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Home ? Your Videos ? "A Dragon called Drac" - My first muvizu movie !!

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01/06/2015 00:12:14

alquimista
alquimista
Posts: 14 		Hello everyone.
I´m a professional illustrator and I´ve recently discovered the Muvizu software because i was searching for something like this to create short story movies for a new client of mine. Im doing a bunch of children books for an English lady who writes amazing children poetry and I always thought their poems were perfect to create little animations and so this was my personal project that came out of that illustration work.

This is my first muvizu animation. Sorry its just in low res because i mainly wanted to try the directing tools more than anything else and so this was just to see how fast i could do something like this. I didnt even bothered much with the lighting, etc, etc.

I think i really love this software. The only thing that i still absolutely hate about it is not allowing much freedom in creating real unique characters which would go away from the muvizu style. As an illustrator i would love to see muvizu one of these days allowing me to put my very own style into the characters and not have to stick with what´s pre-made visually.

In this case i actually wanted to include a dragon and theres no such character in muvizu ...as we are not able to insert our own characters i had to just have the old lady telling the story instead of actually show bits of what was going on in the narration as i wanted initially.

Anyway, despite all this , i really like Muvizu, and im going to stick with it, also for professional projects in the future. Im also going to create a bunch of new sets in sketchup so lets see how this goes.

For now this is just to show you my first atempt at muvizu. Thanks for watching.

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01/06/2015 17:05:31

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		Yeah, we all want dragons Still, as long as you know where the limits are before you start, you can still produce good things with Muvizu. Look forward to seeing what you come up with in future Alquimista - nice test!
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01/06/2015 19:52:18

alquimista
alquimista
Posts: 14 		Well.. although I love Muvizu, my client just got me fired because of this video. Haha, really. At least the animation section I had planned is not going to go ahead...although Im still going to illustrate her books she absolutely hated the test video because she hated the visual style of the characters, does not like the muvizu program at all mainly because of that and does not want to see her children poetry work associated with the visual style of muvizu at all...Personally as I said i would love to have really good flexibility with the characters visuals and style but I still think this is a great tool if we focus on specific projects.
Unfortunelly this one I had high hopes for to spend a lot of fun times animating in Muvizu is not going to happen.

My client wanted to see a dragon character in the film and she wanted the story animated instead of just having a character telling it. When i said there is no way to create a personalized dragon character here, I was just told to scrap the entire project because the client hates everything about muvizu now....

Fortunelly , I have another client for children books which actually loved the animation and totally understood about muvizu limitations, so i might end up doing some projects for her in the future. Meanwhile im planning my own personal muvizu projects just for fun.
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01/06/2015 22:58:00

drewiMuvizu mogulExperimental user
drewi
Posts: 298 		Had a go.. but never going to get a long neck or on all fours.

should be in the assets soon
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01/06/2015 23:31:34

alquimista
alquimista
Posts: 14 		Hey, that is actually very cool !! It can be used as a gargoyle perhaps and it certainly has a lot of uses !!

By the way, if i can have one more request... a typical grey alien would be very welcome too. I have some stories to tell that would be perfect to be created with muvizu.
edited by alquimista on 01/06/2015
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03/06/2015 02:22:42

drewiMuvizu mogulExperimental user
drewi
Posts: 298 		keep an eye on the assets areaWhaaaaa?
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03/06/2015 12:24:59

alquimista
alquimista
Posts: 14 		Thanks for the help (love them). Im going to write a nice review about muvizu soon for my pages too. I really like this software a lot !

Ive spoken to another client of mine and Muvizu is going to be used for a big project ill be working on soon. If all goes well by February of next year , dozens of little muvizu movies will be spread out all over Portugal and Brazil as they will be part of an (already) sucessful comercial educational software for kids around here in Portugal, (www.afonsinho.com) which ill be updating with new animations. That is why the character bit of muvizu is so important to me right now. I really need to pull the most out of the character costumization to bring this thing to life.
edited by alquimista on 03/06/2015
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20/11/2015 20:59:48

PatMarrNCMuvizu mogul
PatMarrNC
Posts: 1738 		Alquimista,

Like you, I love the rapid development aspect of Muvizu, but sometimes want the ability to present characters that MUVIZU cannot create. There are a couple of things that can be done that manage to salvage at least some of the rapid development benefits:

1) note that this approach requires using multiple software products to create scenes, which get combined in a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere or other similar program

2) First I use Muvizu to rapidly develop everything that it can do well. If you want your own artwork as backgrounds, you can apply them to BG panels which have a lot of interesting capabilities hard-wired into them, such as the ability to simulate movement, or work as a container/display for video

3) you can use built-in Muvizu characters as placeholders to get the timing right for each scene, then remove the characters before the final render. Later you can superimpose a character of your own design over top of the scene by placing it in a higher layer in your editing software. (which makes anything in that layer display in front of lower layers)

4) If you are an animator, you probably already have software that you know how to use. If you are mostly an illustrator, and don't normally use animation software, I recommend Anime Studio Debut. It is very inexpensive (well under $100 USD ) and it can easily handle most animation scenarios that aren't already built into Muvizu. There are tutorials all over Youtube showing how to take original artwork and animate it in Anime studio.

that's a quick overview, the rest is learning curve on your part. Good luck!

PS: sometimes even in a project that works almost completely in the MUVIZU paradigm, I need a scene or two that just can't be animated with the built-in character movements... when that's the case, it is a fairly simple thing to take a screen shot of your Muvizu character, open it in a Paintshop type program and save all of the characters parts as separate files, with transparent backgrounds. Once you have these elements, it is VERY easy to recreate a rigged character in Anime studio that looks just like your Muvizu character, but which can be animated in any way you want.

(same procedure works for animating your own hand-drawn characters)

edited by PatMarrNC on 21/11/2015
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24/03/2016 23:46:42

braj
braj
Posts: 286 		This isn't great, but here's a static cartoon dragon prop, it could be useful if you do interesting things with the camera. Also mess with the textures for skin color, if you want to do it right, edit the files externally, just open in an image editor and play with the hue would do it. It isn't fancy, but it is something.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9300947/LittleBigDragon.zip

This is the original prop: http://www.sharecg.com/v/69230/browse/11/Poser/LittleBigDragon


edited by braj on 24/03/2016
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25/03/2016 10:47:44

alquimista
alquimista
Posts: 14 		This Dragon is really excellent. This is the type of character style that´s been missing in Muvizu.
Thank you very much. Maybe it can be used for something for sure.
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Home ? Your Videos ? "A Dragon called Drac" - My first muvizu movie !!

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Muvizu is easy to use 3D animation software that allows anyone to create high quality animations quickly and easily. Muvizu’s animation engine is ideal for storytellers, animators, teachers and businesses looking to engage, enchant and delight audiences with animated content.