TRONimation is finished! Go watch it!
Well, at long last, the TRONimation is finally done. The one project that I’ve always been working on, on top of all my other projects that I’ve done over the time; the project that matured me as an artist; the project that I put over $100 of my own money into for mocap software and models, is finally completed. And to be honest, it feels like dumping a monkey off my back.
I love this animation to death, but boy am I glad to be done with it. There’s quite a few things I could think of that I would still want to do on this animation, but I just don’t want to spare the time anymore; I wanted to get this animation done and over with so I could move on to other projects, and also so I could complete it for my own sanity’s sake.
BUT. That being said, let’s talk about the process, who I need to thank, and all that. Incoming LordAardvark levels of text-wall. :P
It all started back in March 2015. Yes, before you say it, it is December 2016, and yes I HAVE been working on it for that long. It’s taken that long mostly because of working on it in my spare time, off and on, and general laziness. But I’ll get to why that is. Back in March 2015 I wondered why there were no TRON models for SFM. There were a few ports of TRON: Evolution models on the GMOD workshop, and they were alright, but they were only few. So I wondered to myself, it can’t be too hard to port models over from TRON: Evolution right? And that’s where it all started.
LordAardvark, bless his soul, helped me through every step of the journey, teaching me the ins and outs of model porting, how to do this and that in 3ds Max, and basically being an all around saint when it comes to holding my hand through the process of learning 3ds Max from scratch. I couldn’t have done any of this without him, and he is the #1 person I have to thank for this project.
I don’t want to make this part too long, so I’ll just skip ahead to the part where I finished porting all the models I wanted to port, and put out the original TRON model pack. That was my first big model release, and I was so proud of it. Looking back on it it’s pretty shit, and I’ve since updated a lot of those models considerably.
Throughout this whole process though, I was fooling around in SFM with animating some of these models. At this time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with animation. My first little animation test revolving around this project was a small side to side shot of an identity disc being thrown. It sucked.
Back then I had no idea I was even going to do this animation. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was just fooling around with a few shots from this scene, which were all hand animated, with no intentions of releasing it to the public. Fun fact: Some of those early animations are actually still mostly intact in the final animation. They’ve gone through many changes, but the base animations are all still there. Sometime through the project I remember thinking I wanted to reanimate them, but I never did because that was around the time I wanted to just get this thing done.
So eventually I had decided that I wanted to do an actual animation based around the Disc Wars scene from Legacy. The initial shots were all still there, but I had decided at this point to pursue making an actual animation that I intended to release. At that point, all I had was the start of Sam’s fight with Pike (the first combatant he faces in the animation), and not much more than a few shots in it. At that time, Pike was using a placeholder model in the form of the Black Guard. Obviously that isn’t true to the movie at all, but I had to make do with what little experience I had at the time. Somewhere down the line I eventually replaced him with a different model that more closely resembles Pike.
To be more true to the movie, I went on to TurboSquid.com and purchased a few models to use in the animation. I bought the arena model, which contains the arena and the platforms (both of which I’ve since modified to more closely resemble the movie. I hope that’s not infringing on any copyright stuff or whatever, but I’m not making money off of this, so whatever). I also bought a new Identity Disc model on there, and the model for CLU’s command ship. Credits for the Arena model and Command Ship model goes to “tunified”, and for the Disc credit goes to “GrafTrahula”. Thanks to both of them for those models.
I also decided soon after to pursue motion capture software to use for the animation. A lot of these shots were completed way faster with the aid of this software, so thanks a lot to iPisoft for their mocap software. The ease of use (being able to export straight to .dmx to import right into SFM) helped me significantly.
Okay, so. I’m close to rambling on now. What’s next for me in the future? I had thoughts about doing the Light Cycle battle, but I don’t know how feasible that would be. I intend to make a proof of concept for that to see if it could work, but there would be a lot of work to do. We’ll see though. I definitely enjoyed working on this animation, despite it turning from a 30 second animation, into a 2 minute animation, into a 4 minute animation, finally into a 7 minute animation, with all sorts of crazy flips and shit in there.
Also, thanks to Disney for the TRON series. Flynn Lives.
Thanks to the makers of TRON: Evolution and TRON RUN/r.
And to close it out, thanks to all of you.