we were quite limited by lack of students, computers, and time, but we did quite well in my opinion. take a look at our animation at the link below, and while you stop by pick up some wallpapers from your favorite team. us. obviously. and browse the pictures of the last thing your robot will ever see before being crushed under an avalanche of bins. 
http://www.thunderchickens.org/?page=clucky.php
Was use of the Batman theme legal? As with the āSuper chickenā theme during credits?
I know a few teams have been DQād for copyrighted music.
Interesting idea for the animation, rather cleanly done also. Nice job chickens
wha ha ha. we didnt ACTUALY USE the batman theme. it sounds a LOT like it! but its not the batman theme in its entirety!
ā¦
well yea weāll probably get DQed but we just did this for fun really.
This is a very cool animation. SuperChicken!!
what exactly does that have to do with first or ātechnology to save the futureā?
I liked it so much I listened to it several times. Iām still laughing!
Darn you quicktime!!
The first part is funny and well done, but i must agree with TheFork that I donāt see any meaning or message that you are trying to communicateā¦
tee hee. yea there is no meaning. like i said before it was just for fun, we really didnt start it with the attitude that we were gonna win anything, and im impressed that we made it this far.
we actually made up that attempt at a meaning on the last day. we just thought it would be kinda fun to spoof batman.
thanks for the compliments though!
Hilarious. COuld you post a version that hasnt been compressed to smithereens? I could barely see around the egg-sized pixels. If need be, i could prolly provide the space for a bigger versionā¦
Side note
*Originally posted by VanWEric *
hmmmā¦ I guess I canāt quote your message there about the clocks. I like that, that is the funniest thing!
I was one of the judges at the st. louis regoinal. I gave you guys about a 75/100 only because it had nothing to do with first. but i must say, pretty funny and un-expected. Even though our anim got dqāued because of faulty cdās, u guys lightened the mood. good job, just next time make it slightly more first oriented.
I disagree about our animation not having any meaning.
Originally, the evil robot knocking down buildings was supposed to break them into neatly stackable containers. Then our robot was supposed to stack the knocked over buildings back up. Due to time restraints, lack of experience, and long rendering times we had to go with what we had.
Our statement āTechnology to Save the Worldā is very simplistic and doesnāt require much interpretation. Itās just like cartoons where the heroes save the day from some evil monster destroying the town. It would have been more obvious if we had our robot stack the buildings back up, but the only role our robot played was as a transport for Clucky. :rolleyes:
That scene does have something to say about our robot though. Itās extremely fast going up the hill to knock down the stacks, and a hill is shown in the animation with our robot racing toward the buildings. Our autonomous mode time from activation to contact with the bins averages under 4 seconds easily.
If you didnāt notice, our sponsorsā logos were in the distress spotlights before they merged into our ThunderChickens logo. The meaning is vaguely there, although I think we could have done a better job making it clearer or more relevant. Overall we put too much emphasis on humor rather than meaning. The problems I had with our animation were we tried to squeeze too much into a short amount of time, some scenes lasted longer than they should have, other scenes werenāt long enough, bad camera angles in some scenes, some scenes were never modeled/animated but were vital to the animation, and the overall cheesiness of the whole theme.
To sum it up for those who didnāt catch it, our animationās intended meaning was our technology can save the world with the speed of our drive train to respond to distress signals instantly and our stacking ability to restore a demolished city.
well i liked it. we just hit some major time restraints and ended up with little cooperation at all from the team except you and meā¦ so yea we could have refined it a bit more butā¦ nobody was really making an effort to and i was working just trying to get the bare minimum out, which was hard enough. i had to rerender the entire thing the day before we shipped.
Yeah i gave you guys really high at northwestern except had to take off for the message, or lack there of.
The cell shading was really cool how did you do that?
we were really cramped on people too, we had like 15 but noone knew how to do anything and i ended up dooing like 90% of ours and since iām a freshman i had never used it before in my life.
(in case you saw it ours was the really bad pinball machine)
Iām really surprised your animation was not DQād. Allthough it was hilarious, and the first thing I did after seeing it was show my family, then teamates the next day, I still think it should (by the rules) have been DQād.
āSuperChickenā is a copyrighted theme song from the late great cartoon.
āBatmanā is also copyrighted from theā¦ you guessed itā¦ Batman series.
The authorized signatory for the Entrant is over 18 years old and either owns the copyright to the material in these files, or has the right to grant this consent on behalf of the owner, or knows that the material in these files is in the public domain.
I have a lot of respect for your team, and I did like your animation, however, I feel it is slightly unfair to other teams who had stellar animations but used copyrighted music also got DQād while yours stood.
Oh well, unintentional loophole you guys got through. Good luck in the future :)****
well i think it was kinda unfair tooā¦ i was tearing my hair out that some teams got DQed after going through the whole animation experience. that would be terrible sorry to all the teams that did get DQed. but i honestly dont know how we made it through. we did cut out a part of the batman theme and just loop it, we didnt actually play the batman songā¦ so that mightve workedā¦ and we only played the superchicken theme during the creditsā¦ which may have not been judged. thats my hypothesis. or maybe autodesk was laughing too hard.
so we did try to get through a loophole but i personally never thought it would work.
im honored you enjoyed our animation though, thank you very much for the praise and scruples.
good luck in all your future endeavors.
toodles.
So how did you do the cell shading?
oh im sorry your post kinda got wiped out with the addition of the second page.
the cell shading came as a new feature in 3ds max 5 at a material that you applied to your objects, when you create a new material of change material type i believe the material is something like cartoon shading or cell shading or something close to that, and from there you can define the way its outlined (which takes a loooong time by the way, the drawing in of the black lines) and how many levels of paint you want and light etc. so we just applied that material to everythingā¦ sometimes more complex like in the case of the buildings we actually overlayed a brick patternā¦ its all in the max help files if you look under toon shading or whatever the devil its called.
i actually liked your animation more than mostā¦ you had some nice modelling and texturing. i never got to watch it with sound so i go pretty confused by the storyline the first few times i watched i thought you splashed to your title page in the middle but then i realized that was the pinball scoreboard. the only real problem i saw with yours is the animation of the ballā¦ you used the default curves (speed of object in motion) when you moved from point a to point b so the ball sped up and slowed down when it reached its target. you can fix that by editing the aforementioned ācurvesā by clicking the curve editor icon on the keyframe panel. from there you can change the speed of motion (defined by a plot of the coordinates) from the default parabola like curve to straight lines, which makes constant motion.
thanks for your comments and the high judging at northwestern, i hope i covered all your questions.
Thanks
We used VIZ 3 because we had that on 8 computers in our drafting lab and I used MAX 3.1 for some parts, so i guess that really doesnāt help us considering we only have MAX 5 on our engineerās laptop.