Animated Pawn, needs some critiqueing

[zlwilly]

I've been working on this animation in my free time for the past couple weeks. It has been my learning project, I've been applying everything I learn from tutorials to it, which seems to be a good way to go about it. I finally rendered out the beta animation, so here's the link:

http://izationlabs.com/2008/09/16/an...ted-pawn-beta/

It's the beta animation. There has already been an alpha, which was earlier on in the project. Now that the beta is done I'm putting all of my effort into the final in hopes of ending up with a quality animation. I'm looking for any suggestions on lighting, AAO, SSS, or anything else that comes to mind, including what rendering engines might complement (and complicate) the project.

[sabaku::uoji]

looks good to me thoug, keep it up, and never give up

[FDameronUT]

I liked it. The bounce effect was a nice touch.

- Floyd

[evilkillerfiggi]

The animation is brilliant with just one exception: he seems to pause in the air in mid-hop; That should be easily fixed by tweaking the ZLoc curve so it looks more like gravity. (ie, he should decelerate on the way up from the hop and accelerate on the way down.)

Also, when he attacks the camera, you can see the edges across the surface; either add some polys to the model or up the subsurf a bit.

Renderwise: replace the light blue background with a light-to-dark grey gradient. And go for the AAO. Is it a spotlight you've got? I personally would replace it with a two-light or three-light setup just using lamps, but that's your call really.

Looks good!

[zlwilly]

Wow, I had no idea how easy it was to clean up the model using a subsurf modifier. Seemed to slow down playback of my animation though (via ALT A). Details comes with a cost. I was worried I would have to rebuild the model so had ignored it so far.

I've set up a decent lighting rig for the final render, including 2 regular lights, a spot, and a hemi. Amazing how much realism proper lighting can add to your animation.

As for the animation, I'm doing my best but I don't know if I'll be able to improve on it or not. I'm still trying to get used to editing animations as curves. We'll see. Thanks for the input!

*I figured out how to make Blender only show the changes made by subsurf when rendering! Nice!*

[-[Killer]-]

Yes, Subsurf works miracles. Only thing don't use tris, always use quads with subsurf

[evilkillerfiggi]

zlwilly:

In the IPO window, click on the ZLoc so that it's the only one showing.

Tab into Edit Mode and you can access the vertices individually. Pressing 'H' will toggle them between tied (red) and independent (black). I'd imagine you want to keep them tied for this bit.

Find the keyframe that has him in mid-air, in the middle of the hop. Tweak the curve until it resembles this one in shape:


That should give you a serviceable feeling of gravity.

[B3D00]

Ya shold add backgrund.

[blenderguy2008]

Interesting. I see you used the

Blur

effect. Well if you set oversampling to its maximum, you wont have those blind effect..it will look blurry instead, and that's what you want I guess. It will take longer to render though!