new to the board (with some animation)

knellotron

Hi everybody; long-time lurker, first-time poster.

My name is Chris, and I'm a film student at UW-Milwaukee. For the past few years my interest in filmmaking has been shifting from cinematography to computer animation, and last semester I made a film called Esign:

medium quality: (20 mb)
http://www.knellotron.com/video/esign_2_low.mov

high quality: (70 mb)
http://www.knellotron.com/video/esign_2_high.mov

I've done a lot of video / motion graphics stuff before, but one of the challenges for Esign was my decision to make it exclusively using free software. It was animated in Blender, edited in Cinelerra, and scored in Audiomulch. (Audiomulch isn't Open, but still sort of free.)

It was also my first film in 3-D, and most of the time making it was just spent learning Blender. There's quite a few aspects about it that make it different from the usual pipeline... for instance, everything in the film is built out of haloes. That's sort of a quirk in Blender that really made it attractive to me. It also made texturing and lighting a lot easier.

Another thing that's unique about Esign is that all the animation is done with the Build effect, and there's no use of mesh deformation or rigs at all.

I'm not satisfied with it anymore, but I do have a film I'm working on now that's much more ambitious and exciting. It's called Rotunda, and I've been working on it all summer. It should be done in December.

others:

This summer I tried (and failed) to get a job as an editor, so I had to put together a demo reel. It has some of my 2-D animation in it:
http://www.knellotron.com/video/demoreel.mp4

some dancing, edited in Cinelerra.
The dancer is the choreographer for Rotunda.
http://www.knellotron.com/video/bellatrix.mov

and, as a challenge, here's two films made without a computer at all:
http://www.knellotron.com/video/bleach.wmv
http://www.knellotron.com/video/oldman.avi

enjoy. :-|

paroneayea

Am I the first to reply?

That was brilliant! Like seeing music...
(For anyone who hasn't seen it yet: headphones recommended.)

braindamage

such a simple use of blender and yet it is breathtaking.
your filmaking skills are obviously far beyond your blendering skills.
but it doesn't take high end graphics to make something beautifull.
once you have mastered blender you will become quite the 3d animater.

I look forward to your next project.

wah_tak

Woa! Cool! Although i had to pick the smaller file, because the filesizes are just deadly.

The animation in combination with the electronic music reminded me a lot of the realtime demos. (here are examples of what i mean http://www.scene.org/awards.php)
So if the blender game-engine supports halos you could try to make it realtime!

jaderberg

thats wicked!

really inspires me to get onto animating with blender... if only i had a starting point

codebox

that is terriffic!

gr8 work!

Blender needs more artists like you who know a little bit about cinematography ..(i m saying this coz most ppl here are hobbyists)....

you are surely equipped with some art of composition

the whole thing matches very nicely with the music...

keep up the great work..

BTW a question: i saw on cinelerra site that it needs 4 GB RAM.. do you have that much RAM or does cinelerra run well on lower rams...

MassTA

Damn i wish i downloaded the high res version first. Pretty simply made, but the composision with sound is perfect.

Great animation.

sornen

Brilliant.

Stylistically, I didn't think that the inclusion of Jupiter quite fitted in, but everything else was awesome.

The large version is well worth downloading.

BgDM

First off, welcome.

Second, that was brilliant. A very simple, but very effective use of Blender's particle system. Probably one of the most extrensive uses of it I have seen to date as well.

Superb piece of work.

BgDM

chimpoid

Quote:

Originally Posted by MassTA

Damn i wish i downloaded the high res version first.

Ditto

Quote:

Originally Posted by sornen

Stylistically, I didn't think that the inclusion of Jupiter quite fitted in, but everything else was awesome.

Ditto++

Absolutely stunning. Intelligent, artistic and innovative. Just goes to show that it's not all about the tools you use.

Wonderful first post & welcome.

Chimp

knellotron

Hey guys, my bandwidth got maxed out for the first time ever, and I've had my site for almost three years. Try it again in the afternoon.

Quote:

Originally Posted by wah_tak

Woa! Cool! Although i had to pick the smaller file, because the filesizes are just deadly.

Yeah, I know. A lot of my videos utilize things that never compress very well - and particles is one of them. A lower bitrate just makes the codec turn the particles into mush. And on "Bleach," nearly every frame is completely different from the frame before, another area codecs choke on.

Quote:

The animation in combination with the electronic music reminded me a lot of the realtime demos.

The real-time aspect of demos doesn't excite me, but being able to program infinitely complex systems procedurally does. I'm probably going to be utilizing some demo software for a film in the next year.

re: Jupiter.

The inclusion of Jupiter is really the only remaining reference to the thing that inspired the piece, other than Arthur C. Clarke's name in the credits. The original idea for the film came from the story of life emerging on Europa, a moon of Jupiter, from Clarke's novel 2010: Odyssey Two. After experimenting with some designs, I felt it was more interesting to go with a non-realistic and unique look of the haloes instead of a realistic landscape look.

Quote:

BTW a question: i saw on cinelerra site that it needs 4 GB RAM.. do you have that much RAM or does cinelerra run well on lower rams...

The Cinelerra devs are really cocky. Those specs are their way of saying "We're too hardcore for you, noob."

But still, the progam is needlessy hoggy. I have 1 GB of RAM, and Cinelerra is the only app that uses all of it and goes into swap memory. Why? Positron is an important project, imo.

Quote:

thats wicked!

really inspires me to get onto animating with blender... if only i had a starting point

This film was my starting point. I had the idea in 2001, but sat on the concept because I didn't know anything about 3-D animation. I knew I wanted to do the film before I graduated, so last year I just bought the Blender book and did this film as a crash course in Blender.

I've done quite a bit of GNU advocacy around the film department, too. Audacity and Blender are now standard on all the department's lab computers.

I originally wanted to have columns rising and shattering to the music, but I abandoned that. Here's a sketch of that:
http://www.knellotron.com/video/rising.wmv

Claws

with all the praise in this thread im looking forward to seeing it heh - cmon, don't you have any mirrors for the files??

knellotron

I'll put up a torrent I guess.

Job

lookin forward to see it after all those replies

ook

Very nice, it certainly has the professional touch in it. I like the motiongraphics-like stuff and the "oldschool" scifi theme.

It's a good thing your not satisfied it with anymore, that's just a sign you're getting better. If you are still satisfied with your 3D work a few months after you've done it, worry.

sornen

Quote:

Originally Posted by knellotron

[b]I've done quite a bit of GNU advocacy around the film department, too. Audacity and Blender are now standard on all the department's lab computers.

Good to hear. Since first going with linux four or so years ago, I have become a fan of opensource, it's a quite revoluton of sorts.

redbyte

VERY NICE!!

Tried my hand at what you produced. You made it by having a vertex with a particle system follow a curve right?

I have two questions:

1. How did you make the particles 'waver'?
2. What texture did you use on the halos?

Fantastic work. One day hope to be able to make such artistic work with blender. Someone with webhosting should host this so that others can see this excellent work.

knellotron

Thanks for all the nice comments, everybody. It's a new day, so the site is back up.

Quote:

Originally Posted by redbyte

1. How did you make the particles 'waver'?

Most of the streamers that you see in the first have aren't done with particles. I created a path, converted it to a mesh, then applied the build and wave effects to it. Some particles waver a little bit by having a little randomness put on it.

For the red / yellow streamer in the second have, I created two very tiny pentagon which followed a path. One for the red particles, one for the yellow.

Quote:

2. What texture did you use on the halos?

Well, since everything in the film (except Jupiter) was haloes, there was a little bit of variation. I used the "ring" option the most, and the stars a little bit at the end. For the moving streamers, I used X-Alpha to make them stand out more.

knellotron

the site is back up.

JoOngle

WOW! That was a seriously cool music-art-video.

I took the advice of the many users here and downloaded the "big" version
and it was well worth the download.

What an unusual and exciting use of Blender's particle system, I just love it.