This was a cool project, and I was a bit out of my comfort zone. I like the end result! In hindsight, though, there were a ton of things I could’ve done better. It’s finished now, and so I think it fits better here than in the Focused critiques subforum, even though I know there’s a lot to critique.
This was modeled and then animated, rendered, composited etc. in Blender. I textured the sword in Quixel Studio. The glowing text effect was done in After Effects, because I found some very easy tutorials and had access to the program.
This is an intro video commissioned by Jeremy Bai, who translates Chinese fantasy novels as Deathblade. If fantasy novels are your thing, you could check out I Shall Seal The Heavens on wuxiaworld.com.
This was my first time working on video stuff in something like 8 years, and the first time I did it on Blender. I had used Premiere and After Effects before. Video rendering and compositing is VERY different from doing still renders, game stuff, and even from doing simple turnarounds and other simple animation stuff. I thought it’d be like the simple stuff, where it can all be done in one pass and exported straight out of Blender. I wasn’t prepared to think about compositing, color spaces, intermediary file formats and all that!
I had planned on doing more with the backdrops, possibly having some landscapes with mountains and seas, and clouds and wispy mist. However, it turns out learning new things while you’re on a deadline is a bad idea (who would’ve guessed?! ), so I had to keep it simple. I also wanted to do better particle effects and trails, but that also turned out to be too complicated for this project.
I learned a lot! Color spaces and file formats were perhaps the most interesting thing I didn’t understand before this project. I like the end result, but it definitely could’ve been a lot better if I had been familiar with the tools! Also, the video quality suffers from the double butchering of first me doing something with Blender, and then Youtube doing its own conversion. Ouch! Maybe I should’ve rendered this in twice the target resolution - but then again, the rendering times were already way longer than I estimated…
I previously asked some questions about Filmic Blenderand animations, file formats etc. I struggled a lot with the file formats (both between passes before compositing, and the and proper use of compositing tools. Troy_s and sundialsvc4 helped a lot by answering some of my questions. I’m sure I still made some of the mistakes you tried to warn me about, but hopefully it isn’t too bad!