Great Planes Of World War 3: Prologue

here’s the first episode of my new series, Great Planes of WW3. I’m currently in the middle of making the second episode, check back, the second will be out before too long.

Just wanted to drop in say thanks for all the great comments and ideas, you guys are obviously very knowledgeable and your insights are very helpful and inspiring as I delve into yet another day of work on this show. I’ve been pretty busy getting the scenes done for the next episode, but I wanted to drop off the commercial for the next one, which I forgot to post on the OP…

And remember, I’m running for President in 2020, so I hope I can count on your votes!

Animation is pretty slow on the arm movements. To me, that became the focal point of this video. You will have to get a reference so you can improve its speed in the future and it can look a bit more natural.

is that Mars?

if so the flag is waving WAY too much
and the sky is too blue

Now, the title is misleading. It should at least be called the Crimson Survivor. The movements are weird for the walk cycle and the emotion of the character crying. Now there’s nothing wrong with using BVH, but you have to iron things out so you won’t have that awkward moment where the limbs are going though the body mesh in the animation.

nice, but the character movements are a bit off, they aren’t fluid enough

Cool animation at the start “Taking of Airplane”

Just wanted to drop in say thanks for all the great comments and ideas, you guys are obviously very knowledgeable and your insights are very helpful and inspiring as I delve into yet another day of work on this show. I’ve been pretty busy getting the scenes done for the next episode, but I wanted to drop off the commercial for the next one, which I forgot to post on the OP…

I’m running for President in 2020, so I hope I can count on your votes!

So, to answer the crit that the character animations are unnatural and bad, I have to plead lack of experience. To be honest, I was always a games, simulations, spaceships, and weird visual effects guy, but never a character animator. In the few character animations I did before this, I only experimented with mocap. But, I’ve never actually made animation about people before. Frankly, I was always afraid to. Few of the tools or techniques for lipsynch were really up to it until now. And, until very recently, the only program we to make human characters for blender was MakeHuman. But Makehuman creates VERY high-vert characters, so making character animation in the viewport is a hit-and-miss proposition.
This first episode only has a little bit of character animation in it. And even that was really about me experimenting with character animation, but not yet feeling any natural joy or facility for it. Half the time I was playing with mocap routines, but trying to adapt them into something less canned and more what I wanted for the shot, and usually failing.
The second episode, the one I’m working on now, doesn’t have any MakeHumans in it. Instead, I’ve started ManuelBastioniLab characters, and I like them a LOT more. Not only does the skin look more lifelike, but they are not as high-vert as MakeHumans, so they run at a normal framerate out of the box.
And I’ve actually started to enjoy creating character animation, instead of just praying I can find a mocap routine that approaches what I want. I’m still new at character animation, but I’m not terrified of it anymore. Instead, I’m starting to see it as a fun game to just sit down and spend a few hours working out a character’s acting and movements for a shot. And, once i get to that point, it’s usually just a matter of time before I start getting good at it.
I think it will be fun to watch this first episode again in a few years. Hopefully by then I’ll be past the cringing and can just watch and laugh at the jerky movements the way I still do at Tauntauns and walking skeletons and king kong from the old movies.

We all had to start somewhere. Once again, there’s nothing wrong with using Motion Capture files. You just have to deal with the risks of using them. I, too, use Makehuman for the project I’m currently under, but I had to modify the character creations a bit more to my liking. That’s another story. As far as animation goes, if you can apply most of the principals of animation and hone in on the process of making it, I’m pretty sure that you will do fine. All you need is references or “study guides” to help you grasp the idea.

Thank you for the encouragement, XeroShadow. It used to be that I felt as if I were the only BlenderHead who didn’t have much experience with character animation, and so it was really scary. But honestly, the scariest thing of all was character Lipsynch. Oh my GOD, was I TERRIFIED of that! I honestly never thought I would be able to get human characters to talk in a realistic way. These early animations were especially focusing on lipsynch. That election 2020 commercial is literally the first animated experiment I’ve EVER felt that I finally got a convincing character lipsynch going, really that video is just a lipsynch experiment that I was shocked to find actually worked after I watched it. TBH, the hand movements and body acting were mostly just afterthoughts I threw in so he wouldn’t just be a dork standing there talking. And, of course, the only thing that really made it possible was my recent (and, for me, new) experimenting with ManuelBasioniLab characters. Having a much lower vert-count than MakeHumans means I can watch the lips move in realtime in the preview window along with the character’s speech, and adapt the lip movements and sound to each other. That never worked with MakeHumans for me.

While there were fairly obvious mistakes in this first episode which some of you have pointed out, it might be that I might go back and redo a few things to make fixes. As the series goes on, the audience will begin to realize that the story is not being told in chronological order. In fact, this first episode is called “Prologue”, but most of the first season will actually take place years before the events on Mars depicted here. So, there is plenty of time for some rerenders. There might be a “Special Edition” at some point a couple of years from now in which all of these errors don’t get on the screen.
So, it’s helpful to have experienced BlenderHeads like you guys pointing out some of the more obvious goofs.

I don’t have a clue how crowdstuff or even PR goes, so I’m still learning as I go with all this, but here’s the Patreon I made for the show a few months back, if anyone cares. I wish I was as good at this stuff as some of the shows I watch on youTube. Some of those folks could buy a house with what they make on Patreon and YouTube! It’s good to get all the kinks out of this show now, while it’s only made 31 cents on Amazon and gotten 742 views on YouTube. :smiley:

And BTW: someone made a comment about the astronaut, Hummingbird, “crying” as he watches the video of the nuclear war on earth.
Hummingbird is not crying in that shot.
He’s laughing.

I personally believe that the main reason why the frame speed in 3d space was so slow was due to the fact that you used a particle system along with it. Unless you actually bake the system settings and add in the number of vertices on the models itself, it’s going to slow down unless you have to right specs to accommodate. In order to compensate for it, you will have to render the models first and then deal with the particle system in a different video. Next, you can composite the two videos into 1 and you won’t have to suffer much as far as processing speed. It may sounds like an extra step, but it’s the least you can do unless to process all the material through a render farm.

As far as the animation for the lip sync goes, you have two options. Option A consists of doing a motion capture of your face and act out the phonemes in order to get a better, natural movement of what the people are saying. Option B means that you will have to record your self on video saying the words and then match the lips on the video once you upload it to Blender.

The road to animation is difficult alone and it will take time. Although better with a team, you are going to have to focus on that portion of your series as you progress. A lot of shows have improved over the years. Trust me, I’ve witnessed a few myself. But once you get to that level, it will be smooth sailing.