3D music video - feedback

Artwork Finished Projects
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Hi beautiful community :hugs:

This is my very first post here. I’m very excited about beginning exchanging ideas and learning more with you all.

I want to share a music video I created for the kids’ music band Canela Fina, here in Brasil (where I speak from). This is the second music video I created for this band (you can also check the first one here). But I will appreciate your feedback on this one. It was a very hard project for me (I have 6 years learning/working with Blender – I learnt everything by myself through tutorials and lots of trial and error) and the challenge was enormous for me.

The video has already been released, but I want to share it here so I can receive your critiques in order to improve my work and to be able to shed some light on my blindspots – the things I missed or could have done better.

The entire video was made in Blender (including the caption, the compositing, color grading). Rendered in Cycles!

My technical goal with this video was to create low poly assets (as low as possible) but using highly detailed texture. To accomplish that, I created a procedural shader that creates scratches along the mesh and the corners, highlighting the shapes and giving a smoother look to the edges. Every single asset in this video has the same shader, with different base colours. After finding the colour and shape, I baked the shader onto the models to have a lighter render time (that was quite long with the procedural shader).

Here are some stills from the making of:

Vagao212
Vagao2121920×1080 426 KB

Vagao210
Vagao2101920×1080 374 KB

Vagao194
Vagao1941920×1080 266 KB

NaturelCOll36
NaturelCOll361920×1080 351 KB

NaturelCOll26
NaturelCOll261920×1080 234 KB

Master33
Master331920×1080 395 KB

Master28
Master281920×1080 393 KB

Grilo15
Grilo151920×1080 156 KB

Here is the link to the blockout video (the animated storyboard) that I did to pitch the idea to the band:

https://youtu.be/kNbywaWyVHc

Here is the link to the final video:

Very excited to hear from you all :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

*Important to state nowadays… I don’t use “Ai” at all in my work. Everything I do is full of sweat, struggle and a good old fashioned self-fulfilling feeling of accomplishment when I call it “done”… and probably an ice cream to celebrate.

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Hello, what an interesting art style, great colors, top shading, rich and beautiful lighting, and sweet and good music. Thanks for sharing. This must’ve been a lot of work and hopefully gave you also a lot of joy.

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Thank you @vitoli for your words! It really was insanely hard, but equally joyful to create this video. I learned a lot with this project. One thing I´m very proud of (mostly because I did with geometry node - a hydra that I´m still battling to tame) was the visual metronome to be able to sync the song to the timeline/visuals (which you can see in the animated storyboard link). Since I´m also a musician, I only had to find out how to display strings of text properly and make it sync with the frame count (the song is in 111BPM, a very uneven tempo), but it worked out very effectively :hugs:

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Very nice style.

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nice work !

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Really really well-done work with colors and ambient. Good one.

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Yo this is a very cool insight. Sounds complicated! And nice way of saying: GN being a hydra!

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It might be interesting to someone working with music in Blender to have a look on the visual metronome, so I´m attaching here the file with the Geonodes object.

VisualMetronome.blend (178.6 KB)

I also made a quick video showing what the visual metronome can do:

Visual Metronome

I think that my geonodes system in a bit redundant, meaning, there must be a more concise way to have the same result with less nodes. If anyone improve my noodle extravaganza, please share with me. I´m very interested in learning more geonodes.

Ps. (a slight off topic question) - how can I embed a YT video here? - instead of only displaying the link, I´d like to have it playable from here, from the post.

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Amazing, wonderful, great style and animations. What a greater way to enter the forum. Welcome.

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Thank you so so much! It took me a while to discover/join this community, but it is never too late. I´m very happy to be here. Very rewarding!

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You’re on the featured row! :+1:

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Thank you @bartv! The music band from the video is also celebrating as if it´s an Oscar! :laughing:

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Haha that’s awesome :slight_smile:

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This is fantastic! Great job, man! :smiley:

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Thanks you Renzatic! I did this whole video alone, by myself, just me myself and my tormented mind. The joy only came after 5 months and countless nights of render time. :partying_face:

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This is pleasant :slight_smile:

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This is truly stunning. Including, particularly, the camera work – the cinematography, the staging. And, you have polished everything to a brilliant finish.

The “flower emerging from an egg” is amazing, and the little cricket (visibly low-poly) that plays an important part in the show. But, I could just go on and on and on. If there was anywhere(!) that an unexpected detail could be placed, you placed one there.

Alas, I don’t speak/hear Spanish well enough to follow along, but the musical performance was really excellent, too.

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Thank you @garystu for your kind comment!

Thank you @sundialsvc4 for your words! I really appreciate your feedback. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I am a newcomer to this community and I am still learning the ins and outs of it. After reading lots of posts here, I am slowly getting a better sense of how to be more productive with my posts.

I must say that, with this current post, I was very much interested in comments about composition, feedbacks about my execution regarding cinematography. I know it is a vast topic, but after having a good notion of what I can accomplish tecnically in Blender, some things keep coming back: composition, art direction, cinematography, storytelling. I know for a while that this is a life long learning curve and that it comes with lots of practice and analises of other artists work. What I am learning now is that, the best way to do that is to have other artists looking at my work and directly giving me their point of view, their take on how well (or not) I accomplished these major artistic skills. I feel that here is a great place to be in this sense. Exchanging ideas, seeing others works, how they tell their stories, how they express it visually.

Every word here feels valuable, artistically informed, intentional, productive. I learned a lot just by reading solutions to other artist´s issues.

I must also add to all these, how I am relieved and hopeful after reading how the community is dealing with the major issue of “Ai”. I had clients all over Europe, Asia and UAE. The vast majority of them replaced me with synthetic media generator. For the past year I was close to give up on my 3d work. I only kept going because I really love the craft, I love to create art (I am also a music producer - another field where I saw myself being replaced). Apart from the hopelessness I dug deep into the study of the history of “Ai” and what it really is, what is behind the hype and how it really work inside the black box. This opened up a whole window of hope. What I learned about this technology is that we will not be replaced. People can be satisfied with synthetic media but most of us (the creators specially) will not. Criativity and novelty is not part of the scope of these bundle of tech named “Ai”. After all the messy times, I am learning geo nodes as never before, and I am also investing my time to learn Python, C and computer science so I can be even more productive. I tried all sorts of generative tech and I realized that they only work as much as I am capable of polishing and correcting them; “Ai” motion capture, pic to mesh gen, gen coding,… They all need our skills and expertise to be useful/useable.

I am a self tought artist. On top of it, I am also very introverted. This mix made me delay to engage in communities online for way too long. Social media just exhausted me. This environment here finally feels like a valid and validating place to be. Maybe that is the important take away from all this long message! I feel very happy to be here. :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

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That shading looks amazing!

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Thank you @maddisondesigns :melting_face:

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