Here’s a film I completed earlier this year and now I have the web space to upload a decent-quality MPEG-1 file.
It’s 3’20", download is 40MB or so.
Modelled and animated using Blender (with the Lsystem tree script), and rendered with Yafray via Yable.
http://www.martylog.com/films/tree.mpg
Enjoy!
Good idea but quite poor modeling and a few texturing would have helped. The camera moves are soft and clean and I particularly liked one of the last shots of the city in the sun.
40Mb for a 3 minutes video is huge. you should consider using divx or quicktime.
Hope my critics aren’t to harsh 
Keep it up.
-IS-
Very cool! I thought everything had a very definite style: clean and cg-like–almost like a cartoon or claymation. Worked very well with the music.
Great work!
b01c
Thanks for taking the time to download and watch it!
To be honest the film wasn’t conceived as a showcase for fancy modelling or texturing, so while you’re absolutely right that the tree doesn’t look very realistic and the buildings don’t have windows or whatever… that wasn’t really the point - I was going for something stylised and simple (and fast to render!)
As for the compression, I tried DivX but for some reason it ended up a similar weight. You can probably tell that I jumped into this project without enough expertise! 
I enjoyed watching the short, I like the stylised setting. The only crit I have is that the I think it would suit the style if the branches on the tree had been smoothed.
Yes, that irritated me, too. You’ll notice that some of the branches are smoothed and others aren’t - this was a peculiarity of either Blender’s or Yafray’s autosmooth which I never managed to resolve. Eventually I gave up and hoped people wouldn’t notice… You can spend forever on the details or just get on with trying to tell a story somehow, so I opted for the latter option as I just wanted to get the damn thing finished! Hopefully it won’t make too much of a difference to non-Blenderheads :-p
Thanks for watching!
I liked it, good stuff. Would be nice if you went back and ‘updated’ it 
Textures and stuff like that, would be cool to see.
Excellent short film. Its almost like a mini music video. The camera motion and lighting reflected the mood set by the song very well!
I know the file size was large, but to compress it more would have taken away from the visual quality. I know this compromise well, and its always a tough decision. Too often I’m not even happy with the artifacts introduced by MPEG2 DVD-quaility compression!
I like the stylized tree model and leaves (yes, its good to keep them simple when rendering it with yafray - it still must have taken ages!) Blenders most recent features might allow a similar look with significanly reduced render times, allowing for more textures, details, etc.?
My only crit is the rectangles that “sprouted” up around the tree didn’t appear to be buildings like you say they are. I wouldn’t have gotten that impression from the video if you hadn’t mentioned it in your reply above. I guess it was a city sprouting up around the tree, like a metaphor of modern technology encroaching on the natural world. It just didn’t look much like that. It was nicely done, however.
Great job, and I look forward to seeing more from you!
Thanks mzungu!
Very well done.
If this was really a test to see your animation capabilities and not your modelling, I think you nailed it :).
dude, just one word; great
Quick update: A Day In The Life Of A Tree has been accepted by the Raindance Film Festival in London as part of their shorts programme. It will be screened sometime in the first week of October! Exciting news for Blender and Yafray (and for me! 
)
Well, simplistic, but the mood and emotion portrayed with it was fantastic. Great sense of loneliness for the tree. Made you really feel for it with the music and the lighting you included.
Congrats on the film festival entry too. Good luck.
BgDM
it was fantastic.
i watched it twice already.
the one thing that bothered me was the leaves. it would be so much better if you had better leaves.
That was sweet, like most people said it was the texturing, mostly on the tree it self was where it was needed especially the leaves and the three model needed work. the buildings could stay untextured it makes it look a bit more surealistic that way.
yeah i say the buildigns are perfect, its so inhuman.
but i also agree with most others, the tree itself is not human enough, (although in some ways it doesn’t matter to me really)
very nicely done, the music and the video are good together.
very good.
Alltaken
I really liked that. The modelling was basic but I don’t think that detracted from it at all. It reminded me a little of the animations in Pink Floyd’s The Wall (‘Empty Spaces’).
I’m starting to find that you can spend months tweaking things and experimenting to get the best render ever, but if you never actually produce anything what’s the point?
Good luck at Raindance!
whoa…awesome film… I love artistic films with music.
keep it up.
Oh, I must have missed this when I was in holidays.
I like this short film very much. The style works fine for me.
I wish you the best for the Raindance Film Festival!
Very highly most excellent!
One of those truly rare things… a conceptually complete blender work
only crit from me is that I’d have like to see the leaves fall at some point towards the end. But otherwise it gets my 5 monkey’s!
I look forward to seeing more from you and good luck at the festival