Inspired by Alltaken. It’s funny we finished our lego-projects almost the same time.
I got this finally rendered… took two days with my 2,4GHz P4 and I’m not completely happy with the result. I just wish I’d heard about opengl animation rendering BEFORE I started to render this one.
I wish there would be tracks in the sand, particle dust, smoother movement, better scene, camera movement… Well, maybe next time.
Both still and animation are Blender renders.
Here’s a still shot:
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And here’s the animation with soundtrack (3.6MB divx & mp3, 27 seconds):
Wow that’s great! I’m impressed! Nice work. I really like the way the lego car is being built on-screen. Maybe you should focus a bit more on the ground texture and how the stones blend into the landscape. Oh, and it would be cool if the wheels created dents in the ground (there are severeal ways of doing this, and it is troublesome, but it would look really nice)
Thanks for the comments! People seem generally to like the video and I’m happy about that.
I’m propably not going to improve this one anymore, I consider it finished. But I sure like off-road vehicles that much I’m very likely going to do (and animate) one someday.
Fonix Wircs: Is there a car commercial where the car is assembled in an animation or something? I don’t watch much TV. And that helmet closing move… well, sure it could have been made better, if I’d just have unlimited time resources. This animation was not supposed to be perfect. Just nice.
Enriq776: I’m not happy with some of the movement… not nearly dynamic enough for what I ment. And this is hard to see by just watching the animation when pressing an arrow key (alt-a didn’t work… maybe already too complex set for that). Opengl rendering would have been a good motion test. I made two test renders before the final but changed some ipo’s before the last one… oh well. The main thing is that I learned very much from this project.
Answering for Fonix Wircs, the commercial i believe he is thinking of is one where a Honda Element is assembled in much the same fashion as you car, only with about a thousand times more blocks all falling.
Honda was too cheap to get Lego to sponsor them, they went with Mega Blocks. But it is good by itself. My only comment is that I can’t figure out what the two lines on his face are. It looks to me like he is bleeding. :-?
Wow, some new comments after Void bumped the thread up. Thanks everyone!
I’m propably going to add some sound to this animation soon, I have a course going on (time based media) and we’re supposed to do an animation with sound.
The face texture is a digicam shot of the guy’s face (just made the lines a bit stronger afterwards). So it’s not my design. Those new lego guys seem to have some simple facial features painted on, they are actually his cheeks. He looks a bit like Ridge Forrester I think.
I like the way that the car builds itself on-screen. I also liked the way that the “Star Wars” logo appeared, then zipped away reflected upon the sand-dunes in the background.
The only problem I had was: when a humanoid figure comes into the scene, my expectations change slightly. I expect the old Disney-school stuff. I expect him to land with a little bounce. I expect him to anticipate the arm-move and to execute it by “leading into” the motion, then slightly “overshooting” on the completion. I expect the helmet to fall onto his head, and that when it does so his shoulders and head drop just a little bit, then bounce back. When he pulls the accelerator in the last shot, the arm slightly anticipates the motion and the wrist-joint twists leading into the move.
The falling shadows, which anticipate each falling object, are a nice touch. But, the lego-man doesn’t seem to have a shadow. His arrival, by the time it happens, is something that the viewer anticipates, and there ought to be a very slight pause. Likewise the appearance of his helmet, and the helmet dropping into place. A quarter-second pause. It would also be nice if the helmet surface, when it closes, is slightly specular.
A puff of sand-particles when he “digs out” would be nice.
It’s funny we finished our lego-projects almost the same time.
