I made a virtual reconstruction of a Danish castle some time ago, and I decided to make an international version of the story.
I’d appreciate some feedback on my animation.
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I don’t have a critique for you. But I remember this model from when you posted it here before, everything looks really great to me, nice job.
I really like it! The first few shots with the men and horses could be improved a bit, both in terms of modeling and animation, but the second part with the architecture is great. I would watch more of it.
Thanks. The character animations could be improved a lot, I think, but I don’t have the skills. It was really difficult to animate.
Overall, this feels disjointed. We’ve got siege weapons, a rearing horse, various castle bits, but no real sense of how it all fits together or what the purpose of the animation is.
So, first question you have to answer:
What is this animation about?
Are you telling the story of a siege? That would justify the troops and weapons, but we loose sight of all of that in the second half. And if this is your theme, we need some context, and resolution. Are you doing an overview of the castle layout? That would justify some of the castle stuff, but not the troops. And if the castle is your theme then we could really use an overall plan showing all the parts before zooming in on the individual ones.
Or are you just trying to show off the models you made? If so, a literal gallery framing might be the most effective way to do this. Just make a real basic museum gallery where you can put all the little figures and weapons and castle bits. That would make it clear that you’re saying “There’s no narrative here, I’m just showing you some neat things I made in a relatively context-free environment”
As far as the execution of the animation goes, the main thing that jumps out at me is the camera movements. It seems pretty clear that you plopped some key-frames down and called it a day. Familiarize yourself with the graph editor and see if you can clean up those camera moves. One trick that works well for big spinning shots like at 1:52 is to put an empty at the center of rotation (the castle), make it the camera’s parent, and then animate the empty rotation to swing the camera around. Then you can just animate the camera’s position to spiral smoothly in.
Also, you really should sketch out the animation in advance. I like to do it with simple text on the screen, just to nail the big concepts and timing. For example this timing sketch eventually became this animation which also showcases the spinning-camera using a parent empty technique. To go one step further, you can use a second empty as a target, use a “Copy Transforms” object constraint, and animate the influence to smoothly transition between spinning shots.
So, there you go, a couple structural suggestions, and a couple execution tips. Hope that helps, and keep up the beautiful modeling and texturing!
i agree with dudecon. first of all technicallyit is well made. except of one cameraangle where i thought i look at the map of witcher 3 looking at a castle, i cannot find any cameraanle that felt totally wrong even though there is much room for improvement as dudecon mentioned.
but during the whole presentation i asked myself: what is this all about. and if the only reason is that you wanted to show how good you are in building castles and soldiers, it was way too much effort for such a topic.
and the cannon doesnt make sense to me. loading is much faster the old fashioned way.
Hi everybody, and thank you for your feedback.
What I was trying to achieve is to reconstruct three castles or siege works that was located in the same area over a timespan of 180 years of medieval history.
The crossbow-soldier was meant to visually represent the findings of crossbows in the area during archeological excavations.
The cannon animation is to show how the late-medieval cannon works. I got the info on youtube on how to load a real medieval breech loading cannon. First the powder chamber is shown, then the bullet. I can’t do much else than showing the reality of the day.
I’m glad you think technically it is ok, but I would agree with you it needs more context. I did make a text-animation version with a book animation, but it is in Danish only. I was trying to make a much more simple version without text to show the developments of the area.
ok so there is an easy solution to the topic problem: start with a variation of this sentence. you dont need much more explanation than this.
I uploaded a new version, with English translations.
One word : FONT.
I mean come on, you just left the default font, that’s not serious. Take something that looks medieval and make it appear with some noise texture or any other transition effect. Anything will be better than this fade-in/fade-out “bfont” text.
Nice work otherwise, continue working on it.