Chess animation number 12 by a novice Blender user

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This is my twelfth animation.

It is a discovery attack from 1990. It is a truly beautiful game.

I called it Bad Bishop Iago because the black bishop isn’t doing anything while the black king and white queen are dead. It doesn’t follow the plot of Othello exactly, but my scattered mind put it together.

@sozap It is not quite the story that I wanted. I still am working on a way to show the dangers and then actual checkmate. I would give my story telling skills a poor grade. Someday, it will be interesting. Just not today.

@SilverEye I made the sample size higher and made sure the denoiser was on. There are probably still some artifacts remaining.

I got the materials from blendermada, but that site seems to be down or something.

The heart comes from:

Any C and C are welcome.

Thanks!

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Cool !

Hahaha, no worries, you still improve step by step on each animation, that’s cool !
I’ll leave a short comments as usual…
Sorry I don’t know the name of the pieces especially in english :S
At ~12s something bugged me, the white piece travels to the edge of the board, then fall, then the black piece took it’s place.
I think you should have animated the black piece before, so the fall of the white one is motivated by the movement of the black piece in a kind of action-reaction mechanics. That would be clearer to understand.

Two short videos on animation related to that :

See you on the next one !

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Thank you for your comments and the videos.

It was the queen who fell off. I was trying to convey that the queen was too excited and didn’t realize she was going to be lost. I got too excited with the interpolation software. I just figured out how to use it. It was definitely not clear or easy to understand. I don’t like the ending. Unless you remember that rook is covering the other square, then you wouldn’t understand why it is checkmate.

While I really like blenderartists.org, I feel like the WIP page could be divided a little better between the noobs like me and the professionals. Maybe I am just being too fastidious?

Anyways, thanks for your suggestions again. I will try to make a better one next week.

As always, I appreciate your efforts.

Have a good week!

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Hum, ok ! I wasn’t sure ! But indeed that felt a bit silly, like she jump out the board for no reason…
But now that I watch it again today that doesn’t bug me as much :smiley:

Ok don’t take my comments too seriously, because you strive to improve on each videos I’ll try to provide serious feedback, but the most important is that you enjoy doing them and hopefully people interested in chess find them interesting ! To me it’s great to see people having fun doing videos and they don’t have to be “professional” to be valuable.

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Thanks again for the encouragement.

This website sometimes feels like I was walking the Louvre and decided to stick a banana on a blank sheet of paper and call it art after taping it next to the Mona Lisa.

Lol !

Don’t worry about that ! In fact it can get even worse when you don’t consider yourself a beginner anymore. There are always way better artists and your work is still valuable and interesting even if you’re not one of the best !

When looking at some work, there is a lot of things I consider. But generally I look at the intentions, what result do you expect and how far/close you are in my opinion.
If the point of these chess video is getting you a job at ILM, then there is so much work to do…
But if the idea is to have fun and do something informative for chess enthusiast, I think you already reached your goal, and then it’s only a matter of improving them a bit if needed. It’s already good for what it’s supposed to be (as far as I don’t do chess) .
I also look at the progression, one can have high expectations with a poor result, but if on the next piece there is improvements (even if it’s still a beginner level) then it’s promising and interesting to me. It’s much interesting to me than someone with a ok/medium level who doesn’t improve that much over time.

Even in the industry it’s complicated to classify people, I’ve worked on many small project where I consider myself at a senior/supervisor level. Now if I start to work on bigger projects, I’ll be medium level at best and unable to be supervisor.
The opposite may also be very true, if a senior supervisor from pixar had to do my past jobs, he’ll have to adapt to very different constraints and think very differently. It will be a very different job for him and he may lack some experience to make an appropriate answer to the problem.
Another thing from the professional world, one can be really talented but if he can’t adapt his work to the client notes or deliver on time, then he is still in the junior category, even if his personal work is at “senior” level.
So in the end, are we juniors, middles, seniors, leads, supervisors ? these are subjective and tied to a specific job. Two people may be senior/lead, but with very different artistic abilities/level.
So a broad perspective is needed when judging work to make sense. It’s not just looking at something and telling if it’s good or bad. The context is as much as important.

Sorry to have gone a bit off topic in my answer, hope that helps to get my point. I see blenderartists as a bunch of people having fun learning blender and you fall very much in that category.
Artstation is more about gathering professional and expectations are different there.

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Well, congratulations on working in the industry! It must be a hard job to get and even harder to maintain, but it must be a lot of fun to be paid to be creative.

I am pretty sure that ILM or Blizzard won’t be calling me anytime soon. I am not too worried. I really enjoy making these little chess animations. There is something about making the infinite become finite. It gives me a great joy just to see the camera move around a pawn.

Anyways, I am glad blenderartists is fine for nonprofessionals. I just didn’t want to get flamed for mislabeling my work or because I don’t get UV unwrapping yet.

Thanks again for the confirmation that this is right spot.

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:smiley: working in CG doesn’t always mean working on fun and creative stuff ! But it’s cool to be able to live with what you like !
We can see that you’re having fun doing these animations and it’s quite cool to me, blender is for everyone and so does blenderartists !

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