Dogs - teaser

Artwork Animations
#1

Hi everyone,

The video below is my first CG project. I chose Blender to do it.
This is a one minute teaser of a book, named “Dogs”, written by a friend of mine, Guillaume Cazenave.

In this world, the criminals are sold as slaves, and are bought by rich people. The “Dogs” are being captives with the help of a electronic device stuck around their neck. One of them, Donatello, breaks free and tries to hide in the streets at night.

It’s quite a simple work, even though it has been long to produce. The render took 20 minutes per frame (CPU rendering) and there were more than 1500 frames to render. I’m not very happy with the overall result, some parts are too dark, the colors, lights and shadows are not well expressed but it’s a first effort and I’ll keep improving. The time constraint for the rendering process didn’t help.

I’ve made some still images which took more than 20 hours to render and of course the result is better.

Thanks for your comments ! :slight_smile:

#2

I hope the movie is lit a little more, the teaser is WAY too dark (for me).

#3

Well done, actually. One thing that made me feel uncomfortable was camera movement, which i found somewhat stereotypic (or toonish?). Other than that, everything worked for the atmosphere.

#4

Place57 and Slesar, thank you very much. If anyone has any tips and advices about camera work in subjective view and lighting night scenes, I’ll be happy to hear from you.
PS: this is a teaser for a book. So there won’t be anything more.

#5

Maybe add some blue environmental lighting to brighten up the animation but keeping it night.

#6

Looks real nice other than the darkness issue

#7

Thanks aln727. Here’s another view. A still image. Same scene. Different render, and render time (20 hours).
I’d want to add glow on the lights. That would be better.
But in the end, we have a much better vision of the city environment.

CourseHDPost.jpg1280×720 506 KB

#8

I like this. Camera improvements: At the opening, the camera is flying in, but you seem to be going for more of a POV shot? Perhaps have the camera patented to a block representing the first person head height and add head bobbing.
The laptop I looked at it in overexposes everything so your movie looked fine but will probably be too dark for properly calibrated sets. You should make sure you have a good monitor when adjusting lighting etc. Given your render times, I would render all as stills, then add these as image sequence to put through colour correction nodes. For a while there it looked like he was moving through a photograph; nothing was moving. The interaction of a few cars broke this up at the beginning. Possibly add a running cat or moving shadows of people to make the remainder not look so frozen?

I’m not surprised this took you a while to produce. I am surprised that it’s your first. It looks much better than what I’d expect for a first production.

#9

Thank you Lancer ! You gave good thoughts. I was going for a POV shot. The post was made on After Effects but you’re right, I could have done it with the compositing nodes on Blender, on my screen. But the problem is more profound. It’s the lighting inside the scene which is at fault. In the tunnel we don’t see anything because I killed all the reflections, in order to reduce the render time. Next time I’ll probably won’t use Blender Cycles… or I won’t go for realism… or I don’t know yet :slight_smile:

#10

…or, you could bake the lighting so you can gain the speed.

#11

Yes :slight_smile: Thank you.