Finished Animation set to music

I just posted this this evening:

I also wrote and performed the music on the acoustic guitar.

This is by far my most ambitious Blender project thus far.
You should have seen me pulling my hair out trying to get this finished!

Sam – that was awesome. You have an incredible sense of timing and dynamic that is uncanny. The show fit the music excellently. You should be very proud.

Awesome!!!

Exceptional work all around. You play a great acoustic guitar and your animation was great. Your music fit it perfectly.

(i personally liked the thunderstorm the best :p)

amazing work! i realley enjoyed it. Nice feeling.
:smiley:

Wow, thanks for the great encouragement!
Any constructive feedback out there?
Best,
Sam

I typically try not to make too many critical comments unless it’s posted in the Focused Critique section, but if that’s what your after…

your water looks very plastic, both the ocean view and the droplets. This mostly has to do with the specular. Cook-Torr doesn’t work that well. I have had better luck with wardiso set with a low slope and high intensity.

The flashes in the clouds have a fade in and out that isn’t normal for lightning. It should be very staccato. No light, next frame lit, remains lit, then no light. you have a ramp, no light, a little light, bright, then it ramps back down,

These are the things that bugged me most.

But I still think it was pretty excellent.

I love this. Daren makes a good point about the water, and the ocean looks a little static, but I think the droplets fit with the style.

The lightning looks great - whilst the ramping may not be realistic, I really like the effect and it perhaps works better with the softness of the music than sharp transitions would.

daren
Thanks for the tip about the specular - I completely agree. I honestly never even played with the different specular or diffuse shaders: not even once! :o

I played with this stuff for just a few minutes and feel like the possibilities just went through the roof.

Thanks so much for that tip!

Sam

beautiful…absolutely beautiful…if you ever make a demo real, put the lightning storm in there

I agree that lightning storm is probably the highlight of the video.

The flashes in the clouds have a fade in and out that isn’t normal for lightning.

Realistically that may be correct, but I think since the clouds are hexagons that isn’t really relevant. I also think the softness suits the music better and everyone still knows it’s lightning. Great work, very nice and original :slight_smile:

My wife and I were on vacation this past week at the beach. We went on a walk on the beach at night and saw the most awesome thunderstorm miles out over the ocean. It was perfectly calm where we were, but we could see lots of lightning in the distance. I was thinking about this animation while watching the storm and I noticed how in some cases the lightning would ‘grow’ as a streak across the sky, and in other cases it would appear instantly as a very ‘staccato’ flash in the sky. Although I wasn’t necessarily going for realism in this animation, I was intrigued to see lightning behave in a way similar to how I portrayed it here AND in the way that daren described.