Intrigue in rain - Animated

Artwork Finished Projects
1

I have finished the rain environment for the Intrigue animation. Here it is:

http://sflare.50megs.com/feedback/feedback22/feedback22.html

Let me know what you think.

2

The speed of everything seems fairly good. The car stops at about the right speed I’d say, and the camera isn’t moving too fast. The reflects on the car were amazing, as were the spot lights, and the trail left behind by the car. What method did you use for compression though? The movie was terribly blurred. There’s a program called Virtual Dub that is fairly good at compressing video without to much quality loss. It’s webpage is http://www.virtualdub.com/ .

Goo

3

Nicely done. I’ve been looking forward to seeing this little project animated and I must say I’m impressed. The car looks fantastic.

I’d do a little tweaking to the tail lights though, they still emit too much light when the breaks aren’t in use. And the lightning strike looks a little awkward in the rest of the environment, but overall a job well done.

4

not shabby man!

only as few things… once again… MOTION BLUR!!! SORRY, BUT THE WHEELS would look so much more real, and so would the falling wood… also ,the wood would bounce and roll alot… perhaps rain hitting the car aswell?

looks good though

keep it up

5

Awesome work man !

My only crit is that the car should tilt forward a bit when it stops. Watch a car when it stops, the front end comes down a bit and then pops back up.

BgDM

6

Cool animation. Stills look awesome.

Since people seem to like this one enough (including myself) to offer suggestions, I’ll add mine to the pile:

  1. Add a weak, bluish-white spot behind/above on the driver’s side that follows the car. No shadow. Just enough to through some highlighting on the back edge of the vehicle to give it some definition. For an example of this, watch any (good) TV show or movie with a similar perspective night shot.

  2. Add weak omni lights to the broken ends of the cables. Keyframe them so they flicker and flare from time to time.

  3. For the lightning - real lightning isn’t just a single stroke. There is a return stroke following the initial one, followed again by several weaker ones (old National Geographic article). This is why it seems to flicker. If it’s not too much, try placing two or three single-frame after images within a few frames of the original stroke. I think you’ll like how it looks.

  4. Gotta second the call for motion blur.

Even if you don’t implement any of the suggestions on this forum, I think that you have a nice, finished piece.

7

Really nice :o :o

Rain is really nice!

People is right though,

1 - You need motion-blur

2 - Cars tilts when they came to a full stop that quick (you can even want to make rear slip a little sideways :slight_smile: )

Then my personal comments (yup, I’m repeating, I wrote these on the past thread)

3 - When a cable breaks one side is connected to the power plant, the other is NOT only one side can cast sparcles!

4 - Lightnings strikes the topmost possible

5 - Lightnings are much more fractal.

Keep it up!

Stefano

8

Great animation!
Maybe you can add some camera shakes to make the movement more realistic…

@ndy

9

AWESOME! wow!

10

thanks for all of the comments.

S68 said: you can even want to make rear slip a little sideways
I really don’t want to have the car do this. Eventually, all of these clips will be combined to make a 60 second mock advertisment for the car. So any “out of control” look would be bad. This is also why I didn’t have the car tip when brakeing (that and too lazy), it is supposed to look like a smooth, efortless stop to advertise the good brakes.

harkyman said: 3. For the lightning - real lightning isn’t just a single stroke. There is a return stroke following the initial one, followed again by several weaker ones (old National Geographic article). This is why it seems to flicker. If it’s not too much, try placing two or three single-frame after images within a few frames of the original stroke. I think you’ll like how it looks.
As for the lighting, there is multiple flashes, all occuring within a few frames. I don’t know how many more flashes you want, I think there are 4 of them.

As for the brakes, I forgot about that. I don’t even bother to dim the lights or briten them when the brakes come on. I also forgot about the lighting comming from the power lines.

As for the motion blur, I have tried it and found that it makes limited difference. It adds a little bit of streak to the tires, but the rendering times are so much larger.

The compression is DivX. I used motion Virtual Dub for the encodeing. It is a really low bit rate (50?) to fit it unde the file size limit of my web site.

Again, thanks for the constructive feedback. I don’t know if I will implement any of it. Depends on how more time I want to spend on this.

11

:o :o :o wow, well done, bud! :o :o :o
I like that low key athmosphere that leaves enough to imagination. strongest image is what we don’t see. most 3D maniacs don’t pay much attention to this point.
You solved that rain-problem very well! It’s not that high-gear-rain but a beginning type of rain. this underlines that athmosphere of latent energy right before apocalyptic catastrophy brakes thru. You did not just model and animate some amazing objects you also played the strings of modeling athmosphere very virtuosely.

Although hardly neccessary here are some improvement suggestions:

  1. try finding a way rendering with mblur. It’ll pay!

  2. wire seems to be a bit thick to me.

  3. poles stand too close I think.

  4. take this from a pro-cameraman: your cam-movement is not really smoth - too many backs and forths in there. seems like cam has problems deciding where to pan and what to take into focus. It comes close, goes back, comes close again… try making it one big smoth half-circle from close-up to total view. And DON’T take that pole into focus before lightning strikes! cam should be surprised as we are. Why not tear-pan right after the stroke? Make it shiver a bit and than it can continue it’s smoth circle…

12

thanks for the camera motion tips. I know that the camera path needed work. Part of the reason is Blender’s interpolation between the IPOs is not the best, which is why the end sweep has a little hitch in it. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get that smoothed out. May be worth some extra work later.

I guess that I brought the pole into focus before the lighting to get the viewers eyes to wander down the road and then about the enviornment, just not looking striaght at the car. To get them ready to see something different. Otherwise, you end up with “What was that?” instead of “holy cow that was a big lighting bolt”.

Thanks for the compliments about the atmosphere. I notice that the atomsphere is usually lacking in a lot of CG things, so I usually put extra effort into putting atmosphere into my shots. It usually pays off :smiley: