So I’ve been watching and learning from this community for the longest time now. I am an animation student, and have pretty much been able to teach myself blender from online tutorials alone - and blender artists of course! Anyway this animation if far from perfect, but I felt like sharing it would be a small way of saying thank you to the community that has given me so much!
The moving backgrounds in the first part of the short were made in after effects, and the photographs were made by my friend. Otherwise everything from the animation to the sound is self-produced (which I’m sure you can tell haha) and made in blender! I learned a ton by making this and I hope you enjoy it as well.
First comment… why couldn’t you of done the moving bg in blender? woulda saved you from using two programs. Apart from that the first part has an interesting style to it, the paper-ish owl flying through the paper bg. You could reference birds flying abit more though as it looks very unnatural.
Right at 1:00 when the owl lands and shakes it’s head about scarred me… I thought it died cause it’s neck stretched ALOT. Owls, like most birds, necks don’t usually stretch outward but rather slide around on their shoulders (youtube pet birds and you can see)
The front of the owl is also pretty well done, but the back is not… Keeping the quality consistent across the model would add alot in itself.
Apart from that… I don’t think I understand the purpose of the video, but overall it was pleasing to watch. Very artistic.
Thanks for the thoughts QS Dragon!
After Effects has a much more powerful layer animation system and while I could have simply used shadeless premultiplied planes in blender my workflow works better with some after effects in it anyway.
The flying is very unnatural, but this project needed to get wrapped up. That’s a very good point you make though! Same with the neck. I realized too late that my topology was too human in that respect because deforming the head in a natural owl way looked extremely awkward. And I didn’t have enough edge loops on the neck. Now I could have just added some, and I did, but I had already combed all the particles at this point and that offset the vertices count which made everything a huge mess lol. So I just loaded an earlier version and called it good enough haha. :o
I suppose I could have added a better bump map and a higher res texture for the back, but again I had to choose where to invest my time with this project.
lots of things to learn from that I can apply to my next work!
