Some of you may know See3D from past Blender Conferences or our appearance at the Blender SIGGRAPH booth this year. We are a visualization studio based in Wales, UK that uses Blender almost exclusively.
We’ve just finished putting together our first animated short, ‘Frog in a Blender’. It was conceived as something of a demo project, for technical and creative purposes. Creating it involved some pretty complex compositor work, and camera tracking to mix the live-action with the animation.
With ‘Frog in a Blender’ wrapped up we were also ready to put together our 2009 demo-reel. It shows quite a variety of Blender work (and one part done in Crystal Space), including visualization of laser scan point cloud data.
I almost had to turn it off halfway through because it was making me seriously motion-sick. You have the camera moving and twirling so much, rarely resting on anything, and when the camera’s in motion all you can actually see is a blur. A wide-angle lens always produces very-objectionable distortion when panned at any distance less than infinity.
The frog isn’t particularly funny.
Sliced in-between some very forgettable (and “in a blur fly-by”) architectural visualization stuff, you have some very interesting and well-presented material about the aqueduct “constructing itself.” Very tight and informative. Wish you didn’t then take me on another roller-coaster ride trying to show it to me from all angles. Put that airplane on the ground and give me those keys!
You’ve also got some interesting visualization of a submersible pump.
A demo-reel does not need to waste time doing what everyone else out there is doing, namely “architectural visualizations of spotless ultra-modern interiors.” The pieces of this reel that are really good are the ones that show how things work, and historical regression. The texturing and lighting and framing of these is spot-on. And… not everybody out there is doing this.
I’d like a treatment of these where the camera does not move, set to a classical/madrigal sound track that changes fundamentally at least three times in three minutes. At a tempo not to exceed 100bpm. Just askin’.
You’ve got a minute and a quarter of good stuff, a tasteless frog joke that falls splat, and a frog that, fortunately, doesn’t.
The animation is not bad at all, however to me it does not qualify as a demo reel. It depends what type of audience you aim you work to. If I had to hire you as an animator nothing has impress me since all you have is pretty good arquitectural models and landscapes with a camera flying around like mad. It is an eye catching presentation for some sort of TV commercial to show quickly some structures. As I said it depends what you want to show…modeling? ( Then you should speed down the camera…)…animation? ( well flying cameras does not reflect much of animations skills)
The animation is good, it made me visually sick for a bit, but good job.
The frog and the fly were excellent, love the moves of the fly…I almost hit my monitor.
@ sundailsvc4 + blenderguy2008:
Appreciate the detailed critique guys. Just one note: We do quite a lot of architectural visualization and while I agree it’s not as interesting to look at as other projects, it is important that we demonstrate our ability and experience to potential clients. Perhaps there is too much of it in the reel.
I’ll definitely share this feedback with the guys here, and discuss your very well made points.
yeah, definitely ease up on the motion. it looks like whoever was animating the camera had too much coffee or something.
the short with the frog was good
so did you create all that in blender3d? how’d you deal with measurements?
