Something Dalai Felinto and I made for work.
Reef shark by mike pan, on Flickr
Reef and Tuna by mike pan, on Flickr
The images above are screencaptures from an animation I am working on for my university. The video is 2 minutes long, with 5 scenes showing the Northwestern Hawaiian Island and its beautifully pristine coral reefs.
Took about 1 month of preparation, 1 month of modelling and animation, and 1 month of lighting and composting to get to where we are today.
That’s really great looking. Where is actual video?
The video is still rendering 
at 10 minutes a frame with with real motion-blur, it’s going to take a while. I think we’ve gone a bit overboard with the quality settings, each frame has 60mil faces (mostly from subsurf) and 100k particles, 5 render layers and a pretty massive node composite chain. Blender 2.5 64bit is helping a lot though, with 2.4, i can’t imagine how much longer it will take.
wow, post it up for shur when it finishes. it looks sick.
The images are really attractive, but I am looking forward to the video.
That is the screencapture of your work? I was shocked by it! I must confess that the screen effect looks pretty good! Almost mix the spurious with the genuine!
Beautiful image! Very nicely done. Good job!
Cant wait for the animation.
Why is this in the wip? Looks like a final product to me
I am afraid that my animation skill is far inferior to my lighting and texturing abilities. So the video might not look as impressive as the screenshots. There is also a bit of photoshopping involved to make the image more dramatic, I’ll try to apply the same color grading and treatment to the video, but the result might not be identical.
That is always hard, so easy to tweak in PS, hard to recreate smoothly in AE.
Top notch looking work, no crits. Good luck with the animation.
I have been learning heaps to improve my animation skills over at the http://11secondclub.com Perfect place to learn by watching imo.
We would all be better animators if we just properly estimated how long we should spend on it. They spend an entire month on 11 seconds of animation, it could take a master animator 6 months to complete 2 minutes of film quality anim. So don’t be so hard on yourself!
Thanks for the link.
Also, rigging and animating goes hand-in-hand. I had no clue how to rig properly when I started, so the rig is horrible to work with. It doesn’t help that it’s not a biped character, so there is even less reference on how to properly rig a fish.