Short Animated Film: Blocking Stage Feedback

Artwork Focused Critiques
21

Thank you for these suggestions. I really appreciate it. I will give it a try. I do have the girl–for the most part–in completely different scenes. I learned fairly early on that having hair in the scene, even if it isn’t in view, slows everything down.

I’m new to BlenderArtists. I have tried to utilize it as a resource and I add my own two cents a time or two also. I haven’t had great experiences getting advice. I appreciate people’s efforts, but often the answers and suggestions are things I already know and have tried, or are people like me who are not Blender experts just trying to be helpful. In the long run, and for the most part, if I haven’t learned something in a tutorial, I have had to figure it out on my own. I have worked really hard on this. I had a real nightmare with the hair and one comment I got on here let me know that it is a problem in Blender (the hair doesn’t respond to the collision modifier of any mesh and blows through it). One of the problems is that I’m new enough to Blender that taking on a project like this was more or less guaranteed to be fraught with problems and I think some of the most serious issues are that I didn’t know when I started a lot of the things I learned along the way. Do you have any suggestions for getting people who know more what their talking about to answer? I hate to sound like a snob here, but it’s a lot of work to put these questions together and then not really get a workable answer.

I’m not shelving this permanently. I will make the effort to–at the very least–find someone who has a machine that I can render this on in a reasonable amount of time. The suggestion of using BI is worth considering. I actually made the switch to Cycles halfway through this project and wound up changing all my textures and materials for that. It took about a week (30-40 hours) to get back on track. I’ll think aobut it. But it won’t look as good as the Cycles. That’s the big problem. I will try the 720p, as you suggest and will look at your work.

I’m not using SSS. I didn’t bother because I felt it wasn’t necessary for the more-or-less cartoony look I was going for. Most of my textures are from Sketchup Texture Warehouse, which are excellent, plentiful, and free. I don’t think they are particularly “heavy” in terms of graphics processing, but I don’t know how to determine this for sure. I converted all of my png textures to jpegs when I learned it made a significant difference. I have some normal mapping, like on the heart and the rug which I could probably lose. I originally had normal mapping on the doll, too, as her “skin” is actually cloth, but I dropped it in favor of lowering render times.

I really appreciate all this info and your interest in the project. I’ll see what I can do.

22

You can render this out someway.

There is raypump, you get a free limit every day,

render.st gives you $25 just for signing up (No cc info needed)

What kind of card do you have? I’ve got a GTX 780, I could cook some video overnight. Some people don’t want to give out their hard work and I understand that, but to let this sit there… pm a packed link if you want. Or look at render farms.

23

Don’t worry about exactly-who might respond to a post … lots of folks out there are watching it, including true technical experts. If you have a particular technical question, it’s probably best to “fork” a new question in the appropriate thread, perhaps including in it a link to this (parent …) thread for context.

Anyhow … at this point in the process, I strongly suggest that you should be focusing your concerns only upon OpenGL renders. And, that you ought to be singularly focused on that, perhaps, for quite some time yet.

The next milestone that you should be working for, I think, is: “The F-i-n-a-l Cut.™”

That is to say, t-h-e absolutely-complete sequence of shots, start to finish, for the entire movie. You reach this point just as “real” filmmakers do: by first “shooting a lot of film,” from this camera and that, shot by shot and scene by scene, and then “editing it all together” until you have determined exactly what footage you require. Even though the OpenGL images are comparatively crude, they can be produced very quickly and-d-d-d they are exact. When you replace an OpenGL stand-in with “the real thing,” it will match perfectly.

So … do that. “Shoot a lot of film,” then “cut it all together” using whatever video-editing tool strikes your fancy. Agonize over the frame-by-frame timing of a particular scene. Look at the edges of the frame and consider what’s in and what’s out. Look for the frames, here and there and there, that can be sacrificed without losing impact. Do it now.

Now, “well, you have your movie, so the only thing that’s left is rendering it.” You have your shot-list, so now you can do shot-breakdowns. Some might require Cycles. Some might do just as well with BI. Some can be done, by gawd, with OpenGL.

Some might be “critical pod-racer audience scenes,” well-deserving of lavish attention, while others “might be done with colored Q-tips (cotton swabs),” as was actually​ done in the first theatrical release of Star Wars: Episode One. (Yeah, it was cleaned-up before the DVD went out…) Go through every shot, ruthlessly. All three renderers that are built-in to Blender (OpenGL, BI, Cycles) can be used in the same project, or for layers within the same shot … and very frequently are. Once you have that “final, approved, now set-in-stone” shot-sequence, you can determine the most-economical way to achieve it. If it’s an important establishing-shot, lavish attention upon it. If it’s a passing-shot or a repeat of “what the audience has seen before,” digital Q-tips will do nicely.

But, “you don’t know that … yet.”

So, first you need that “Final Cut,” and the associated “edit lock” project-milestone. Freely explore your creative options now … while they’re still “free.” Strive to keep them “still free” as long as possible. Yeah, yeah, you’re destined to spend “minutes/hours per-frame” soon enough, but … not yet.

24

@ Photox: I have a GeForce GT330M GPU. I installed the CUDA patch, but this card doesn’t have the capability needed to run the cycles renders (this is from a message I got in Blender when I tried to render using GPU). It’s a Macbook with OS 10.6.8. I have the lightpaths set to Max 8, Min 0, and the render tiling size (in the Performance panel of the Render window) set to 32 as this is optimum for a CPU render. Doing test renders with the samples set ridiculously low at 25-30, the shortest render time was 1:29. The longest render time with these settings was 7:43. By and large, most single image renders take about 3-5 minutes. I tried harleynut97’s suggestion with the 720p and even 640p resolution and there was little or no change. Assuming an average render time of 3 minutes, which is very liberal, I calculated that it will take 8.97 days (24/7) to render this little film. Not only will that likely be more like a month, I’m genuinely concerned that I will burn my laptop up in the process. It gets really warm when I do renders, especially repeated ones.

I would be very interested in utilizing your offer to do some of the rendering, and I’ll definitely look into the resources you listed. I will check into these matters and try to get organized somehow with it. I’m not sure how all of that works. I have relative paths set up, but when I tried to run my files on my roommate’s desktop PC, I imported the entire tree structure of the project, but some of the textures and libraries still needed to be reassigned. I would feel really bad if you had to chase all that stuff down in order to do some rendering for me. So, I’ll get back to you on this and see what I can do. I also have read sundialsvc4’s response and realize that I don’t have to render this very moment as I do still have a bit of work to do on this.

25

@ sundialsvc4, I understand what you’re saying. For certain logistical reasons, I do have to set this project aside for a little while. This has been an extremely difficult decision to make, but sometimes life demands that we make such choices. Having said that, I do appreciate what you’re saying. I have worked through many changes from your and the others’ suggestions, but I’m at a place where I need to learn more about the polishing stages. I took this project on predominantly as a learning exercise and now I need to deepen my understanding of animation, those small little things that most people wouldn’t notice, but that make a huge difference in making the film accessible and comfortable to viewers. So, aside from setting this aside for a month or two, I also need to work at this deepening of my skills in animation.

I also appreciate your reminder that this is a creative process and that there are infinite ways to skin a cat. I am a huge admirer of the work of both Lucas and Spielberg and one of the things that inspired me to do what I could with the limited resources I have is Lucas’s fairly lo-tech approach to one of the greatest movies ever made. Thank you for that reminder.

26

I appreciate everyone’s involvement in this process. I have gotten far more from this critique than I expected. Thank you for all of your suggestions and feedback.

As I said in another comment above, for logistical reasons, I have to set this project aside for a bit. With that in mind, I wanted to make a the-best-could-do-right-now version of the film to serve as a way to tie up all the loose ends before I set it aside. I still have changes I want to make–many of them based on your suggestions, which I couldn’t get to in the time I had to do this. I don’t expect the interruption to last more than a couple of months, but I went ahead and made this version and I have uploaded it to YouTube.

Here is the current state of affairs for anyone interested in checking it out.

27

Sometimes life steps in and you just have to take a break. Believe me I understand that. Feel free to pm a packed scene or two any time and I’ll see what kind of times we’re talking about.

28

@ Photox Thank you, and that sounds great. I really appreciate it. I do have to step away from this for a bit, but I will get back to it and we’ll see what we can do.