Here’s another little film I hope gives some laughs:
A lovesick man is saved from certain death by a divine light, but is there a hidden agenda behind the intervention?
What that little promo out the way, let me get geeky at all the Blender stuff!
The focus for this short was very much on the story and animation. After Taste Lab I’d had enough of worrying about buffer shadows and textured SSS, so it was a big relief when tests using the Freestyle renderer turned out pretty nice. I could probably try to relate line-drawing to the “on edge” main character, but honestly it was the 20 second render times that did it.
Hopefully it strikes a good balance between humour and tragedy - for a long while there wasn’t a single joke in it, and it really wasn’t fun to watch. Luckily focus testing (shoving an early preview in people’s faces and watching them look bored) came to the rescue. I ended up animating nearly the whole thing again, so it took longer than I would’ve liked.
There was also quite a lot of compositing involved - everything was rendered in separate renderlayers and put together in the compositor. Normal nodes were used for subtle shading effects on the ground, and I put a heavy lightwrap effect on the clouds (big thanks to the Sintel compositing guys for that one!) I experimented with using hair particles for the grass, but I ended up doing it all in the compositor - displacing it with a fine cloud texture and blurring upwards. I also had simulations going on the hair and shirt, although I did cheat a little bit by painting over a few frames in Gimp when things messed up.
In all, it was a fun project to work on - the hardest thing was the story. I really struggled with the film’s “meaning” (if you want to get arty) but once I brought my themes together it all kind of fell into place.
You’re genius! I was really looking forward to this, I really liked your previous shorts!
I hope at Blender foundation they will consider to hire you for the upcoming projects…
Excellent work!
P.S: I read your motivations not to use a brilliant graphic, but you could really improve it without to much effort…
i love the style, and the first bit is great. you seem to have troubles with the cloth simulation, but i thought it was a nice (if not slightly depressing) short.
@3dementia: Yes exactly I didn’t want to undo the animation with my poor efforts at shading and texturing. Hopefully next time I can get some extra help to make a film that looks really nice.
@BlenderPER: Thanks! It sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but I’m not really sure you can cover animation in a tutorial properly. You can be taught the techniques, but it mainly comes down to just lots and lots of practice. Read “The Animator’s Survival Kit” if you’re interested - it’s an excellent foundation
@Casio23: Re ,cloth simulation - tell me about it Unfortunately it was only after I made this did I realise you could cache linked simulations, so with this I had to set up the cloth sim separately in each shot. I hoped that the final shot (while not immediately obvious) does alleviate the depressing tone somewhat - it’s supposed to be symbolic of him “letting go” of his baggage.
Are you considerig something like community help for your next project?
I think that sort of collaboration will really help people like me in getting better…
Yes I am! I’ve been working on a much bigger project since January, and I’ll be looking to get some extra help soonish. I’ll post an announcement in a while, once I’ve got a few more things worked out.
loved it very much
I didn’t want to undo the animation with my poor efforts at shading and texturing. Hopefully next time I can get some extra help to make a film that looks really nice.