My god the animation is INSANE!!!
I have to admit, I was skeptical before I saw the animation. (That’s the power of animation over just doing stills, damnit!)
My gut said the legs weren’t spidery enough, that that should be called a “Crab” not a “Spider,” that it should have long legs coming down from what are now the feet.
But, after seeing the animation, I’m convinced that it works. If this thing were twenty feet tall, as I would have made it, it would be tripped up by phone and power lines.
I think it’s AMAZING just the way it is. I LOVE the interesting colors in the vid, I think the animating work is incredible, I’m glad you threw in some glare node for the fire, etc.
The only bitch I have now is with those transitions: ideally, each new shot should be at least 30 degrees different from the one that preceeded it, in terms of cam angle. That’s just a universal rule in film. That’s why you felt you had to put those transitions in; something in your gut told you something didn’t feel right. Transitions denote a passage of time. And these are pretty heavy wipes. For these, you’re really talking about some “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” stuff going on.
So, my only suggestion, lose the wipes to seperate related cam shots in a single scene, mix up the angles so you don’t need them, and keep everything as is. It’s not that I hate wipe transitions, I don’t. AND I DO THINK THEY BELONG IN A VID LIKE THIS: they fit perfectly with your comic-book style of storytelling you’re doing here.
I just think they should be used to seperate different scenes, and to denote a passage of time and change of place.
Otherwise, this is top notch. I still give five stars and a bag of Pizza Rolls. Mr. Plinket at HalfInTheBag and RedLetterMedia would have said this is FAR better than the Star Wars Prequels.
Keep up the greatness.
Addendum: okay, after thinking about it for a minute, you don’t need to go and rerender any of the footage from different angles. Keep what you’ve got. What you need is some very quick cut shots, they could be 40 frame cutshots or something. A little pilot light at the tip of the flame thrower arcing up right before the flame thrower fires to ignite the gasses; one of the feet in close up crunching into the pavement as the mech stabilizes itself in firing position; a shot of the mech from POV inside the alleyway right before the victim gets baked by the incoming river of fire. Just throw in some quick cutshots like that where the wipes are now and you’re in business.
The great thing about this animation is that it screams for a continuing story. It was literally writing itself in my head as I watched and rewatched this thing. It fires the imagination.
Thanks for the feedback AdamEtheredge You are correct about the gut feeling I had with the transitions, something wasn’t quite right. Great suggestions, I’m having a good think about how I can tackle this better.
@gianmichele: The road smashing was mainly particles with dynamic paint. The couple of places where the concrete in the middle fractures was done using the technique in this fantastic video by Ian Moore-Kilgannon. While I’m mentioning tutorials I should also say this tutorial by Andrew Price was also amazing.
If this was a part of a movie, there would have been loooong-ish interview at CG talk and everyone in the team would be telling about buckets of sweat and blood that went into that amazing animation. Unfortunately, since you didn’t made a lot of money of it, it will go unnoticed… sigh…
Really awesome
this is my first comment in the forum so guess how awesome it’s
wanna ask you some questions…the light setup??because the most attractive thing i saw is the shadow
did u use environment map?or a large sphere with emmision material?
the specular on the head at second 4 is insane too!!
the lens effects too
hope my questions aren’t so noob
btw i played it like 200 times till now …really good job and keep the good work up
The lighting is pretty simple. Its just a sun light of size 0.01 with a plain pale blue background light. Most of the work was done in the compositor with a quick Reinhard tonemap to bring the colours in range. I then used a few curves and a colour balance to give it the feel I wanted, and to even out the levels.
Most of the materials were pretty simple with a dual glossy set up, one slightly rough base, with a white glossy shader with a Fresnel term over the top.
The lens effect is a Ghost Glare, with mix set to 1, then Gaussian Blurred and multiplied with a lense dust texture. This is then added back over the original shot. If you want MohamedSakr, I can take the time to upload a blend file with the set up.
This image was created in Blender with Cycles and Gimp, and rendered in under 2 minutes at 720p.
