Hi
Im working on this little project still. My PC is too weak to render 14 000 frames at this render quality. Im also using this as a lighting excercise.
Rendered in Cycles . Ive moved over to Blender 2.8 as well.
all comments welcome.
Update//
Finally got round to rendering the scene.
all comments welcome
Hi,
I like this a lot, overall. It takes a few minutes to really get going but that’s just matching the mood of the music. There’s good pacing and rhythm. Kudos for having the patience to animate and render for an 8+ minute song! 
Regarding the lighting, materials and scene in general, I just don’t know if there’s anything to improve. I have very little experience in these areas, it just looks very good.
But the character animation has many things I could give suggestions for, if you like. You probably noticed some details which don’t look quite natural about it. Which model and rig did you use?
Hi Polylearn. Thanks for taking the time to revview and give crits.
for the animations I used about 4 different self animated sequenceses , saved to actions. Then I used the NLA editor to create the animation for the whole video. I mixed and matched different actions to different body parts to get a variety of dance moves ( so I used action 1 arms , with action 4’s legs and body. that sort of mixing and matching) . the transitions between actions in the NLA editor did give me weird distortions in the arms especially, but I tried my best to get smooth transitions, though I failed most of the time.
I originally wanted to render in cycles , to get the best rendering as possible but that was a no go. Enter EEVEE to the rescue. the whole sequence to 3 days straight of rendering in EEVEE. I got the render time per frame down to 5 secounds.
I use an i3 , 6 gbs ram, Nvidia 620 GT .
Ok, using only 4 “moves” explains the limitations. Actually that’s quite an impressive dance for having mixed only 4 sequences.
I’m really new to Blender and not very familiar with the NLA yet, but I’m mostly concentrated on learning realistic character animation. It’s the little things that make a big difference; small variations in positioning over time make the model look alive and less robotic.
Of course, a full dance is most reasonable to make with some limited set of actions and then try to add some “noise” and smoothing afterwards. What I mostly notice about this for improvement is that for the first minute, the spine seems to be completely immobile. The other thing is that the toes of the left foot keep lifting off the floor (the heel stays down) though it is supposed to be supporting her weight when the right leg is in the air - around 0:30 - 0:55 of the video.
Was the character your own creation or did you use a ready-made model with rig?
By the way, I noticed you made the music yourself. Amazing, that makes the video so captivating!
Thanks Polylearn. Yeah, most of the time im just winging it hey…but thanks for the lovely words. I might go back and tweak almost everything about this little project, later . But for now its just gonna stay like this. Yes , the model is self-made and self-rigged. I have an obsession with using the default tools of a 3d program. I feel like im cheating , if I use a plugin that does almost everything for me… I am the same way, with my 3ds max projects.
@kulu, if I may…
I’m not gonna critique the animation nor the lighting. I’m gonna critique the missed opportunites in three days of rendering in EEVEE.
Your song is more than eight minutes long. First off, why? That’s a long time. That’s 499 seconds. That’s (I’m assuming 30fps) more than 14,400 frames of animation! And why? The animation sequences are limited; you’ve admitted that yourself.
Okay, let’s say you’re “married” to your 8’19" of music. Why a fixed camera the entire time? I’m not even talking a moving camera, I’m talking adding additional cameras and just cutting from one camera to another. It would have rendered your entire animation so much more interesting with almost no additional effort, instead of the static montage of the four different renders assembled in the NLE.
Thirdly, I’d like to know why rendering in EEVEE took three days?? Is that including the time and rendering out from the NLE, I suppose?
That said, I thought your animation was really cute, rough edges and all. 
It’s just for a minimal extra effort it could have been so much nicer. Forgive me if it sounds like I’m down on you. These are just suggestions and no reflection on you. PEACE! 
I share that obsession!
Thanks for the softly worded comments gtommorrow. This is only how far I got with this little project. I do have other cameras and angles in the scene. But I wanted it to look like home made video at one stage. Like the girl just placed her phone on a tripod and filmed herself. I wasnr going for anything like a movie sequence at all.
Yes I feel bad for not doing the whole song, which is about 11 minutes. So it could have been worse. But since its a conmon complaint about the song length, I can edit it down to about 5 minutes I guess.
The long render times is because of my pc rigg. It’s an i3 , 6 gbs ram , nvidia gt 620 (1gbs).
Yes it’s quite weak. But right now it’s all I have. I was so overjoyed that eevee was a viable alternative to cycles. I was over the moon actually. Even though It would have been nice to render in eevee.
Yes it was about 14500 frames. Each frame was about 5secounds . I tried my best with the eevee settings. Would have been nice to get some reflections in the metal parts of sone of the objects, but ah well. 5 stars for effort nvidia gt 620.
