Well I posted this once before, but the site that was hosting my film had removed it without letting me know. So this time I’m hosting a smaller version myself. I finished this movie last July, but I don’t think a lot of the Blender community has gotten to see it. All animation and rendering is done in Blender (except for a couple of shots done with Terragen and Ter2Blend).
I’d love to hear your responses/critiques. I’ve only been working with Blender for a little over a year now, so there are still some rough edges. It sure was fun, though! Let me know what you think!
Wonderful Stuff. I take my hat off to your vision! :o
This is the ONLY blender animation made by a non NAN member that has a full and coherent story. You also faithfully replicated the Lucas style which is another plus. There are a couple of gripes with the character animation being a little wooden, but considering that you worked alone on this (I assume), and the fact that character animation is very very hard to get right, this is a very small gripe indeed.
On the whole, spectacular
One thing I have to ask tho: How many of those models are actually yours?
Actually most of the models are modified versions of existing ones.
Since this was my first attempt at a 3D animated film, I wanted to concentrate more on getting the hang of animating, rather than starting all the models from the ground up.
However, several models are original, including: the gamorrean gaurd, salacious crumb, Oola, and several of the other creatures in Jabba’s palace. The ship is patched together from several models, the millenium falcon obviously being one. Darkstar is also a composite, part Darth Maul, part Boba.
Anyway, it helped me learn enough about Blender that I’m now working on more original projects. I plan on having a new film called “The Outlet” finished by late March, and I’m also in the early stages of a film version of Han Christian Anderson’s short story, “The Little Match Girl”.
Has my Bandwidth really been used up already? I get so frustrated trying to share movies over the internet because of issues like that. I guess I’m eventually going to have to PAY for my webservice.
You were saying you would upload it to IPTIC… I’m kind of a newbie. What’s IPTIC?
Whoa now this is great stuff. Very spectacular. I agree what m@dcow says about the character-animation but hey I still haven’t tackled that one. Nice work.
Did you get the FX-sounds from internet or did you have some audioprogram and what program did you use to edit the movie?
first off i’d like to say i thought the film was great, but you did ask for some crits so i’ll be picky.
The animation was a little slow overall. Especially in the chase/fight scene, i think it would have looked better if the whole thing just moved a little faster.
The base in the desert looked quite detached from the background. I think it was because the ground you placed it in wasn’t really flat. Maybe it would have worked better if there was a bit of flat ground for the base to be on.
Inside the base looks a bit simple, especially compared to the inside of the ship, which looked great. The main thing that put me off here was the large specularity on the floor. It just didn’t look right…
Im pretty disappointed by the lightsabers, i think they could have looked a lot cooler, and again compared to the rest it was lacking.
Finally, on the last part where the TIE interceptors are chasing the ship when they fly past the camera, they seem to slow down as they approach the camera. This looks weird, it would be better to make them look faster as they get near the camera.
The film would have looked a lot better if it wasn’t so compressed, but then again i wouldn’t be able to download it at full quality. I just think it would be alot cooler to see a decent sized, full quality version of it.
Well, the character animation isn’t perfect (like others said, it’s a little slow), there are a couple of strange coincidences (how many people can there be with a spaceship like the millenium falcon, a wookiee for a copilot, and two droids?), the lightsabers don’t look quite right and the fight (probably due to being too slow) doesn’t look very exciting (and where did he get a lightsaber?), and the yellow text at the beginning is too vertical…
BUT making a 10 minute animation is very impressive! Especially since it actually has a plot! Not many people could do that. And overall this is a damn cool animation.
It’s really helpful to see the flaws other people notice in it. When you’re working on something yourself, looking at it day after day for months, it gets hard to see it accurately after a while.
The things that bother me the most with it are:
-Mog the Wookie-I would have liked to have made him look more realistic
-The voices. i did all the voices myself except for Vader. I got someone from the Blenderwars forum to do his voice. But the voices I did are just bad. My southern accent is pretty hard to hide.
-The action scenes. It just looks fake when Darkstar turns over that table on Vader and the Stormtroopers. And the lightsaber fight is very stilted and slow.
This was the film I really cut my teeth on… learning about texturing, animating, etc. By the way, I did all the editing with premeire. The sound effects are from http://www.theforce.net
I’ll post links to my newer projects on this forum as they are completed. Due in March is “The Outlet”.
Thanks for the comments!
i don’t know why you don’t like the voices, i thought the soundtrack was one of the best things about it. It was very star wars-ish, but i think there was the love theme in there somewhere…
Not bad for a small screen flick. Your work lets PC users see that animation projects can be produced with Blender. Hey I watched it from start to finish. Most of the animation work that I download from hobby 3d artist doesn’t hold my attention for more than 10 seconds. Good job.
I won’t go into the critique, as some others have basically already said what there is to say, and as you said, this is to learn more about animation, and I think you’ve done an amazing job… even just finishing something is probably more than most of us do…
What I really want to add is that your editing/storyboarding/whatever and sound design are excellent… by sound design I don’t just mean the sound effects themselves… but rather the combination of them…
this is a pretty hard thing to get right, which I’ve discovered myself putting together DV shorts (non CGI)… a lot of the time it’s all too easy to let the music and/or sound effects carry the action, meaning that they dominate the dialogue and therefore the storyline…
Anyway… the storyline is good too… I wanted to find out what happened next… and that’s more important that anything else.
in other words… excellent work… keep going with it… with every short you make you’ll get better and better and learn more and more.
I thought your animation was very impressive. I especially liked the shots with Terragen. Your editing of the music and speech was good but the pace could have been juiced up in some spots.
I thought it was a little too easy to take Vader out (maybe he was sick that day).
I can tell that you must have spent alot of time on it and I think it payed off.
Kudos.
Well, as I mentioned before, I didn’t do all the modelling for this project. Many of the models were borrowed from www.scifi3d.com and swma.com and then modified, retextured, etc. The inside of the ship is from scifi3d.com. It was in 3ds format, and I converted it to blender and retextured the whole thing to look like a “similar” ship to the millenium falcon. The 3ds converter for blender was invaluable in this project.
As far as advise goes, I would just say dive in and keep going until it’s done. I worked for 3 months straight on this film, and I learned so much about blender in the process.
