Environment and Animation WiP

Going to start a WiP for this series.


Slow going to start since I have very little animation experience in Blender.
Anyway, I have the block out and animation under way.
Here are a couple of screen grabs of my early progress.




Wow, that’s an ambitious project. Do you plan to show the whole progress during your course? I’m going to follow this :slight_smile:

That is my intent, but I do not think it is as ambitious as the stuff you and Harley have been working on.
I am working on the last two sequences for the animation now. (coin falling down the drain/splashing in the sewer)
I’ll post the animatic once I have it rendered out.

I’ll look forward to watching your progress on this, you mentioned the animatic, I’m assuming your refering to an openGL render. It is so important to use these because you never are able to get frame rates high enough just judging it via the viewport.

My recommendation is to always render image sequences for the final renders… never render out movie clips. I can’t tell you how many times some glitch occured and instead of re-rendering out the whole thing again, I was able to just re-render just a certain amount of frames and fix the problem.

I won’t be able to help you much on the blender video editor because I use a different program, but I’m pretty sure Minoribus is getting very familiar with it and can help you with any issues you may have.

But good to see you tackling animation Anthony, I have no doubt you will enjoy the learning process, but the real joy I have found, is watching your hard work in modeling come to life.

Now see you’re ahead of me already. When I look over at my Outliner I see Plane.087. :slight_smile: Actually, it’s not quite that bad but you’re going to get started with how it should be done. Including that pre-production stage thing which I just ignore and it shows. Hell I even see several markers on your Timeline, Anthony. I need to be watching this thread.

Thanks guys, I appreciate the support.

Here is the first pass animatic. There are a few timing issues to fix but as I become more acquainted with the constraints system they should work themselves out.

first impression

0-4 seconds lools fine…just laying on ground
4-6 secons flip occurs too fast
6-10 seconds starts off oK…but than moves too fast
10-19 ssconids- way way too fast on spinning…actually ramps up… when it should be slowing down
19-21 seconds- looks right
21-24 seconds way … way too fast
26- end seconds… looks good

Wow Anthony! This is impressive stuff, you’ve gone quickly through this, there’s a lot of different animation aspects at play here and you’re on the right track!

Some of the timings of things could do with being a bit smoother, possibly go with keeping the camera in a soft motion throughout so there’s always a slight sense of moving through the scene. Also, the drop down at the end can be much longer. The drop is a fun section to setup :slight_smile:

You could even take that further have it bouncing off the walls and so on, rolling down pipes and allsorts!!! could be a fun challenge where you might get to practice playing with the elements and timings some more, but really really great work so far! :smiley: - Aidy.

Thanks Harley, my target time is roughly 35 seconds so a lot of this will be slowing down.

Oh crap, the man himself! :eek:
I am going to finish up Section 2 and once I have the rest of the scene roughed in I’ll make another pass at the animation sequence. This way I have time to digest all the stuff you covered in Sec2Chap3 and see if I can do it myself the second time around. I appreciate you stopping by, I look forward to hearing from you more as I progress.

removed double post

Hi Anthony,

great to see an new project of yours. I really like the idea behind this. The problem with the timing was already addressed, so I have only one issue so far.

The first camera flight is a nice introduction, but I think the camera stop at the end of the flight is quite radical.
The flight has a really nice flow to it, so don’t cut that away at the end. Try to find a smoother transition between the moving camera and the stop. A slow fadeout to the final position.

Keep it coming! Looking forward to your progress.

Greetings from Hamburg,
FastLeaD

Thanks for the suggestion. I am going to reshoot the opening camera as soon as I have the rest of the rough in completed. I’ll take this into consideration and see where it goes.

Here is my progress for the morning.


So how are you lighting this project ? Is this going to be BI or cycles? Looks like you had some good progress today.

I think the series will cover both BI and Cycles.
At the moment I am just using the environment light in BI


Got the rough in well in hand and tracked a new camera for the opening.
Not amazed by it but I think it is closer to what I want than the first one was.

Overall I like the camera movement and you made me do a little research on this topic :slight_smile:

I guess the purpose of the first seconds is to give an overview of the environment and to introduce the coin. I see that you tried a more curved path when the camera approaches the coin in the second video. But I think it went too far to the left and is nearly loosing the focus on the coin. Perhaps a “track to” constraint for the camera could help?

Coming along well Anthony, the coin movement looks more natural to me. I would agree with what Minoribus said regarding the camera movement suggestion.

Woah, very cool, coming along nicely! Love that you’re trying something different with the environment camera sweep, a compositional note though - if you’re going to draw the eye of the viewer into an area (that is to the left somewhere) you’ll need something of significance for the eye to rest on. Feel free to try completely different methods of establishing the environment if you like. :slight_smile: - Aidy.

My first attempt at making my own brick texture. Blender to sculpt, GIMP to paint.
Not a spectacular result by any means but good enough to move forward with.


I am not sure what i’ll do with the camera in the end but I will for sure be changing it up a bit. Probably going to draw out the fly in at the very least, we’ll see.

Thanks Harley, the coin animation itself is the same. I think the change in feel comes from the keeping the camera moving as FastLeaD and Aidy pointed out.

The first animatic makes heavy use of the constraint system. I was just trying to animate it by hand for the second one. Just trying to feel out what I want.