Blood Spatter experts?

This is for my 11secondclub sub this month.

How can I get the blood to end up splattered on his face at the end? Can I do that in the particle system, or would I have to make up another material for that?

if your character is UV mapped you can do it using dynamic paint.

Thanks - I’ve never heard of that - I’ll check it out.

youve only got a few days! If can be done would like to see what it looks like.

I don’t know enough about the CGcookie Flex rig to mess with the UV dynamic paint stuff. I’m going to try a few things tonight, I’ll post it.

I’m almost done rendering the final version out. I wish I knew how to adjust motion blur, so it only happened when I want it to. I’m sure it’s easy.

My final entry - 139 out of 162 entries. There were some really great ones submitted, and I got some really good feedback on my entry. If you’ve never done the 11secondclub competition, you should give it a try. I learned a TON doing it.

Beau,

Your little experiment here got me pretty interested. And, the more I think about it, whatever else I have going on in my life, making an 11-second animation every month, learning from it, and adding to it the next…seems like a pretty great way to accept that I’m not a professional, but I damn sure have no excuse not to get some worthwhile practice in on a regular schedule!

In any case, of course some of the harsher voices on the 11-second comments board were difficult, but they were spot on. The ones that were substantive in any case. But, having watched this video, as well as the one on the 11-seconds site, whether or not you, as one person said, “know anything about the principles of animation”, you did make your final product a much more visually interesting render than this test.

But, I can’t help but laugh at some of those comments. The guy who is all grave and deadly serious…“sorry. but this is in poor taste.” Did…did he not listen to the sound byte? Has he never heard of Chinatown? Or the Noir genre at all? While I’m sure less visually graphic than your animation (not that I found your animation shocking), even noir films of the 1940’s were wont to do more than simply allude to murder. I wonder how often that guy tries to play father figure to the “darker visionaries” active on the 11-seconds forums.

However, setting aside the (worthwhile) mockery of the 11-second nanny, it is also worth considering his comment in a different light…perhaps in the light of the comments about “animation principles.” And perhaps expand beyond simply animation principles, to the principles of film in general (of which I am certainly no expert, I am also less than an amateur). If you take a moment and give a little credence to the “poor taste” comment, consider ways in which you could present the same scene in both more “tasteful” and less “tasteful” manners.

In other words, think about what your medium permits.

On one hand, you could bypass insinuation and explanation entirely by simply relying on exposition: simply showing the guy getting shoveled to death. Now, while I would never say that is in poor taste using the “father-nanny” argument, I would say that it is in poor taste because it makes poor use of the medium of film (and particularly, animation!). That kind of graphic exposition is great for campy horror (and clearly, with the dramatic light and staging you settled on, you were kind of going for that), or for like, Saving Private Ryan, where exposition in lieu of explanation more wholly captures the horror and shock of war through the sight, sound, and pacing of the violence itself as an actor.

On the other hand, you could rely on absolute insinuation to reveal, essentially, the violence in your film. Now, if you were in absolutely total creative control of your film, there would be at least two ways to accomplish this. The first is through verbal insinuation: have the character’s words imply what is going to happen. However, in a contest like this, you don’t really have that kind of control (although with this particular quote, a lot of the same effect is accomplished). The second way is with visual insinuation.

Here, it’s kind of a pity that you weren’t able to get the dynamic paint system up and running in time, as it would have provided something crucial. As it is, being that the soundbyte is not specific enough to directly imply the outcome of the situation you depict, you required a visual indicator of what was happening. I wonder if, even lacking dynamic paint, you could have simply animated the texture on his to very quickly reveal a spatter patter in synch with his shovel strike, perhaps indicating that the strike was so forceful and violent as to create a rather high velocity spattering, and maybe used his arms or the shovel itself to cover up the actual cast-off blood in flight. What you ended up doing was relying on the visual of the blood in motion as an expository mechanism: the viewer hears the “threat”, the viewer sees the wind up and the pitch…but they also see where the ball is going to end up. It’s a form of overkill, really. You use and hint at mechanisms of insinuation, but you also depict in a blatant fashion the act itself, relying on the visual of the blood for shock value. But, what this does is take away the emotional, narrative, or visual intrigue. Kind of like, the quote, and the sneakiness of his facial expressions are hinting at a secret motive and plan, but then rather than keep the secret, he ends up shouting it out loud, “WHAT I MEAN TO SAY IS THAT I AM HITTING THIS GUY WITH THIS SHOVEL RIGHT NOW!”

Especially with the moodiness of the lighting in your final cut…rather than relying on the visual of the blood and the impact…perhaps, a sound, a facial expression, a brief flurry of motion that does just enough to suggest the strength and power and violence of the act, while properly positioning things to reduce the need for the visual of flying blood…followed by…a postural change, a deep sense of relaxation and contentment in posture, in body language, a quiet and unnerving calm on your character’s face, and a texture change that includes a nominal amount of blood spatter, but without relying on the visual (and difficulty) of a particle system to place the spatter there. This also would have given you the opportunity to create a perfect and stylized spatter pattern on his face so that you could use the spatter and the shadows to really emphasize the sense of calm and relief and accomplishment and satisfaction…and to wrap the video up…deviousness, a moment of eye contact with the viewer (as you have kind of done…but I think you could make it much more sister as a whole).

In a certain sense, you actually could have accomplished the same thing using dirt and mud on his face, with the suggestion of letting sleeping dogs lie and dead dogs buried.

Anyway, sorry, I don’t know why I just felt compelled to write so much. I guess just because I was thinking about what I would have done if I had more experience and became more willing to do an 11-second competition, and if I were working on this film as if it were my own. You did a very nice job for your first stab at a contest like that, I can only hope to do half that well.

Oh, one more thing. This last guy commenting on your video on 11-seconds, talking about how, OMG, this video is so phallic. Like…what? Just because there is a shovel handle in the center of the frame, all of a sudden this video becomes a statement on eroticism and violent homosexual fantasies? Where do people come up with this stuff…sometimes a shovel is just a shovel. And I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m involved with “Critical Theory” in graduate school and I think there is alot to be had by reading into things, their content, and the context in which they arise…but…really…phallic? No wonder psychoanalysis has gotten such a bad rap. Guys like that…he is saying more about himself than he is your video :wink:

I only just saw this now, but my main advice for your next attemot would be to focus more on the animation than the rendering and effects.
The 11 second club is really about getting a good animation performance.

From this piece I would suggest going back to basics and learning about how to convey weight and attitude.

Yes everything you said. Yes. A thousand times yes.

You can’t please everybody, or at least that’s what they tell me.