I had a month to finish this project for a competition. I wish the modelling and some of the animation was better, but my focus was on the fight scenes. Any advice on how I can improve would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
link [video]https://youtu.be/WABs8WBA0nk[/video]
Cameras and motions in general feel very linear rather then bezier with nice ease ins / outs… not to mention lack of overlapping action / followthrough… not sure how much time you have left & how detailed critiques you want… I could probably list around 200+ notes but it all depends if you are actually wanting this sort of detailed critique… A fair few people have requested critiques here before and I have given it… then never actually used it at all.
The contest ended about a week ago. I’m looking at this as a post mortem, so anything you have to say will help.
Arcs are also important. You might also want to add in some motion blur.
Definitely getting a Monty Oum vibe from it.
I think it is missing some vital lighting and shading though. The colours are very flat and it makes it difficult to determine depth. Shadows would make it a bit easier to work out the proximity of the characters from the walls.
I also agree that some motion blur would help with the fighting. I do like the cuts to the slow-motion parts and that would give it a bit more of an action feel to it.
In terms of the animation, it must’ve taken a good while to rig everything. I think the slow-paced bits need to be slower though. There is no time to catch your breath. For instance, at 1:12 when the orange Spartan goes down, I think it would work a lot better if he stayed down for just a bit longer. There are a few other moments like that. I think there is too much action and not enough chance to understand the narrative - Some of the camera movements are a bit too fast or are a bit too linear.
But overall, enjoyable to watch!
Thanks for the replies. Overall a notiable critique is on the linearity of movements within the animation. I’ll be sure to avoid this by using bezier curves more often for motion paths and look into easing in and out of motions.
I’ll try to respond to each critique with some comments.
I’ll be sure to apply more arcs in the future. I’ve recently found the motion path button for bones, so hopefully that will be useful. Motion blur actually crashes blender on my PC. Personally I’d like to avoid it since I’d like to avoid obscuring the fight choreography as much as possible.
Modelling and rigging was done in a week. This includes characters and environment. Though I agree better shadows and lighting would improve the video, in this case I didn’t have much time to implement them. I’ll be sure to look into this in future projects.
Timing music with fight choreography is surprisingly difficult. The reason for the orange spartan’s quick rise is so that when the ensuing fight scene finishes, it transitions nicely into the slow motion punching. Delaying the rise would mean dropping parts of the fight choreography, which intern sacrifices positioning of characters and/or timing of other movements. I agree that there are a lot of areas that should be slower(predominantly the not fighting parts) and would have been better for the narrative if they weren’t so rushed.
Again thank you for the respones. If you have any additional comments or rebutles to what I’ve written please let me know.
