Preview my new animated horror short: R A C H E L ! (She really dead?)

argus1000

http://youtu.be/1kWBjByS6I4

All comments and suggestions welcome, as I mainly used Carrara for this project and I consider this forum sort of like a preview audience. Don't be too harsh: I spent 15 months hatching this baby.

bigh

pretty good - you get 8.5 out of 10 ;-)

WendyLuvsCatz

looking fantastic so far,
my crappy 3G wireless broadband taking for ever to buffer,
Saturday night never good.
got it paused on my second monitor hoping I can watch it later, if my connection does not drop out!
otherwise might have to use the laptop and my Android wifi , it is quite a bit better and can plug it into the 42" plasma, my desktop does not have wifi.

Frank__

Only some suggestions which came into my mind:

- maybe you should tune down the ambient light; your video has mostly a washed out look
- in the end if you have to zoom on the guys' feet when walking the toes should bend
- in the forest walk the optitex jeans on Rachel bend and crumble way too much: make the clothing stiffer (same on the shorts after the beach run)
- foot sliding in the beginning: hard to avoid; maybe simply don't show the feet from the side
- guy cutting wood: maybe some particles spraying away where the axe hits the wood?
- Rachel sitting on bed: the right calf goes to the left thigh: that's horror :)
- Rachel dancing in the attic: in the beginning she misses her slip (06:11). I had to mention this!

I hope this isn't too harsh, but I thought you deserved some more answers after 64 people viewing the clip ...

Before more critical points it would be nice to know what style you want to achieve and for what audience your video is intended.

edited 4 times to achieve breaks

Frank__

Some general suggestions/opinions:

- bodies have weight (actually, mine has 50% too much, nevertheless): show it! In animation you should over-emphazise it. A body falling down on the floor will bounce a little bit, same if sitting down. Avoid the impression of a weightless body floating through the air.
- secondary motions: don't concentrate too much on the actual plot-motion. Flesh jiggles, wiggles and giggles (or so). Again: over-emphasize it even if realism is your goal.
- animating real human beings is the most difficult task in 3D; really, really most difficult. Why haven't we seen a "real life"-animation from Pixar yet? --- I guess those guys will come up in the next ten years with something remarkable, but there's a reason why we haven't seen it yet. (Some time ago there was some guy who did a great realistic short with DAZ and Poser, something with martial arts and roses and something: he got at the moment a job in Hollywood. Extraordinary talent.)

And I won't like to discourage someone: 15 years ago I did my first completed (and so far: only) 3D animation. 200 sec took me 3 years of 12-14 hours a day work and it would be a compliment to say: it wasn't good. Okay, I had to model everything (including a human-look-alike model, which is today not the show-stopper) and there was no mocap ... what did I learn from this experience: I'm obviously not the born animator, but others may be ... :)

Good night and good luck.

3DAGE

Nice work Argus :)

Ditto on all of Franks suggestions,.
.
It's a tough challenge to do realistic human motion.

try this NLA on V4 for your convulsive Fit,.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7907045/ConvulsionFit.cbr

chris poole

Sorry argus1000,

I just spent the last 35 mins + typing a review of your animation and tried to put a smiley face on the page and it replaced my post with a screen of smiley faces, I'm annoyed! mostly with myself for not doing it in a external program and as usual and pasting it in.

Great job, some problems as Frank mentioned and a few others, but hey, it's as f'ing hard to do as it is fun, so well done you.

Chris

argus1000

Frank__ said:

- animating real human beings is the most difficult task in 3D; really, really most difficult. Why haven't we seen a "real life"-animation from Pixar yet? --- I guess those guys will come up in the next ten years with something remarkable, but there's a reason why we haven't seen it yet. (Some time ago there was some guy who did a great realistic short with DAZ and Poser, something with martial arts and roses and something: he got at the moment a job in Hollywood. Extraordinary talent.)

Thanks for your comments. I'm very conscious about the feet sliding and the dynamic cloth crumbling at some points. I wasn't aware of Rachel missing her slip or her right calf going through the right thigh, though. My ambient light setting was 5% at all times.

But you have to understand that animation is not what I'm doing. Although most people use the terms interchangeably, animation and motion capture are two completely different things. Animation is what Pixar or Disney does : it has to obey certains rules timing, squash and stretch, anticipation and overlapping motion. Animation is difficult; it is an ART. It is not meant to be realistic.

By contrast, motion capture is not an art: it is a TECHNIQUE. It is what James Cameron does in "Avatar" and Spielberg does in "Tintin". If you have the right equipment (the Avatar system had 120 cameras plus state-of-the-art facial motion cameras), it is not that difficult to reproduce human movements accurately. By contrast to animation, motion capture HAS TO be realistic. It is only a technique.

I am not trying to do animation like Pixar; I'm trying to do motion capture like in Avatar. I bought the Ipisoft app and my 2 kinect cameras about halfway through the making of "Rachel". I did what I could at the time with this prosumer motion capture system.

I just thought people would pay more attention to the story.

.

argus1000

3DAGE said:

Nice work Argus :)
Ditto on all of Franks suggestions,.
.It's a tough challenge to do realistic human motion.
try this NLA on V4 for your convulsive Fit,.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7907045/ConvulsionFit.cbr

Thanks for the clip, 3dage. It is a very good clip. Maybe it is a matter of taste, but I got one my convulsion clips from Mixamo and I think they are just as good as yours.

argus1000

chris poole said:

Sorry argus1000,
I just spent the last 35 mins + typing a review of your animation and tried to put a smiley face on the page and it replaced my post with a screen of smiley faces,

Thanks for acknowleging my animated short, Chris. I wish I could have read your review.

Frank__

argus1000 said:

Thanks for your comments. I'm very conscious about the feet sliding and the dynamic cloth crumbling at some points.

Crumbling isn't the problem. On the "walk through forest"-part the lower part of the jeans are jiggling like you had a wind force changing from left to right every two frames. It's a problem with the dynamic cloth simulation, so I suggested to make the clothing a bit stiffier.

argus1000 said:

My ambient light setting was 5% at all times.
Are you on a Mac? There's some difference on Gamma. My play-notebook usually isn't too bright, but I could test it on my working-machine. Sorry, PC only.

argus1000 said:

But you have to understand that animation is not what I'm doing. Although most people use the terms interchangeably, animation and motion capture are two completely different things. Animation is what Pixar or Disney does : it has to obey certains rules timing, squash and stretch, anticipation and overlapping motion. Animation is difficult; it is an ART. It is not meant to be realistic.

I don't want to discuss this extensivly, but for me MoCap is a tech support for an animator. I don't see an animation vs. mocap distinction. MoCap helps animators a lot to get the animation done. It's (sometimes) a short-cut for doing everything by hand.
Both have nothing to do with the style of animation.

argus1000 said:

By contrast, motion capture is not an art: it is a TECHNIQUE. It is what James Cameron does in "Avatar" and Spielberg does in "Tintin".
.

"Tintin" aka "Tim and Struppi" are comic figures. I don't have seen the whole film, but what I've seen is nothing near "realism". The same goes with "Avatar": it works only, because the "I-just-forget-the-name-those-aliens-are-named" are Aliens! It's the same as Andy Gerkis giving the MoCap for Gollum or King Kong.
Better examples would be "Polar Express", something I didn't want to see, because it got into the unpleasent "uncanny valley" or from the times I was interested in realistic animation: the first Final Fantasy and Animatrix.

I bought the Ipisoft app and my 2 kinect cameras about halfway through the making of "Rachel". I did what I could at the time with this prosumer motion capture system.

And in ten years from now you can do the same as Cameron. If your goal is to show the capability of some low cost equipment: you'd win. And I hope this will encourage other people to advance.

I just thought people would pay more attention to the story.

And there you got me :) I watched your vid twice, two times without sound ,,,

.(TM)

3DAGE

Hi Argus :)

I watched it with the sound, liked the story, although it's a little dark, and somehow it made me think of that Vincent price film where he's afraid of being buried alive. and a recent film with Liam Neeson and Christina Rici, where she wakes up on "the Slab", after a car accident, convinced she's not dead yet...

Mixamo On-line animation is a useful concept,.. if you want to make animations,.. but don't want to learn to animate. (no offence intended to anyone) It's not easy,. and it's why you normally see a huge team of animators, riggers. modellers etc .. on any film credits now.

The motion capture capabilities of Kinect have, and will continue to push the boundaries of what's possible (at home) and that's a good thing.

Software also improves constantly to try to make animation easier, even things like Animate and Puppeteer are really handy whether you make your own poses and animations or use the prebuilt "content".
but "We" need to demand more from the software, we still don't have "walk on terrain" "auto balance" or any physics involvement in figure animation,

For anyone that's not seen the adventure's of Tintin.. Go see it. ...still images don't do it justice.

Just my two pence