Tek wrote:
> 
> It's a trick. The rings of the planet are completely flat and textured with a
> very complicated pigment I dreamt up. It's based on pov's crackle function, with
> a slight noise pattern layered over it. That is used to cut out the silhouette
> of the rocks (so there's see thru bits and solid bits). Then the "lighting" on
> the rocks is faked by using the same pattern in a function, but computing very
> simple lighting as if it was a bump map. I would use a real bump map but that
> renders much slower than my trick. All of this means the rings render in just a
> few seconds per frame.
> 
> The same pattern is used as the backdrop to the sequence inside the asteroid
> field, meaning that I only needed about 20 3D asteroids, and the rest are flat
> ones on the sky sphere. If you look closely you'll see none of them are moving
> :)

Oh, so it's really just "smoke and mirrors"? I didn't notice at 
all! The impression of "my goodness, what did he do to his poor 
computer" was overwhelming :)

>>(2nd place! Woohoo too... :-)
> 
> 
> Congratulations! Your entry was my favourite :)

Mine, too... :) ooops, that came out totally wrong - the other 
way round, of course: *your* entry was *my* favourite :)

>>My opinion is that it's especially the "negative" comments that
>>help with improvement.
> 
> I agree, except that I always feel kinda down if all I get are negative
> comments! I feel a bit mean, always finding some fault in other people's scenes,
> so I try to give some positive and some negative.

Of course, getting a comment listing that basically says "your 
artwork sucks" (in a nice way, of course) can wreak havoc on an 
artist's self-esteem... that's why i'm always very nervous when i 
start reading the comments...

> BTW, sorry I couldn't think of anything much to say on your one!

No problem. Most of my comments were rather short, too.

 > I was feeling a
> little uninspired. To rectify, I'll comment a bit more here, but I'll avoid
> saying stuff others have said:
> 
> The camera movement seems a little excessive, it's like the Matrix at times but
> that seems out of place when it's not used in an action scene. A trick I think
> works well is to think about how you could move the camera if you were actually
> there shooting a movie with real cameras, because people are used to seeing
> footage filmed in that way.

That's some sort of chronical disease i've acquired... sort of 
"restless lens syndrome" ;-) most of the time, i'll render lots 
of versions of a scene, with different camera angles. Did the 
same this time, but a) the ones i wanted turned out too short, 
and the ones i had turned out too long for 3:45 runtime, so i 
compressed the running speed - result: "camera on speed", sort 
of. Lessons learned: Create a final storyboard. Start early. 
Stick to the storyboard... and most important: Move camera, *or* 
move object...

> The editing is generally good but gets a bit quick in the desert sequence. I
> would expect to get lots of much longer shots emphasizing the heat and weariness
> of those scenes, but instead they're shown almost as a montage. A classic shot
> pointing towards the sun would be nice (i.e. with just the sun in the centre of
> the frame), it's a bit cliched but it works.

I only had one of those sun flare shots... and the scenes in the 
desert are actually the earliest. Meaning: they suck. No nice way 
to put it. It's an awful walk cycle, it's *only* a walk cycle, 
the first version of the ground rendered slow as snails, the IK 
setup was in its infancy (not that it's that much improved now, 
either), it's actually just slapped together to have a starting 
point. Result: Not enough usable frames. And no idea how to 
create what i really had in mind: heat blur, as seen in BBC 
wildlife documentaries... *sigh*
And there's this odd behaviour of my raytracer, where one frame 
renders in 3-4 minutes, and the next one - even though there's 
only minimal change of the bones placement! - takes more than ten 
times longer... at 240x176!

> And one other thought: why are your characters a big cat-woman and some girl
> with wings? Maybe I missed an earlier episode where this was explained, but they
> look kinda like someone's just taken a model of a nude and decided to mess
> around and see what happens. I'm pretty sure that isn't the case 'cause the
> cat's face is really detailed, but I'm curious about that choice of character.

Well, that's a long story... okay, maybe not *that* long. I 
started airbrushing some 12 years ago (haven't touched it for 
seven years now, but i'll try to set up some small room in my new 
flat as a working place in the future). It's not that hard to 
draw or design technical stuff like cars, metal surfaces etc., 
but i'm not that good when it comes to the human body or the 
human face. On the other hand, i had the ambition to *not* copy 
things but to actually construct my drawings (and now 3D) from 
scratch. You know, head height is 1/8 of body height, length of 
hand equals distance from chin to (average) start of hair, and 
all this stuff. Takes more time, but i don't have to earn a 
living by this (most illustrators copy all of the time... take a 
look at any of the "making of" photos of the working places of, 
say, Hajime Sorayama, or Boris Vallejo... either photos, or 
*ahem* "magazines" lying all around... :)
Anyway, i was able to construct halfway believable bodies, but 
not faces... that's where the cat design first appeared, inspired 
from the title of the german "nature" magazine i saw a few years 
earlier (human body with the head of a house cat superimposed, 
professionally hand-drawn - ah, the days before digital 
retouching...). Some article about how we link human character 
attributes to animal images or such. Cats are especially popular 
with this. I've done quite a few of motorcycles with lions or 
panthers on them... the best i've managed so far is:
http://www.asamnet.de/~altendom/bilder23/airmax/d02603.jpg
http://www.asamnet.de/~altendom/bilder23/airmax/d02629.jpg

Anyway: The line of reasoning was like: Want complete character 
design > Can't draw human head > Try something other. Simple 
avoidance tactics... :-) but somehow, the design sticked over the 
years, even though it appeared in similar form only once on 
paper, on one hood and on one scooter side. One of my first 3-D 
animations (for a LAN party demo reel) featured a four-legged 
cat-bot with a laser cannon on its back, welding the party's 
logotype out of a rusty metal wall. The next LAN party saw a 
longer animation, building on the previous one, this time with 
claws breaking through a metal plate. Then i found the IRTC 
website, back when the topic was "Alien Invasion". That's when i 
decided to take the old pen-and-paper design to 3D and built the 
first version of the cat creature. I guess it's a try to do some 
strange alien-mythology-independence-dangerousness-crossover 
design ;-) That was three versions of Cinema and 120 revisions of 
the model ago... the way i fumble around with 3D software, it's 
not that easy to create lots of various different characters...

The "girl with wings": This was an add-on for the 
"pursuit-escape" IRTC contest. It's a rather crude model, which 
also shows in the RAM footprint. Cat: 3-4 MB. Girl: 1 MB. Again, 
based on some scribbles. Originally, i just wanted to do an 
airbrush painting titled "Fantasia", with a faery-like girl, but 
having a darker touch (that's why i chose skin-based wings, 
instead of the usual "butterfly" type ;-), but so far, it hasn't 
gone beyond the pen-and-paper phase... and the 3-D version isn't 
that great either. On paper, it just has to be "believable" 
pseudo 3D. On the screen, it *is* 3-D. And that's when you 
realize that a pair of wings is something terribly impractical 
and clumsy, can't be properly folded, creates self-colisions and 
lots of other consistency problems... :-)

Well, some questions hopefully answered...
Yours,
Markus

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