Animation - Australia penthouse

[Crayox13]

This was an older project which I wanted to animate since it's been ages since I've done my last animation. C&C greatly appreciated and noted for my next one.
Some heavy sequences were rendered with Render rocket (really great guys) and simpler flybys on my system. I cheated on some areas and slowed them down with AE. Do you think that jerky motion on some sequences is annoying or cinema like?

Thanks guys

[Morne]

Awesome!
Nice renders. Please could you share your render settings for this?

As for your other question: The forward, then sudden backward movement of the camera is a bit distracting. The squiggly wavy transition between scenes is way too quick, I think that the transition between shots should be at least 2 or 3 times slower, and maybe just a crossfade instead. OR take out the transition.

But as I said, the rendering itself is brilliant and I would love to see your settings

[glorybound]

nice animation! How were your render times?

[stevesideas]

Looking good. Did you use BF or pre cached Irr maps ?

[Neilg]

I'm not a fan of the camera movement....
They're all trying to show too much, and the motion is awkward. You have a couple of close up detail shots in there, but you still try and show too much within the same movement. Wide shots should be slower and focus on the form/composition that you get from the architecture, and details should be more focused and graceful to show how expensive that particular detail is. It's a boring way to compose an animation, but if you're trying to get clients it's a very effective formula to use before you get comfortable enough to experiment.

You really need a background in there too, it's very disconnected from reality at the moment and un-grounded. Find a photograph of a beach or a shot of a city center taken from a rooftop and put that on a curved plane. You can have it pretty much blown out and barely visible, but you need something.

Not your fault, but the design is gross too. It's an attempt at a big elegant white museum like space but with none of the subtlety required to make it work. It looks like it's unfinished.

e: rendering quality is great though - ha. I hope you don't see this as being too negative

[Crayox13]

Thanks for all the great and informative comments...I do not find them negative!

The speed and transition, yeah, you know how it is, if I make a transition slower it takes too much of my precious (and expensive ha ha) frames to transit, without it I don't think it would work. I guess I can use just a normal transition next time.
Settings are pretty basic. IR + LC, only I used Solid Rocks to make settings for me...I wanted its optimization. Still with SR, I usually have to increase hsph subdivs.

I wanted to show effects - time laps and camera depth of field basically. Yes, those other flybys were messy

After I calculated IR/LC render times were about 10-13min per frame. Of course time laps and bokeh were like 40-50 mins on Render Rocket.

I was too eager with this one and I just couldn't find a nice photo for the background (it was supposed to be a view from a high-rise) so I just left it like this, also background couldn't work with time laps either.

What about slowing things down in AE? Do you guys use it? I mean we all know how expensive each frame is...so...

[Neilg]

All the time for helicopter shots. For fully cg things we have done in a pinch.
We use kronos from the foundry though - it's the only one which doesn't produce serious artifacts.
edit: if I was doing this on my own/freelance, it's very likely that i'd use kronos on everything I did.

I'd say it's not really worth forcing a huge time lapse or DOF in until you actually have a reason to do them - for the most part you can get away with doing DOF in post. For a time lapse, if you don't have filmed background footage, don't show the background. Do the transistion from day->night within detail shots, shorter, more controlled sequences. Again, you're trying to show too much - more than you actually have available to show
If a client wants a time lapse background/clouds they can pay for it as an extra expense and you can figure out where to film it from together.

A client/employer wont be impressed by your ability to simply render a sequence - they'll be impressed at your ability to hide potential technical issues behind good direction.

[chrisjacks21]

What about slowing things down in AE? Do you guys use it? I mean we all know how expensive each frame is...so...

We have been experimenting with that over the last couple of days using Twixtor - very surprised by how well it works. I think it would struggle on anything complex/too quick, but slowing down a simple camera moves seems to work pretty well - we have been testing at 25% of original speed, and even 10 % in some cases, which would mean a significant reduction in quantity of frames to output...

[Crayox13]

Thanks, will try that too!

What music do you guys use? I need to find some free for use music, not copyrighted, I think there is some.

[jacksc02]

We have been experimenting with that over the last couple of days using Twixtor - very surprised by how well it works. I think it would struggle on anything complex/too quick, but slowing down a simple camera moves seems to work pretty well - we have been testing at 25% of original speed, and even 10 % in some cases, which would mean a significant reduction in quantity of frames to output...

Start rendering at 12FPS Chris and use twixtor....... been there done that! and it is surprisingly good

[Neilg]

What music do you guys use? I need to find some free for use music, not copyrighted, I think there is some.

http://www.royaltyfreemusic.com/
http://freeplaymusic.com/
http://www.soundclick.com/default.cfm
etc

There are a lot of sites around that sell royalty free music. It's generally awful though. Takes a lot of work to sift through. You will hate all music after browsing these sites for long enough.

If you're doing a showreel or personal work to get a job in just use any appropriate song and give credit.