DSP logo: Intro Animation

[entity]

Here are links to the full res and reduced res versions of the logo intro animation...

 

The Text and Fonts selected for the intro are temporary and we are deciding what the final font will be, but we are excited with the outcome of the winged skull. Hubukai (John Hubickey) rendered this monster out at full res (3 full days of rendering) and created the video files and is hosting the files! Without him there would be no Dark Skull Productions!

 

(I suggest *right click>"save as"*)

FULL RES (HD720) DSPintro (18.8MB) Quicktime (H264codec)

 

FULL RES (HD720) DSPintro (6.71MB) Windows Media(WMV)

 

Comments are welcome, but I doubt we are going to change much. Lots more to get done on other things. To see the old post for this project::

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?a...&pid=208058

 

More updated images of characters:

Etharion Assassin

Rom Pitt

 

Thanks!

[totlover]

i like this a lot... the only problem i have with it is the end. i think there is a little to much fidgeting of the wings at the end. it takes him like 3 seconds to get into that position.

 

EDIT: just read about your not going to change much... oh well.. ill leave this up

[elliotclem1]

Maybe you could add a Force in front of the wings so it looks like the bird is flying though the sky.

[Rodney]

Thats pretty eye catching Rich.

Its hard work to make Skulls fly I'll bet.

 

The primary change I would suggest (and I read that you probably won't change anything) would be to extend the wings out to fully formed 'Y' shape at some point (about 2/3 of the way through by my guesstimation).

This would give the sense that the wings are helping the skull decend to its final position.

As such you wouldn't need to worry as much about it flying.

 

The final resting position makes me think 'spider' a bit more than winged skull.

This might not be a bad thing of course but you might consider that interpretation for when you use the image in stills.

To counter that effect you could add a little light or coloring to the wings.

 

Regardless... your logo definitely says "Dark Skull Productions" to me!

 

More please!

[KNBits]

Very nice mood! Good work!

 

The shimmering are more distracting to me than wings movement, especially those occuring in the skull texture. What render settings have you use? Any MP/soften on this?

[entity]

i like this a lot... the only problem i have with it is the end. i think there is a little to much fidgeting of the wings at the end. it takes him like 3 seconds to get into that position.

...

 

The fidgeting shows the skull's condition... it obviously has been through "HELL". We tried it with the wings slowing and stopping, but it dies visually... the intent is that it still looks like it's living at the end, so I must keep them babies movin.

 

Maybe you could add a Force in front of the wings so it looks like the bird is flying though the sky.

 

Hair with dynamics? Good idea! Only problem is that I don't want it to fly... I want it to be "other worldly" so I made it NOT birdlike. Trying to suggest wings are living by moving them, but it's not a bird- it's a skull.

 

Thats pretty eye catching Rich.

Its hard work to make Skulls fly I'll bet.

 

The primary change I would suggest (and I read that you probably won't change anything) would be to extend the wings out to fully formed 'Y' shape at some point (about 2/3 of the way through by my guesstimation).

This would give the sense that the wings are helping the skull decend to its final position.

As such you wouldn't need to worry as much about it flying.

 

The final resting position makes me think 'spider' a bit more than winged skull.

This might not be a bad thing of course but you might consider that interpretation for when you use the image in stills.

To counter that effect you could add a little light or coloring to the wings.

 

Regardless... your logo definitely says "Dark Skull Productions" to me!

 

More please!

 

Rodney, you got it! It's moving like a spider in some ways also. It adds to the creepyness. I want it to be unexpected movements... it keeps it alive, but contrasts what it looks like it should be doing.

 

Very nice mood! Good work!

 

The shimmering are more distracting to me than wings movement, especially those occuring in the skull texture. What render settings have you use? Any MP/soften on this?

 

The shimmering is slightly distracting to me... I have been looking at this thing so long I may be overlooking that, maybe I could do something different there with the texture of the skull, but softening might take away from the detail in the wings and I don't want to do that.

Unfortunately, we have to decide if we want to spend more time on this or let it be... as we have so much more to do. Your comments have been very constructive and everything is being considered.

Thanks!

[totlover]

i like this a lot... the only problem i have with it is the end. i think there is a little to much fidgeting of the wings at the end. it takes him like 3 seconds to get into that position.

...

 

The fidgeting shows the skull's condition... it obviously has been through "HELL". We tried it with the wings slowing and stopping, but it dies visually... the intent is that it still looks like it's living at the end, so I must keep them babies movin.

 

 

ok... i see what your sayin...

[Hubukai]

Hi everybody,

 

Here are the links to the final versions of our dark skull production logo animation:

 

choose which one you would like to download. Recommend right-click save as:

 

Dark Skull Production logo animation 1280 x 720 -- QuickTime -H.264

 

Dark Skull Production logo animation 640 x 360 -- QuickTime -H.264

 

Dark Skull Production logo animation 1280 x 720 -- DivX

 

Dark Skull Production logo animation 640 x 368 -- DivX

 

Originally at the end of the logo animation we had the wings move to a standard position and then just stop and it looks somewhat unnatural actually. Rich and I talked about it and he did a few more changes to add the twitching to the wings so that the entire logo animation has some kind of wing movement. The one thing I like about the wing movement we currently have is it goes with the look and feel that we want to portray. Right now during the entire logo movie the wings flap in and move similar to the way a black crow that just got shot by a shotgun would kind of flat and shake as it was dying on the side of the road. Now I know that sounds a little bit morbid, but the overall mentality at dark skull productions has a dark movie feel to it.

 

 

The feeling we're trying to get across would be, creepy, dark, spooky, scary, cool and so forth.

 

Another reason were going to leave the rendering the way it is is just because of render time. Rendering anything at 1280 x 720 could be a complicated task for your average computer. Just as a note this entire animation was 450 frames and each frame took approximately 30 minutes to render. That comes out to a total of 225 hours of render time just to produce this animation. The thing that slowed it down the most was the volumetric lighting. We did not want to give up the volumetric lighting so we let it render. We had several Intel dual core machines running two copies of animation master to try and get the frames finished as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the multicore, multithreaded version of animation master ( revision 14 ) isn't perfected yet so we couldn't run it through the new version. It just made more sense to run two copies of animation master on each dual core computer and let it run its course. Two different computers running two different animation master's gives us for frames every half an hour. This is into bed to let run while we are are either sleeping or at our day jobs. It's

 

One of the main goals at dark skull productions is to produce a high-quality film using animation master rendered at 1280 x 720. We considered running the animations at the highest high definition resolution but we were looking at more than an hour per frame and until the multicore version of animation master is ready for prime time and Intel makes even higher numbered multicore processors are going to stick to the 1280 x 720 resolution.

[Rodney]

John,

Thanks for the insight into your rendering process.

 

One thing animators should realize early on is that 'realism' can be quite costly in terms of design, animation and rendering time.

Its certainly a lot harder to create than your average toon film.

I applaud your efforts to tackle it.