My Next game parody animation

[detbear]

Hey everyone.

 

I completed my next animated short. It's a game parody of the "World of Tanks" video game.

It's always a good feeling to complete a project.

 

 

xhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnLGcQ38xO0

 

Cheers,

 

William

[itsjustme]

Great stuff, William!

[Fuchur]

That really was great .

Much character in that character's movement .

Well done!

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[Shelton]

I loved. Just now had a chance to watch it. Great stuff!!

[Rodney]

Great stuff!

 

Makes me want to drive around in a tiny tank.

(But not get shot/crushed by a bigger tank)

[detbear]

Hey Guys.

 

Thanks a bunch.

 

Here's a screen shot of the WIP:

 

[detbear]

In getting this short done, I had to throw together a Tiger Tank.

 

Here is my basic Tiger Tank refitted to A:M. It's EXTREMELY Simple and not

detailed at all. I had to get something in there that did the job for the video.

 

Maybe someone here can improve this Tiger for the community to use. (More detail/ better tracks/ better rig/ etc) Anyway....here is

the model I constructed in all it's simplicity.

 

TIGER TANK AM Version.mdl

 

Cheers,

 

William

[John Bigboote]

FUN! Great work, William!

 

Question; Do you use any sort of AO in your renders?

[detbear]

Hey Matt,

 

Thanks a lot!!!!

 

Yes... I use AO in all my projects. Unless the style requires that there be no AO. But my

stuff always needs it for the more "realistic shadows."

 

BUT as you know, A:M's ambient occlusion renders wayyyyyy slow. In A:M I use the SBAO option. Actually, I

use to use the "Jenpy" plugin, but since A:M added the SBAO option.....I use it instead.

 

ALSO.......I always render things separately in layers. The props, background, characters, etc......are rendered separately.

AND I normally do a flat shaded render pass that captures only the ground shadows and AO. In Post, I overlay this in AE using

the "MULTIPLY" mode. With this you can control your shows some in AE. color/ darkness/ transparency/ etc.

[ovni1]

It's ready for Prime Time! nicely done.

[largento]

Awesome! Laughed out loud when the cannonball bounced off the enemy tank. Great job!

[Rodney]

I just did a more thorough... even frame by frame... review of this one and you've got some great detail throughout that very subtly works to enhance the whole show. Nice.

From the little details in the background, to textures in just the right places, subtle blurring and on and on and on.

I feel I need to mention the tank treads and their individual colors too. That may be obvious to most people but it really sells the fact that those treads are moving as well at the camera angle itself (and cropping) that allows for those treads to continue to move (and be seen moving) as the story progresses. How many of these subtle master strokes were intentional and how many were happy accidents??? That's what I'd love to know! For instance, the sliver of tank tread down at the very bottom of the screen getting smaller and smaller and (basically) disappearing just in time for our attention to fully move to the big tank.

 

I love the 'hand off' that you accomplish from story element to story element. It's that premise of having things continuously perform an action until something causes a change in action/motivation that you've really nailed with this one.

 

Part of what helped me enjoy the detail of reviewing at a closer level was trying to explore what I thought might be room for improvement in color correction (I'm trying to learn more about color correction these days!). The two areas that seemed to suggest themselves were to apply a color LUT that pushed the contrast a little more (in my test I used a film_1963 LUT) as well as an application of Vignette that darkened the outer edges of the shot while keeping the focal center of the frame lighter. This color correction seemed to automatically enhance the focus as new objects were introduced as well as generally enhancing the characters skin color against similar colors elsewhere in the scene. Examples of the bigger enhancements included when the big tank is first revealed, the colors popped a little more. Another example: the red buttons that Larry pulls up into view and then pushes (they seemed to read just a little brighter/better). Of course a lot of color correction is just 'eye of the beholder' stuff and the primary shift appears to have been a slight move more from yellow to red and the Larry element itself probably suggests the yellow hue you have now works just as well. At any rate, I'm glad I did the test because it makes me appreciate all the detail you put into the scene even more!

 

Keep up the great work William!

[detbear]

Hey....

YES Rodney, Most of the seemingly crazy things had to be thought out.

The multi colored tracks were added because the first render(with them all the same color) gave the appearance that
the tracks were moving in reverse. So I went in and individually colored each track. but spaced the dark ones where they
are far enough apart to show which direction they are traveling.

The blurring of things was a really difficult Composite. I layered 3 separate background, prop, and backplate layers in AE....
Then I actually masked and key animated them so that each had a separate level of "Lens" blurr. This was very difficult and

didn't turn out quite like I wanted. But it did create a fake DOF that I could control like I wanted.

 

COLOR CORRECTION......For some reason, the encoding came out wayyyyyyy too green. I still need to investigate that.

The red buttons are more of an oversight than anything.

 

THE BACK PLATE....The back plates(trees, sky) were created/ rendered in Lumion and then stamped as images onto Flat models in the

back. SO the lighting had to be matched between these two worlds.

 

THE tank track rig was a real challenge. It took much more time than I thought it would. In the end, I fit one complete rotation on a slider.

 

I became a little more itchy to finish. there were some real hurdles that I ran into.

I think the sheer amount of work and hats I have to wear takes it's toll on the process. Motivation is the only budget I have. In my

case, I'm the story guy, the storyboarder, the modeller, the layout artist, the character animator, the rigger, the texture artist. The environment

artist, the lighter, the compositer, the renderer, effects artist, the video editor, etc....etc...etc.

 

In this case I had to make the sound effects and music track from scratch. The arrangement and edit of the sound took more than I had anticipated.

Even though it's short, it was more than I thought it was going to be.

[detbear]

Oh yeah..... Also I should mention that I did experiment with darkening and lightening layers to keep the focus models from blending too

much into the background.

 

I definately used blur for this as well. Those subtle differences do help what the viewer sees clearly. Sometimes you just have to flip a coin

and call it done.

 

In the real world much of the dark areas and blurred places would never exist.

[detbear]

Rodney....

 

You have some great suggestions in there. I thought about adding a dark vignette early on, but got to the end and just missed the

opportunity. It would benefit from that.

 

Larry's skin color as you mentioned is odd. That green/ yellow encode result made it even more noticeable It was totally my fault somehow.

Like the crab on "Finding Nemo" said when he just couldn't help but keep doing what they warned him not to......"I am shame"...

 

I like that you mentioned the acting choices. There's a brief time just before the Tiger is revealed that was difficult to keep Larry occupied.

I came up with a few ideas for things for Larry to do. But in the end it didn't work out. So I decided to have another turn with his head. Seemed

a bit awkward but I decide to keep it the way it was. It's really hard to keep a character "alive" while doing nothing.

[Rodney]

Thanks for the great info and insight into your work WIlliam.

Much appreciated.

Motivation is the only budget I have

You appear to be blessed with a significant budget of motivation and talent my friend.

 

In this case I had to make the sound effects and music track from scratch.

And that makes it all the more impressive. I confess that I was caught up so much with the imagery that I didn't even think to consider the audio and for me that is very telling. The audo very obviously worked well because it fit in perfectly... to where I didn't even consider its contribution to the story... which is considerable. Now you've got me wanting to watch the video all over again! Sound is an area I am so lacking in and yet one that I know is so very important in animation. I've even been considering taking a few classes at the local college to exercise some of those artistic muscles for future endeavors. I'm mostly interested in the basic-basics, those that clue us in to better ways to approach the pacing/beat of audio*. I'm really interested in that but not sure if I have that in me. You however, have got it going on in your productions. Color me impressed. I will now go back and view your show with a focus on the audio's contribution.

 

*I wish I'd stuck with those piano lessons my Mom thought to put me in as a kid.

[John Bigboote]

Once in a while as versions pass by and computers and OS's get faster I like to retry AO to see if the render time has improved. First, I made a regular AO image by setting the Choreography to a white Global Ambiance at 80% and the AO to 100% (a lesser % may have rendered faster!) and the result took 1:40 but was quite nice AO. Then I went about recreating that using SSAO and took a while to get the settings right (the default settings give very little AO effect.) The default SSAO took :03 seconds but once I cranked-up to get a 'pushed' AO effect final render time was :20 seconds.

[detbear]

I haven't made a decision whether I'm going to move forward yet with this one. There are several others in the works and/or

being thought out. Not sure if this will warrant the time ahead of the others. I have about 4 things under development.

There are drawbacks to doing a Star Wars themed spoof.

 

Eventually I plan to complete this. But I'm deciding whether to do it before the others.

 

(moved image for later post)

[detbear]

I would really like to get this one done though. I think it could be fun.

[ChuckGram]

Great stuff. I was going to build I Tiger model a few years back but got sidetracked. Yours came out very nice!

[Mitovo]

As someone who has spent some time playing World of Tanks, and been obliterated by the opposition, this vid hits home for me lol.

Nicely done!