OTOY Forums

Hi, I am a print designer, but getting into 3D. This is my first animation. The kitchen animation is work in progress, the bin installation is all complete with voice over. Linking couple of them bellow and would appreciate your feedback on it, as I am still fresh for the 3D environment.

http://vimeo.com/22795443

http://vimeo.com/22796278

Thanks

hey rehan,

what struck me first and foremost was that your camera movements stop abruptly - instead of ease in and out. especially since the rest of your camera movement is smooth and slow.

Hi, thanks for your comment...is it for the kitchen render or the installation? the kitchen render is still a work in progress...

both. although in the "installation animation" it's less apparent as you often cut within the movement.

i think what most people struggle with when it comes to easy ease ins and easy ease outs is that they alter the length of a shot OR it's overall speed. for instance, if you'd introduce and easy ease in and out in the very first shot of your kitchen animation, you'd have to speed up your camera movement quite a bit to get from point A to point B in the same amount of time. problem is, you're probably happy with the cameras speed so far. so your camera would have to travel a shorter distance, or your shot would need to be a lot longer.
that's why, in my personal opinion, camera movements need to include those easy ease ins and outs in the early stages of animation already.

hope that was of any use.

Thanks, helps a lot and really appreciate our comment. I totally agree with you, and this was the first time I did something in this kind of work, apart from the brand design, was a learning curve for me and knew quite a bit of ins and out of this entire process - where did I go wrong or what should have been done first. But your comments really helped a lot.

It looks (render wise) good, I'm a editor with a video production company who is also working a little more and more into the animating side of things.

I'd like to give you a few tips if you don't mind.

One, if your camera moves in the video are rendered with animating in your 3D application ( for example the direct pulls, pushes, and pans ), just render a single image of adequate resolution, and use your editing or compositing software to make these movements much much faster ( that may have been what you've already done here ). Many of the "animations" I've done with my 3D title treatments, etc... have been able to be done in the editing/compositing phase.

I also use After Effects time re-mapping tool at 100 percent playback with force motion blur to simulate pixel accurate motion blur on the parts that I do have to animate in side of my 3D application ( such as dynamic camera moves that change the viewing angle as they move ).

Regarding the abrupt movements, they can be very jarring to a viewer. Making your cuts during the movement process will resolve much of this, but if you do come to a stop in one of your scenes, smoothing out the camera motion to a gradual stop ( easing in / out ) will take care of a lot of the trouble.

The shift in focus with a shallow depth of field in one of the videos was very distracting. You would have been wise to render a matte/mask out of the camera angle so that you could have had a shot with everything perfectly sharp, and then you could have animated a shift in focus by just using a focus filter on the masked out sections and increasing the blur on one section while decreasing it on the other.

Almost always, the fastest way with the least amount of work that still generates the desired result means doing a portion of your work in the 3D side, and finishing in the editing side. if you are locked into the render that you have, you can always use an optical slow motion calculation to fake the frames of the easing in and out process, and just time-remap the footage that you've already rendered, rather than going through and doing it all over again.

Anyway, those are some tips to help improve on things, the overall look was good, there were a few times I wished it had been a bit more contrasty to make the bin system visually stand out a bit more from the surroundings, but that may not have been the direction you wanted to go.

If you need any help with stuff, feel free to pm me or something. We use Sony Vegas Pro for our editing, and After Effects for our compositing, and since I'm still just moving into 3D stuff a little bit here or there, we start with blender because the price was right, and now we're using that for most everything we need to do in 3D modeling.

Nice work and presentation and good use of octane.

Very nice work

If you have any final animation projects like these, and you would like us to place them in the gallery on our website,
please deliver us a .FLV compressed HD version (email us) and we will be happy to add them.
Feel free to add credits and company contact information to any, for commercial exposure.

Radiance