Smashcube

It’s a cube.  That smashes.

Not vastly dissimilar to Exploding With Light, it’s…  Well, it’s the same thing, innit.  But with a cube.  ‘Edited’ within Cinema 4D this time – the complete cube becoming invisible and the fracture cube becoming visible the frame after, then exploding.

Nowt more exciting than that.  Took a whole fucking day to render this, at 640×480.  But, you know, it does look rather swish.

Given the right bit of music, we reckon this could be used quite nicely, with the smashed bits being swept away, or the surface turning so they fall away, and…  Dunno, some other things smashing.  It’s simple, but it looks pretty swish, right?  Yeah, it does.

WALL OF BIEBER

What to say?

Main points of interest: Music made on NanoStudio. Parallax scrolling fun – 2D linear movement, no 3D fancypants. Subtle darkening of ‘further back’ Biebers. And we fancied a bit of compression artifact fun for this, especially around that last transition, but it didn’t come off in the cheap-o VLC export method, and couldn’t be arsed faffing to get it to work. Bit of grain effects, and we’re done.

Jeremy Cunt Medley

We’ll pay for this in tiredness, but in an awful bit of pagehit bait, we knocked this up in a couple hours.  The tune bits were already done in NanoStudio, but we moved the tracks around there, then outputted a mixdown, then cut that up in FCP (hence the clicks when the imperfect loops join.)

And chucked some white mattes and some text over the top and, really, it’s not complicated, is it.

Misspellng The Movie

So, here’s a procrastination from doing two proper music videos!

The music is made by us on the wonderful iOS music thing NanoStudio.  Hurrah hurree.  (And it’s in 7/4, unusual time signature fans.)

The vid is just all the misspellng animated GIFs imported into Final Cut, and chucked over the music, along with some nonsense text cards in the Collins Deconstruction stylee.

But then!  Exported as an MPEG4, transcoded in VLC to another MPEG4 (which I found out – accidentally, when trying to get some episodes of Smallville in an iPod friendly format, hrn – has the effect of futzing the compression without having to faff around with manually mucking about with I and P frames as we did for the Vomiting vid,) then transcoded that again to an MPEG1 (because Quicktime and FCP wouldn’t recognise the futzed MPEG4-o-version.)

Created a new Sequence, chucked the existing sequence as a nested sequence on one line, removed the attached audio for the original again, and popped the futzed version on the track above.  Then!  Just went through and cut out bits of the futzed one.

And by doing that, we get a nifty we effecting, cutting in and out of a clean version and a compression messy version, edited to the beats and that, and making quite a fun bit of nonsense.

Now, those other videos…

Walking Test 2 Hi

Walking Test 2, Hi!  Oho.  ‘Hi’ meaning it’s a high quality version with anti-aliasing turned to Best on both the lines and the general shading, because we’d done a quick rough one earlier (not uploaded) to check it out.  The difference in render times was massive, but hey ho.

So, this is new.  Why the long gap?  Well, we’ve had to do things with our days other than work on this.  And we’d rigged the sandpiper, done a walking test (the first one, title fans, also not uploaded) that was a bit shit because we’d rigged it a bit wrong (we think) and weren’t massively looking forward to re-rigging it (and still didn’t know exactly how to do it write.)

Anyway, so we re-rigged it.  All the joints the same, but removed the IK and skin and goals and that (so maybe not technically re-rigging?  Who cares.)  Made sure to ‘align’ the joints this time – think that was what was causing the foot to flip up oddly when moving the goals in the first test – and then re-IK’d and bound it (and redid the weighting, but copying the body stuff from the old one, which worked fine as we could get it, and left the legs as they were autosetup.)  Fairly painless – maybe the wait was worth it, although difficult to get back into something like this, it did mean a dull task seemed kind of refreshingly…  fine.

Still not sure it’s perfect.  In fact, sure it isn’t.  As you can see in the vid, the feet do still turn a bit, and slip under the plane that’s acting as the ground.  But we think it’s better than the first effort, and we did put together this animation very quickly so it could be possibly finessed to look better.  And!  The amazing get-out we very nicely have here is that it’s a wading bird, so its feet can slip below the plane and it can look almost intentional (at least fitting and excusable) so that’s coo’.

Before doing the anim, we also completely retextured the model, this time as a whole including the legs, so the texture file has much more space in it.  Tried editing the texture file directly in Photoshop – didn’t work well, just made the different segments really stand out instead of looking like a single skin.  So went back to editing it all in BodyPaint 3D, which is actually fine and quite highly functional, really, clone brush and all.  (Far far far from expert here, but we did a decent enough job, and safe knowing Sketch & Toon’s quantising of the textures will cover us a bit too.)  We got a new source image from the internets, higher resolution, and made the texture higher resolution too, mainly so in close-ups the eye looks okay and not like a really scaled up and blurred low-res texture.  This means in general there’s more detail (obv) which we’re not sure is as nice as the early one, but it looks okay (we were thinking of trying blurring out most of the texture, save the eye, and seeing how the quantising deals with that, but a day later, we may just leave it ’cause it looks decent.)

Also, instead of 100% luminence, on this’n it’s 50%, so we get some shadow whilst not looking too dark.  This is still a bodge to stop it looking too dark, and does mean this looks a bit duller than the old one, but it’s okay.  Could try messing with levels in Photoshop to see what can be done, but again, it’s fine enough so maybe we won’t bother…

Aaand what else?  Oh, in making the anim, the first try did this weird thing of the ground being grey (forgot to apply a white texture to the plane, but it wasn’t just that) and then popping into white suddenly as the camera moved up.  Not sure if it’s a camera angle issue or what.  But in this one, making the plane much much bigger seems to have solved it (who knows.  But don’t think we noodled anything else to fix it.)  There’s a light source nicked from the explosions vid (we think) and the an environment fog/mist thing nicked from some other earlier test.  Reckon it looks pretty good, so didn’t bother noodling (in a way, the fog isn’t great, and most of the bird being in shade isn’t great, but when we do more anim with it moving around more and different camera angles, should be pretty cool, we reckon.)

A lot of saying things are ‘fine’ here, eh?  And compromise, and ‘it’ll do’ sentiment.  But!  We’re really proud of this and think it looks pretty ace and exciting for what we can do.  So hurrah!