Dirge: new anim, Zbrush/Maya/Photoshop/AFX

[João Alberto]

Absolutely fantastic!! Thanks for sharing!

[T Woods]

I hope hell looks and sounds like that.

Awesome work!

[AdamShaw.vfx]

great effort mate!, love the look of him.. u said u used maya? is he fully rigged or anything? i'd love to animate him, he looks fun.

[A.Alvarez]

SadamHu: Thanks!

EricShawn: Yeah, I agree but it was intentional. Being a permanent loop on a hanging screen, I wanted there to be stuff to look at everywhere, as opposed to a film shot where the audience only has a few seconds to read the image. But thanks for the thumbs up!

SixxPixels: Thanks!

tyrellcorp: The breathing was done with a blendshape. I duplicated the character, put a lattice on his torso, made a cluster out of the center lattice points, weighted the points, then scaled up the cluster. I then wrote an expression on the blendshape attribute so that he would keep breathing: (sin(time) + 1)/2; The sin of time goes from '-1' to '1'. Adding '1' makes it positive, so 0-2. Then dividing by 2 makes it go from 0-1.

Beneto: Thank you! It is cool to see a 2560x1600 anim on a big monitor... I'd never rendered or played back such a high-res anim before...

cherub_rock: thanks for your feedback. My hope is that everything I do I get a little better, but I still have much to learn!

Sleet: Thanks!

KillahPriest: Thanks... haha. Dunno if I will make a making of. Didn't record any of it as I really just wanted to make something for fun. Regarding depth of field, as I mentioned earlier, I intentionally wanted to allow the viewer to look around, so I kept the dof to a minimum.

VictorCS: Cool... thanks! I figured that I'd have the second minute be a little different to reward people who stuck around that long. Heh.

rightnut51: In my experience, the larger the print, the more far away someone will probably be when they look at it. For example, most billboards are 72dpi. I rendered at 6000x3750, resized in Photoshop to 8k and printed at 150dpi. Even up close the canvas print looks fine as canvas is not as tight as photo paper.

Darkrusader: Thanks! The sound has a Lustmord track in the bg (with his permission: http://www.lustmord.com) and then I added some sound fx on top... found a bunch of cool sound clips online. Yep, those are locusts! They were a lot of fun to make... using Maya's particle instancer.

SeanJM: Heh... well, we actually made a Dirge screensaver that you can download for free from Gnomon. http://www.thegnomonworkshop.com/fre.../dirge_ss.html

BuendiaCG: Alvaro! Thanks so much man... your stuff is killer. Can't wait to see the new thing you were telling me about!

Bas Mazur: Well, I guess the music and effects are meant to help... its why they're there. Heh. Remember, this is meant to be wall art, nothing narrative and with too much character movement it became distracting which is why he doesn't move much. And in the end, I'm not a very good animator. But thanks for the feedback!

Joao Alberto: Thank you!

T Woods: Heh. Thanks!

AdamShaw.vfx: Yeah, everything is put together and animated in Maya, rendered with Mental Ray. Yep, he's rigged... had no choice. Definitely one of my least favorite things to do but it doesn't take too long. I think I spent about a day rigging him as I didn't need to worry about a lot of things that that would have taken more time... such as if he raised his arms up high, or grabbed onto the scythe with his other hand... I tried to keep it simple.

Thanks everyone for the feedback... very very much appreciated! I'll try to post some wip images this weekend.

-Alex

[aesis412]

excellent, looks like something out of diablo or something like that, maybe like an end boss.

[jinjian]

cool,I like it very much!

[Stefano Dubay]

this is pretty cool alex! really love the breathing cycle on him and the atmosphere is quite outwordly , would it be possible o post some closeups on that environment?
awesome work!

*****

[locusta]

Great work Alex, as always.

Very impressive to see an anim in that size. I look forward to see a tiny in depth few of the production of this piece.

Again thanks for sharing

[drem026]

awesome work! I'm always checking out your blog for reference and inspiration when it comes to creature/humanoid designs. Would be awesome if you could post some WIP images from zbrush to the final mental ray render passes.......if possible ? ?

[kskovbo]

Alex.. as always fantastic.

[Sofia]

A beautiful piece...and I got to see it from beginning to end
/bow!

[Etcher]

Great stuff, love the eerie mood -> keep on experimenting !

[danko75]

!


My hope is that everything I do I get a little better, but I still have much to learn!

besides the work being supercool (and with all that stuff around, with modeling, sculpting, texturing, rigging animating and rendering i can easily believe it was a huge work!...5 stars for me), words like these, coming from a worldwide-known artist like you get all my respect and admiration and additional 10 stars for the great humilty

[testure]

I'll preface this by saying I normally enjoy your work, and this piece certainly has its merits. However (and this may be a pet peeve of mine) I find animation for animation's sake a tad pedestrian. I'm not sure what the point of an infinite loop animation is- especially with such an obvious intro transition. Is this for a website to be played in the background? I'm not sure I really get the point. If it was just an experiment to tool around with the new animation features in zbrush then I'll stop trying to figure out the point of it

As far as the character design itself goes, I want to like it, but it feels unfinished.. maybe the ropy nature of the sculpt? lack of material breakup or contrast? I can't put my finger on it, but it doesn't jump out at me as being super creative.. not that you have to be super creative all of the time, but anything that lands on the top row is subject to crits of this nature as I'm sure you can appreciate.

As far as the animation goes, a lot of the movements seem timed together and not really offset at all, indicating a lack of effort.. Although I saw these same type of animations with Pixolator's Z4 teaser video back when he posted it, so I'm not sure if it's a limitation of ZBrush's animation capabilities or not (I must confess that I have not tried them). The breathing feels a bit awkward, like a rubber doll being inflated and deflated. I would have liked to see something more natural looking- like the occasional irregular breathing, or a deep breath now and then.. maybe smelling the air, something like that. We don't really think about how breathing looks because we just do it automatically, but there is a lot of subtlety that cannot be overlooked or the illusion is broken.

I tend to agree with what has been said about the busy composition, but you have given valid reasons for doing it the way you did. Maybe some depth of field and environmental effects (such as rolling smoke or haze) that temporarily blots out the background and creates an interesting (albeit moving) composition? Not sure exactly how I would have done it different, but it seems like there would be some other options out there to explore- especially with a lot of moving noise in the foreground (such as the flies and whatnot).

We're all just artists trying to get better, so I hope you accept my comments in that spirit. Good luck, and keep up the hard work!

[andrey DRON]

weakly for gnomon