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/freebies/screensaver/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