Flying robot animation

[ayman]

Hello people,
I am growing dead with my thesis project but here is again some material of it.

This animation clip shows swarm of flying attack probes flying towards and by the camera. The camera is animated for "hand-held" or view finder look.
All animation, modeling etc is doen in max. The sky, mountain, each robot, each robots smoke trail are rendered as separate elements.
(the robot is actually too high res for this kind of shots and with motion blur it would kill mys system to render all of them at the same time + all adjustments are nicer this way)
The layers are composited together in After Effects. The "HUD" or what ever was done in photoshop with a couple of layers and then animated in AE.
Each robot has unique animation.

At this moment there is smoke only in on robot.

Please comment on the rendering, animation and general feeling. I am considerin of adding still several more robots.

cheers,
heikki

http://www.projectkerosene.com/gallery/vehicle/probegroup.avihttp://www.projectkerosene.com/gallery/veh.../probegroup.avi
(<900K divX avi)

[eri]

first off, the only problem i see with the animation is the Title you gave to the post... First I saw it and went "ugh.. another robot, won't these guys ever learn???" then i saw that Kerosene was the poster and went and got some popcorn to eat while watching the movie. As always, your work is clean, and the only things to critique are personal preferences. I think it would be nice to see the ground effected by the air flow from the engines on the robots.... say a few small rocks and some dust being kicked up as they come over the ridge, something to give some interaction between the environment and the robots.

[jsmorgun]

wow, that is really great work...besides the previous mentioning of the robots effecting the ground...I cant see anything else.

[movieist]

Now this is getting nitpicky but I think you could still spice up that HUD. I can't decide exactly what you should add but it seems like it should be a little more complex. If your personal preference is to keep the HUD the way it is, no problem because it still looks good . Everybody will have their own preference about something like that and I just happen to like detailed HUDs.

Overall, I definitely liked your clip and could tell it had been polished and not just thrown together. Your camera movement is believable/smooth and the modeling/texture work is great. Robot animation seems spot-on as well as the render quality/lighting. Oh yeah, that terrain looks nice! Are those polys?

[ayman]

sithos - but it IS a flying robot animation.
The dust point is good but I think I will pass it for schedule reasons. (reality sucks doesn't it) I will probably render the backgorund layer again though (with some forground rocks or similar elements).

Crazy bri-
The HUD isn't quite to my taste either. I am quite happy with the target area but the "sensor outputs" on the right are not up the rest. I am fan off lots of running numbers too but there are two reasons why I won't fill the screen with them:
- This is view from the "good" and their technology is more streamlined and less robust, functional or militaristic
- I don't want to use real letters or numbers which means that it takes bigger effort to make up small input details.

thanks for all comments,
heikki

some sketches and wip of another clip:
http://www.projectkerosene.com/probeprocess.htmlhttp://www.projectkerosene.com/probeprocess.html

[movieist]

Hey I checked out your sketches/illustrations and two more movies of the robots in action. Excellent work! Love the attention to detail. I can't wait to see the final story!

[xgc]

yeah, thats pretty slick right there man.... i like the design for the ships, and i cant wait to see em shooting, and exploding...etc....

if you ever do make a scene with those robots under attack, you should make one get shot, and just start smoking, and heading straight for the camera, and then, explode right before it gets to the camera...

just an idea

though, when they launch from the carrier, the dark smoke is too obvious, and apprent, and it is too much... it should be less visible when its dark like that i think...

[exodusmaximus]

The only thing wrong (jus a bit ) is a lack of exost from other robots.
Other then that - great work!!!

[xgc]

well, he said, that currently, there is only exhast coming from 1 robot.