The Black Snapper

Update

Here is a quick update, just to let you know the state of progress.

'Snapper' is coming along well. I'm mainly at the stage of editing and creating the motion graphics for the descriptions that appear during the movie. When I've edited together a rough version, I'll go back and tweak some of the animation. At the end of the story, a certain object (I won't say what!) has to fall onto the floor and bounce off it, and since that's easier to create in Unreal Engine, I need to look at one or two tutorial videos regarding physics simulation. In any case, I think the whole movie will be finished within the next two weeks.

A word of warning though, Snapper was originally intended as a kind of 'proof of concept' for doing movies using UE4 (although—as always seems to happen—the form of presentation has grown a bit). For that reason, the 'Snapper' is the only character that fully appears and moves around. I hope the little blighter is enough to keep your interest!

I've also been thinking a lot about ideas for one-off artwork. The trouble is that, to do them justice, they need to involve a dialog, monologue or short sequence of images. They're best realized as a 'motion comic' style movie (like Pamphlets), or as 'kinetic short story' (like Teasehouse). In either case, from the lessons I learned on those previous projects, the workflow will be simpler. I think I've settled on doing one particular idea, and I'm really intent on it not dragging on or taking too long. It involves one character drawing (+ different expressions) and a 'motion comic' style monologue.

Visitors is still on ice. The next time I mention it will probably be when I release the whole thing (including the earlier frames) as a slideshow. That's because, at this stage, presenting the whole story together will help the impact of the final frames, so that's what I've decided to do.

Regards.

ADJUSTIA

Here’s a heads up regarding the home planet of the Black Snapper. If you don’t know what a 'deballing world' is, please refer to this post.

Update

First, as always, I’d like to thank everyone for their comments. I haven’t posted anything recently, but as some of you may know, I’m doing a bit of research into rendering alternatives for future CGI animations. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that people like to feel informed about what’s going on, so from now on, I’ll attempt to provide some updates with regard to progress, even if that doesn’t involve posting actual artwork.

In addition, (and as a change of pace from work on the CGI animations) I’m going to try to do some one-off pieces of artwork each consisting of a single ‘frame’ only. Whatever I start to do always seems to grow in scale (and effort required) as I develop it, so as a counterbalance to that, I’m going to do some stuff that strictly consists of one frame only, keeping to that as a kind of rule. These one-frame efforts could also function as a precursor to more ambitious projects.

With regard to the CGI side, I’m progressing OK on “Snapper” using Unreal Engine 4 as the renderer. I’d already briefly considered Source Filmmaker as a possible candidate for producing animations, but after receiving a comment about it, I took a more in-depth look. It’s certainly got some good points (such as automatic lip-synch and creation of the animation within the application itself), but the process for preparing custom models is extremely involved, and the rendering doesn’t seem to be as good as the physically based rendering available in Unreal. It looks like Blender will get a real time PBR based viewport renderer in around a year’s time, and if that’s close to being as good as the UE4 renderer, then that would be terrific! It would mean being able to do everything (apart from editing) in one application, with instant feedback on the final render. In the meantime, I intend to produce some stuff using Blender + Unreal.

“Visitors” is on hold at the moment, but with a little more work, the next frame will be finished, so I’ll be posting that before too long (probably shortly after I upload “Snapper”).

Regards.

Episode 2.5

First, I’d like to thank everyone for their encouraging comments. They really are appreciated.

Here is Episode 2.5. It’s kind of a short extra, and not really part of the main narrative, but I liked the idea, and had done some work on it before my CG projects went into hibernation. Many of you will no doubt notice that the 'device' involved owes a big debt to a certain comedy movie of the 1970’s…

I’ve also been busy with something else. One of the big 'pains' involved in CG animation is the time it takes to render the final images. However, the real time rendering now available in some 3D games engines (especially Unreal 4), is already impressively realistic. Furthermore, these games engines make the creation of various environments, lighting and volumetric/particle effects (such as fire, smoke, fog, etc.) easier than in 'conventional' CG animation software. For that reason, as a kind of 'proof of concept', I’m creating another short animation using a combination of Blender and Unreal Engine. So, prepare to meet the cruel, disgusting, atrocious Snapper from the planet Adjustia! If all goes well with that, I’ll produce Episode 3 using the same animation pipeline.

Episode 2.5 Coming Soon

Apologies for the recent silence. I'm not very good at multitasking, so Visitors is on hold just now. I haven't been idle, though...

Visitors: Frame 11