Safari - The Animation

Started by DocCharly65, November 22, 2018, 08:49:33 AM

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DocCharly65

Just the first 80 frames of the stampede...

I added a pop of faster animated grass near the animals for the imagination of their speed and power...
The "cumulus-dust" is more luck than knowledge - I am happy that it works.

Enjoy the first successful animated stampede :)

https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgqxUz0nPG89whMSMwQ


... for the R2D2 Animation I will have to add... let me calculate: 500 animals x 200,000 grass tufts - 10,000 l extracted water = 100 x 5000 * 20 horse droppings...  ::) ;D



The other animations and the rest of this one will take some more time - especially the sunrise version will  need more rendertime as I expected. I deleted a bad looking tree but now there is more sky visible - that means longer rendertime per frame.

Dune


bobbystahr

Agree with Ulco...love the variety of animals as that's what would happen...bash on my friend bash on...
something borrowed,
something Blue.
Ring out the Old.
Bring in the New
Bobby Stahr, Paracosmologist

Hannes

Wow, that's awesome!!!! The animals look fantastic, and the moving grass is superb as well. Good job!!!

Oshyan

Surprisingly good, as usual! :D I love the moving grasses too. That is an OBJ sequence? I think the moving trees are a bit much though, unless the winds are quite strong at this moment for some reason. I feel like if the trees were moving that much, the grass would be moving a lot more (those are fairly "stiff" trees from my understanding).

- Oshyan

DocCharly65

#5
Thanks :)

You have good eyes and great botanical knowledge, Oshyan ;)

First: all animated objects are object sequences.
3 populations of slower running zebras each pop 0, 10 and 25 frames offset
2 pops of fast running zebras with one pop 10 frames offset
13 single zebras slightly offset in a row in the foreground always with the  0 / 10 / 25 frames offset -- same with 4 elephants and 4 giraffes.
All animals (and pops) positioned that no one runs through another one - and of course no y-rotation ;) .
The grass is 10 different pops of Walli's Dry Phragmites rigged and animated. Every with a slightly different range of scale, colors and 2 different animation sequences with each 2 different frame-offsets and the rest of the job is done by the random y rotation :)

The tree movement:

In fact in some of the other safari renders there will be too much tree-movement too. I know on one side that e.g. acacia trees are quite stiff but some facts let me move almost everything:
The bushes and trees which are NOT acacias are just my animated oaks with boxwood- and acacia leaves.

It's because I reach the limits of my available disk space with my (animated) objects with over 300 GB - the whole film project will be soon app. 2 TB. That means before I reorganize all, extend disk space and move files I mostly try to save space.

Another reason was that stiff trees and bushes still have motion but only in little branches or leaves. That immense higher rigging and animation effort was too much for me at the moment so I chose the mid way - as described earlier: plausible but in reality not accurate or authentic (doesn't work for for people with botanical and geographical knowledge) ;)

To compensate this tree movement dilemma, I chose a not too slow clouds movement and dust movement. Anyway I think a world where a spaceduck will attack the earth and where the Galactica meets the Enterprise with Lara Croft on board has bigger problems than some weird moving trees... I hope so ;)

Oshyan

Haha! You make excellent points. :D

- Oshyan

DocCharly65

#7
..a night of difficult and hard decisions... ;)
I watched some documentaries and my animations again and again. As you perhaps have seen I already kept the dry leave-less trees as stiff - so I should at least keep the umbrella acacia trees stiff as well. Otherwise it looks really too weird - even for my crazy standards ;)

Because the render times for the daylight safari views are all below 1 h (25-46 min) I decided to make a compromise:
I set all umbrella acacia to stiff versions, let the bushes and as they were and restarted all renders. A little pain but I think that's worth it.

I was also able to use the opportunity to improve the traffic lights.
The old ones had too unclear and undefined bump maps and too bright reflections... looked a bit like suckled gummy bears ;D .

Old:  [attachimg=1]      New:   [attachimg=2]

luvsmuzik

Agree ...fantastic! Explanations of methodology so helpful, hope you have enough space!  ;D This is all crazy enough to make perfect sense! ;D

Hannes

I watched this clip over and over. It's so great. But let me do some nitpicking  ;):
To my eyes the giraffes walk a bit too fast. Maybe if the walking cycle (and thus the movement of their necks) would be half the speed, they would look somehow more majestic. It's just my impression, I haven't compared it to real footage.

DocCharly65

#10
Thanks luvs :)

You're not not really wrong, Hannes.
I purchased some animated Blender3D - animal and character packages from 3DRT and I think they used same or similar animated armatures for many of objects. And some are just not fitting perfectly to the type of animal (or human character) But especially walking and running is something I can't animate (yet ;) ) So I live with those mistakes.

Additionally it seems that some animations are created to be used in 30 FPS games and some for 25/24 FPS so I get a weird mix if I use both in the same animation. I have the same problems with some soldiers on my Enterprise: If I animate them with 25 FPS they look like running in slow motion but if I speed up in postwork to 30 FPS they run great but others look like Charly Chaplin ;D


Unfortunately there are still many limitations to my blender knowledge to change the animation speed. It must have to do with baking animations and adjusting length of loops... some day...

Another little mistake at almost all of 3DRTs animated walking/running characters is a not perfectly fitting length of the steps. That means I always have one (or two at animals) of the legs sliding through the ground if the other has perfect step length. So you will almost never see my animations with feets on the ground ;) I tried to compesate that by exactly positioning the ground touching feet but then the body wobbles because the walking animations are created for a linear movement.

But never the less - my own experiments with walking animation look even worse ;D


But also some good news: with deleting the Umbrella Acacia object sequence I could safe 4-5 GB and have enough place now for animating R2D2. He can turn his head now... didn't know that rigging and animationg of his head would be so complicated but the 30° axis made some trouble. But works now too :)

DocCharly65

#11
A little addition:

Though the described little trouble my fully respect to the 3DRT artists! I don't know any source where you get e.g. 10 or more low poy animals with 15-30 or more animation loops in that quality for about 30-70$ (and very often special sales)

I suspect they would never think that a noob like me would use their characters or animations in Terragen for a film project ;D

I saw professional animation- and rigging offers of e.g. pumas or horses - no chance to get one beneath 700-1500$

Kadri


It does have a documentary kind of look. Very nice video.

sboerner

Fantastic! The dust is a nice touch. You are getting so adept at this. Your turnaround times are so quick!

Good luck managing all that storage . . .

j meyer