This started as a test for an animated dragon. I cleaned up the animation by only using every fifth key. Before that the movement looked a bit like Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animations.
Then I created a scene around it. First the water was static, and it looked weird. I used a plane in 3ds Max and applied a flex modifier, which resulted in a simple water movement according to the dragon's action.
I added some water splash object sequences which I could perfectly place in time. Then I created a few particle systems for the water dropping when the wings come out of the water, and exported these as OBJ sequences as well.
The knight is animated as well. He's breathing. Very subtle, but he's alive!
So all in all there are three types of object animation in this scene: The dragon and the water plane are MDD-animated, the splashes, droplets and the knight are object sequences, and the trees are animated using mesh deformation by power fractals. The knight is an object sequence, and not animated by MDD, since there are several parts I added to the main body, that should not deform with the actual object, so I would have needed to create an MDD file for each part, and so I decided to make it easier for me.
Actually it was rendered in 800 X 450 px and then upscaled and enhanced using Topaz Video Enhance AI.
For those, who are interested, I also created a version with sound (don't expect too much, I haven't done this very often before...), but the final clip was too large to upload it here, and I didn't want to compress it too much, so I put it on Vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/737574795That was quite an undertaking. It took me loads and loads of attempts and rerendering, until I was happy.
