GunBunny Animation - Captains Art Thread

[CaptBrenden]

Welcome to GunBunny Animation, where I will be posting my art projects and such for critique and discussion.

All critique is welcome and highly encouraged. This is not a "look what I did and worship it" thread, it's a forum for me to post serious art projects for constructive feedback. That being said, do keep it semi polite and professional. It's okay not to like something, but "it's stupid" is hardly constructive. Tell me why you don't like something, and I'd love to discuss it with you.

I'll also be posting Livestream notifications here as well.

Various Pages and Links
My Livestream http://www.livestream.com/gunbunnyanimation
My Deviantart http://geekygothgirl.deviantart.com
My Youtube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/GunBunnyAnimation?feature=mhee

As my signature says, I am also open for commisions. I will post pricing info later.  All commisions will be done when I get a chance, but as I have school it maybe be slower when I'm not on break.

[CaptBrenden]

Rules and such:
Keep it polite and professional.
No images unless it's relevant to the disscusion in some major way, such as to prove a point. Please no image macros and memes.
I reserve the right to remove any offensive material posted in this thread without warning.
No short posts or one word post. This is a major discussion thread not an IM conversation.
No off topic posting, direct tangent convos to topicless or some such thread with a link if you think your going off on a tangent. I would be happy to discuss something brought up in the thread with you elsewhere, but I want to keep this thread to the art discussion.
Be honest.
If you post, ideally post something that was done well, then talk about anything that can be improved, and then finish with something that was done well. The good old compliment sammich.

Other then that, please have fun with it. I'm an animator, my primary job is to entertain people. If what I have is boring let me know, of course with some saggestion on what to do to get it there.

[CaptBrenden]

This post reserved for embedded Livestream feed.. when I can find the forum code for it.

[CaptBrenden]

Going to be streaming from now until about 10:30AM Pacific standard time. Will be working in 3D on final project stuff. Come watch if you like.

Livestream Link
http://www.livestream.com/gunbunnyanimation

EDIT
Going offline, Livestream is slowing my modeling down right now and I cant affort to be slow on finals.

[CaptBrenden]

Right, lets get this ball rolling...

Here is a script Ive been working on for a short animation Ill prolly do for my animation pre and post production classes.

Of Cookies and Handgrenades

FADE IN

EXT. SUBURBIA - Mid Day

A minivan drives down nice suburban streets.

INT. MINIVAN - MID DAY

Inside half a dozen Girl Scouts talk and laugh amongst themselves as the SOCCER MOM drives them to their destination. A LITTLE SCOUT sits in the far back quiet and not involved with the other scouts. She is looking at a prize flier for selling Girl Scout cookies. She intently looks at a picture of a little pink bike with streamers and basket.

EXT. SUBURBIA - MID DAY

The minivan stops and the Girl Scouts unload from the vehicle. Each of them is handed two cases of Girl Scout cookies. The little scout is handed her allotment of cookies and its nearly as large as her. The soccer mom gives her a small hand trolley to wheel the cookies behind her.

The Girl Scouts head out every which direction to sell their cookies. The little scout struggles to pull the cart along. Every house the little scout tries to go to, a larger scout makes it there first and sells her cookies.

Soon the little scout is far behind her comrades and is getting desperate. She sees a house at the end of the block that the other scouts have avoided and she heads towards it.

EXT.SUBURBIA - Vet's house - Early AFTERNOON

The little scout stands outside the veteran's house surveying the scene. The house is fortified by sandbag bunkers, trenches, concertina wire, alarm towers, spotlights, and mines. On the porch the WAR VETERAN sleeps with an old World War II metal helmet covering his eyes. Next to the war veteran are two Pomeranian guard dogs. GUARD DOG #1 and GUARD DOG #2 are asleep.

The little scout musters her courage and starts to enter the war veterans compound. Her foot snags a trip wire and fires a pop flare up into the air. The war veteran snaps out of his nap and having flashbacks to the war slams his hand down on an alarm button. The alarm towers light up with twirling red lights and sirens sound. The war veteran dives into a sandbag bunker with his cane, sticking it out the view slot like a rifle. Guard dog #1 and #2 wake up as well and take off running towards the girl, yapping and jumping up. The little scout runs frantically out of the compound.

EXT.SUBURBIA - VET'S HOUSE - MID AFTERNOON

The little scout catches her breath and waits for guard dog #1 and #2 to go back to sleep. She peeks around the edge of the compound's gate to make sure the coast is clear then starts to wheel her cart in again. Looking down she notices more trip wires along the path catching the mid afternoon sun. She decides to go around them by cutting through the lawn.

Halfway through the lawn, the little scout hears a click and stops. She looks back and one of the cart's wheels are in the center of a small earthen mound. She looks around and sees dozens of such little mounds, then notices a sign with skull and cross bones that reads "Mines."

The little scout panics and tries to run for it, but a little black device pops out of the dirt. When it goes off it sprays water in every direction and it turns out to be no more than a standard lawn sprinkler. All of the other sprinklers go off and the little scout makes another retreat, slipping and falling in the mud several times.

EXT.SUBURBIA - VET'S HOUSE - Late AFTERNOON

As the sun gets low in the sky, the little scout is outside the war veteran's house soaking wet and dirty on her hands and knees hanging her head in shame. The cookies are safe only because the cardboard case holding the boxes protected them. She looks utterly defeated until she notices the mud soaked flier on the ground. She sees the pink bike again and she stands and turns to face the compound with resolve.

The little scout then gears up for one last attempt. She adjusts her uniform to look more military, smears her face with mud to look like camouflage paint, straps various items to herself such as a water pistol, a child's bag of jerky, and a teddy bear. She stuffs as many boxes of cookies as she can in a cute little back pack and looks determined up at the imposing fortress of a suburban home.

The little scout finds a spot in the fence she can squeeze under, low crawling like a soldier. Once inside, she avoids the "mines" until she gets to where guard dog #1 and guard dog #2 are sleeping. Nearby there is a kennel. She opens the bag of jerky and tosses a few pieces inside and whistles. The dogs wake up smell the jerky and runs into the kennel, after which the little scout closes the gate.

The old war veteran sits in his porch rocking chair half asleep, his cane "rifle" clutched across his chest. He hears a noise and snaps awake. He hops up and starts pointing his cane back and forth like a jumpy soldier. He hears another noise behind him and spins around to see someone disappear into the bushes. He senses a presence behind him, spins around thinking he's got the intruder only to find a teddy bear sitting on the ground.

Behind him the little scout sneaks up with her "sidearm" drawn. The war veteran spins around just in time to get "gunned down." After a few squirts he falls on his rump and looks up at the figure standing over him. The little scout looks at him with a fire in her eyes. The old war veteran looks scared, but then the little scout holds out a box of Girl Scout cookies.

EXT. SUBURBIA - MID DAY

The little scout is riding down the street on a little pink bike with streamers and a basket. Inside the basket is a half-gallon jug of milk. She is bright-eyed and extremely happy. She rides up to the war veteran's house. On the porch the war veteran is sitting in his chair, the card table next to him covered with piles and piles of girl scout cookie boxes. The war veteran notices the little scout as she rides into the driveway and stands up to salute her with a smile. The little scout smiles back and holds up the jug of milk.

fade out

[CaptBrenden]

Wow, absolutly no feedback so far.

Oh well Ill keep posting anyways. Final project for two of my classes. Done with two team members.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWfvZDP9Ha4&context=C3f939dcADOEgsToPDskLs0ijIeeljnNAzHUesBBKr

[Aurora Borealis]

Sorry, I'm not good at input, and I don't know anything about 3D animation, but your animations look really good!

[CaptBrenden]

= u = well the story could use some critiquing.   It always amazes me when someone says they cant critique. You dont need a degree to do it. Its as simple as, "hey thats cute, i like the part where this character did this, but this part seemed odd to me." 

[Tsubashi]

Being hesitant to give critique is not that unusual, especially if one is inexperienced in the fields being discussed. That being said, I will add my two bits. It may or may not be useful, since I am with Aurora-hime in being terrible at feedback. Sorry.

I liked the story, it is cute. Nothing groundbreaking literarily, but enjoyable nonetheless. I thought of the girls from Despicable Me as I was reading it, probably because of the cookies. It seems to me, though, that the War Vetran ought to be impressed/amused instead of scared, but that may just be a disjunction in my imagination. I think I understand what you are aiming at, just make sure it is not too exaggerated or lasts too long, since that is not the emotion you want to focus on.

Your final project is intriguing, but the lighting seems inconsistent. Understandable if that was not the focus of the project, but odd nonetheless. Out of curiosity, what rederer are you using for your 3D development. I am afraid I have not had time to review your live streams in anything more than the most cursory of ways, let alone your deviantart, so apologies if that has already been answered.

Well, I apologize if my response is entirely useless to you, but in the hope that there may be even the smallest glimmer of use, I submit my thoughts for your consideration. Keep working hard, Captain-sama!

[CaptBrenden]

See, again with people shooting themselves down :p what was very nice critique. Inface critique from an untrained mind picks up things that the trained mine does not. The emotion point is completely valid, if that didnt feel like it matched up to you, then there is the possibility of something that needs to be revised.

The animation project there.. was kind of a clusterbumble of teamwork. Teams like that make me wish to never work on teams.. I hope its better in the industry.  One person modeled the tower like buildings, one person was suppose to model the bubbles, and I modeled the canyon and the greek architecture. They were then to give their parts to me, I simply insert mind, and light it.  when they handed it to me a week before the due date, the file was ... f-ed up like a football bat.  The file contained, without my portion 1.2 MILLION polygons. Trying to play the camera movement inside the modeling program was nearly enough to crash it, and I have a beast of a computer. The file was 355mb.    Their achitecture was not comined from primatives into sub structors, nothing was named so the outliner listed several thousand "polysurface" objects instead of "widow_lit" "tower_dome" or such proper named object, and the there was co planer geometry, that is objects on top of other objects to their planes existed in the same place which causes artifacting in rendering, and the materials on the buildings did not match the drendering engine. Alot of geometery was simply too dense.. The bridgeways between the towers had about 50 rivets per section, each rivet having 20 polys, and none of them got close to the camera to actually see them. Ofcourse, since they werent named I couldnt simply select "Tower_bridge_rivit" from the outliner, I had to manually go through and delete them. the non visable back sides of the towers were as complex as the front, each of them having thousands of non visable polys.. I spent my entire time that I was suppose to be fine tuning the lighting fixing my teamates parts.  I was also, I might ad, the only person to UV unwrap, texture, and bump map my portion. The collumns on the partenon like building, only the 4 that start next to the camera have geometery, the ones in the rest of the stucture are bumps and were mear 10 sided cylinders.  After a week of cleaning on that file, it had, with greek architecture and canyon added, 75,000 polys and the file size dropped to 165, just short of 200 mb of junk data was removed, and the poly count one 16th its previous size. Even getting extra time from the instructor to try to light and render it, It was pretty much thrown togeather at the last moment with the lighting and compositing. There was suppose to be a parti volume pass so the lights had cones of light in the water, and a particulate pass to give the sense that there was stuff floating in the water.  Anti aliasing and final gathering if you know what they are were also set to "test" quality settings for the final render.

Summary.. yes, the lighting is inconsistant, Im glad you noticed.  And to answer your question, it was rendered out of Autodesk Maya 2012 using the mental ray rendering package.

I appriciate your feedback, please feel free to drop such useful insight in again.

[Tsubashi]

Aha! I knew it seemed familiar. I did some work for a client in Maya back in 2008, but it seems that they made significant updates since then. (I it would seem, have not ^.^')

I think I can relate to you with you "teamwork woes." While I might not have experience in 3d team projects, I think some of the C++ projects I have been handed could qualify as being similarly disheartening. Way to be the team saver and not just throwing the infuriating work on someone else's plate.

[CaptBrenden]

ha... the instructor kinda yelled at me for not throwing it back to them and telling them to fix their parts.. said I should learn to rely on my team more

[Chocofreak13]

the team dynamic isn't for everyone. personally, i like working alone because that way, i'm only accountable to myself, so if i screw up, there's no one to blame but me. but in that same respect, if i do great, then there's no one else to bring me down. i partnered up a couple times in a class this past semester, which yielded pretty good results, but for the big projects i prefer to stay solo.

that said, your final looked pretty damn good, man. there's always room for improvement, but my friend (who's better at my preferred style than i am) said something i plan on adopting as a personal mantra for awhile: "I'm a sophmore in college. I'M LEARNING." don't expect your stuff to be perfect.

your part of the project looked great, but the way you did it, you managed to evern cover up your partners' sloppiness by putting them in the background. things far away wouldn't have as much detail, so putting them in the background was smart. it looks realer that way.

given that i don't work with digital 3D (i have a friend who's actually in the exact same program you are, same school system, only she's here in boston, and i can't imagine the amount of time you guys pour into this, it would drive me insane), i can't comment much, but if you want to improve something, just go back and tweak the lighting and colour (unless you were aiming to make it look like it was underwater, which would be cool).


as for the story, it was pretty cute (love the ending ^^ ), though it felt a little lacking since it felt like i've seen something like this before. that said, if you did it in a unique style, it'd likely make up for it, since while it's similar to other stories, it's not exactly the same, and the unique style would help establish that.
let me know if you make this; i'd like to see it. :3

(also, have you read the kiki strike books? they're similar in nature to the short story and i think you'd like them; i sure as hell did. ^^)

next time i critique i'll make sure to be more awake. xD

[CaptBrenden]

Sorry for the late reply, somehow I missed your post

Yeah, I actually like working in teams.. tho I usually end up the leader because Im the only one willing to actually say what needs to get done and assign tasks... if I don't the projects end up just looking like stuff from 3 different people cruedly soldered togeather.  I had the same problem as you in the military though. I was discribed once by my CO as a fire and forget missile, if I was given a task he didnt have to worry about it getting done, but I was also yelled at several times for not making people come help me do things because I wanted to make sure they were done properly. Im told it shows my team I dont trust them and that boads badly for leadership.

As for the final, yes its suppose to be under water. The project is incomplete due to the time crunch. Their was going to be a parti volumetric pass that would have made the spot lights cast beams through the water, and there was going to be an over laid pass to make little floating particles move past the camera to give it more of a camera under water look. The scene itself was for my modular city building final, and our group had decided to make a city built around the underwater ruins of atlantis.

and to finish up my post ill throw up some random renders and such

[Chocofreak13]

both look quite shiny. *__* i want to see the first in context.

well, i can't comment much on the military, but in terms of leadership, it helps to show a little faith in your teammates. that's why when i have to partner up, i usually do so with friends, since i always had a habit of forming mini-gangs anyay. we stuck together and looked out for each other like family. i take friendship very seriously; all my close friends i'd take a bullet for and trust with my life.

how this translates into art: just like when you like the subject matter, if you like the people it yields a better result. i hope you get to pick your teammates for projects, cause that always helps me. xD

that effect with the final would have been very effective, as it would have firmly established scene. i completely understand sacrificing some little things in the name of time, but i hope that if you get to do something like this again you can put in something iconic like that.