What can I say? I’m still alive I was just on a little vacation.
It always interesting to look at other people’s works. I’m always thinking – “I can do better’. Moreover, always answering to myself – “Well, show me!”
Simple challenge – jumping lamp. But wait! What the point? What is the plot?
Let’s say it jumps on something more interesting than books or cubes. On letters? I think I saw it somewhere… And something should happens after… Blast, for example! Therefore, it should be button. Big Red F#$@ing Nuclear Button! So where we can find 1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Heavy Duty Super-Colliding Super Button ®? Of course, in Portal games!
So, whole scene from the beginning was creating in “Portal’ style. White lamp with grey and red accents, white and blue doors, and, of course, “The Button”.
The whole sequence was created in advance with paper and pencil. The entire plot was written down below timeline. And it had fixed camera, so excuse me, no “moving camera” tricks, just some shaking.
There are an enormous number of armature moving. I wanted it to feel alive, not a puppet on strings of bones. It’s breathing, it’s shaking, it’s shrinks when touches the ground. You can see few jerky movements – some troubles with IK. I tried to smooth out some of them, but some of them saw already in a final render.
There is a few funny tricks that I did cause I do not know some things. For example – there are two wires – blue and orange. They replace each other in one frame. Smooth turn on lighting has two different ways to do. I’m sure that both are too overcomplicated. First realization had 3 spot lights – 1000, 5000, and 15000 watts. They changed each other in three frames. Then I remade lighting to one spotlight – it just moved from a height 150m to 15m.
The duration of the scene was supposed to be 25 seconds, Well, you can see, my sense of time was wrong.
There was a very big elephant in the room. I knew, that’s gonna be a hella long animation. I wanted that in ‘Cycles’, I wanted this beautiful raytracing on the walls… but… my videocard did not support ‘Cycles’. My old but powerful AMD was useless. And everything that I created I checked with my processor’s renders. The animation became longer – the elephant in the room began to crush the plates.
So, the final day. I checked everything with Eevee and started the Cycles render. I seemed heard my old i5 7400 screaming. And… It took 11 hours. With just 16 samples on frame in 720p with denoising. And it looks awful… So… I just went to the shop I bought to myself RTX 2060. 2,5 hours and its done. Well, still 720p, but I don’t care – 75 samples looks nicer than 16! So I can say now that this animation has a budget. A very big budget by my standards – 519$
I did the sound management using free 7 days of Premiere Pro. I took almost everything from my copy of the game. Just in case, I don’t claim any rights. All sounds belong to Valve. All this is just a parody and blah-blah-blah.
What next? I’ll continue the course. Who knows what my motivation makes me to create? I don’t