the rigging is mostly done though there are a few things still to tweak. But I couldn't resist a test flight!

EDIT: Replaced it with one with a few more details.

How big are these characters?

Life size. Midge is 5'8".

This is the last one (for today anyway!) I roughed in an environment to give it some scale and show camera movement instead of just pointing it at a blue sky. This is a simplified version of the Porcupines, a forest of razor-sharp crystal growths. Pretty much the whole planet is made of superconducting ceramics, which is why Earth is happy to trade with the Weevils even though they don't want to have to deal with them directly!

We should find a way to blur those wings so they're more insect-like

I think the wingbeat could be faster. Timing overall is a little slow on this, but you're right about making the wings more insectlike.

Looks really good Gerry.

Okay, this is a little mechanical looking, but dang I'm having fun! I cribbed some martial arts moves from a YouTube video and gave Midge a workout...

EDIT: I posted a slightly improved version on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKXT9L8TL4w .

Or you could check it out on the Nightcallers blog and leave a comment!

I just caught Shrek 2 for the first time on cable over the weekend, and the Fairy Godmother's wings are pretty much how I'd like Midge's, especially the motion blur when they're in motion. Prabably pretty much what Robcat was getting at in his comments up above. I'm not sure this is doable with simple motion blur. I may need a different swappable object to create the illusion of really buzzy wings.

I did get a halfway decent effect with motion blur set to 85% but that would create a problem for whatever scene it's in. Maybe I only increase the MB for critical sequences, and render them separately? Still trying to figure this out.

Here's a first wireframe render of what I'll be doing for Jason and Comicon. I'm still smoothing out some things, but any comments are welcome. sorry for the large file size.

Great job Gerry I love it, can't wait to see a full render.

Very cool, Gerry!

I did sort of hope for a second that Midge might stop and sprinkle the hive with a magic wand. :-)

Does a magical can of WhoopAss count?

looks wonderful!

your test looks good
are you going to add more air traffic in the finale ?

You know I thought about that, but it seemed like there would be more of a sense of foreboding or danger if there were no other activity. There are a couple of landing decks in the upper levels of the towers and I thought a Jetwasp or two, either sitting or taking off, or some other activity would be interesting but I opted for simplicity.
I'm going to use the same music clip I used for the original Hive flyaround so I'm hoping it will have a nice mood.
I'm doing a final quality test render now and it's looking good but I wish I could get a little more blurriness in her wings. I'm gonna need to solve this eventually, now might be a good time.

ok i can see that
then may i suggest some slight movement in the arms,hands,legs ect

Also a good suggestion, Jim.

Actually there is already a lot of movement in her arms and legs but I've noticed that if the overall movement is fast, that kind of detail tends to get swallowed up. Her feet and legs shift to adjust to her swoops and turns, and toward the end she pulls her arms back and clenches her fists, but it's all almost invisible. I do wish it were more obvious but once this final quality render is done I'll look at that again.

It may be that the camera needs to be closer to her throughout to catch a little more of that. As it is I find the camera moves a little crazed in the middle part and I want to smooth that out. I'll be taking a look at the whole thing to make adjustments.

the landing plays out better then any movement you have during flight
you might have to exaggerate the flight a bit more for it to read right
and yeah maybe some different camera passes for a comp

Thanks, Jim. I've actually tweaked the landing to give it more life, and I agree, I need to give her more movement in flight.

But if anyone has a suggestion for blurring her wings, with some kind of object that I can swap out with an action maybe, I'd like to hear it. I'm not sure how to proceed, though I'm thinking about creating an object filled with a smoky material or something. Just thinking out loud here. It doesn't need to indicate movement, just be a blurry shape. Motion blur won't create the effect I want.

? do you think they are moving fast enough
and you might try this (the cheap i don't know what the heck i'm doing way)
i just made an extra set of arms, duplicated the action, then lagged it time wise, and brought down the transparency
all to taste of course

I mentioned up above that I'd seen Shrek 2 recently, and the effect of the wings on the Fairy Godmother is what I'd like to duplicate. The problem with using motion blur is that (at 30 fps anyway) I can't create a wing beat fast enough to blur over the span of the entire wing beat.

Currently I've got the wing beat at its high point, then two frames later at its low point. that leaves just one intermediate frame for blurring, and the wingbeat isn't nearly fast enough for a good illusion. To make it faster wouldn't even leave that intermediate frame for blur so I believe that's as fast as i can go with it.

So I'm thinking that a soft, fuzzy, semi transparent object would be the thing. I just am at a loss as to how to create it.

EDIT: oh actually I overlooked what you'd meant by an extra set of arms. That might be a solution actually! I'll play around with it.

Here's a final quality render. Comments please!

Here's a "traditional" approach, drawing the wings pre-blurred...

Click to view attachment


Click to view attachment

The fact that your character is seen from many different angles complicates this, but it's still doable.




Motion blur could get you what you want, but the keyframing is a bit counterintuitive. Some R&D would be needed.

I'm wondering if a slower wingbeat with more passes (but not necessarily more motion blur) would be a solution. Robcat, I like your test movie but haven't downloaded the prj. Once again I'm at the office on a Saturday with no free time for AM. But come Monday...!

You might experiment with animating the transparency of the wings, too. We tend to view things moving faster as being more transparent.

I did a quickie experiment with a solid shape that approximated the "shape" of both wings in motion, then put a material with an edge gradient on it that fades to about 95% transparency. I think that's the direction I'm going to try. When she's moving at top speed neither the wings nor the flapping need to be perfectly apparent.

it was a while back i saw Shrek, but how's this for moblur; made a real quick single dragonfly wing hard at work:

Click to view attachment

transparency is the way to go, and though there's none in this clip, the other principles at work are all there:

the shape of the wing determines quite a bit. there's more motion when the wing is long. you can clearly see where there's blur, and where you can see the grey grid of dragonfly wing.

the weird dark half is due to n00b not speaking alpha with a:m - the purpose was to have a nice oil-slick-color-patch on the tip of the wing to illustrate that a color difference will further enhance a sense of speed. there's more to flicker, and if it's a pattern, more to blur.

if you imagine looking at this wing from above ("num5"):
"splayed" is 9 o'clock
"closed together" is 6 o'clock
the animation is keyed every frame. o'clock: 9 - 7 - 8 - 6 - 9 - 6 - 8 - 7 - 9
easy to see where that's going, and am not even sure that's exactly what's in the clip, but it doesn't matter.
ctrl+c ctrl+v till you're happy (ah-ahem, that's n00b for "actions"). you can make it more butterfly-like with erratic changes or make it mechanical by shifting those numbers.
the render was a default, i didn't do anything. multipass default x16, moblur default 20%. render took i think 5-6 min.

hope this helps!

Also interesting! Thanks for taking the time to do this dblhelix. It all helps tremendously.

Oh and I did download your prj, Robert. Thanks for putting that together!

Some years ago, maybe ten or so, there was a movie that started out the title sequence with the camera following a dragon fly real close as it flew. Was it "Men in Black"?

Get that and single frame it to see what they did with the motion blur on the wings. Mimic that look.





That looks promising!

While digging, I came across this post by Xtaz.

It's for a propeller, but the theory is the same. It lets you have a multi-frame action appear in one frame.

Ooh! So I did a little testing and experimenting and guess what...!

If you're curious, settings are as follows: I created a 28 frame action of the wings flapping; then in the chor set it to be 2 frames long. In the render I did 16 passes, and 40% motion blur.

I think this wing beat will work just fine.

That looks awesome

Steve

looks terrific!

Thanks folks, and especially thanks to everyone who had suggestions and created test projects. It all went towards finding a solution.

Excellent trick Gerry. Can't get much more blurry than that.

That's working real well!

way to go !

Very nice!

beautiful!
especially the way the iridescence is sort of enhanced in this - you didn't mention working on material in any way, so i'm guessing you didn't?
it's like by increasing transparency you've increased the right kind of visibility.

Thanks dblhelix! It's not a material, it's a color decal, specularity decal and transparency. I wanted that insect-wing gleam.

Here's a final quality render of Midge's fly-in to the Weevil Hive, though it's still a work in progress. This is what I'll be sending Jason for the Comic Con reel. It still needs some smoothing out as well as more detail, but I would like to hear any comments about fine-tuning it. I thought I'd gotten the camera moves smoother but it still feels a little jagged in the middle.

Tada!

Awesome, Gerry! The wing flaps are perfect!

Thanks guys! I actually had to cut the number of passes because of the render time. I think the wingflaps would look better at 16 passes (the original setting) but I had to dial it back to 9 passes. This still took five days to render.

I also want to do some refinements on the doorway she lands at, as well as showing some activity at the landing ports you can see in the flyby and add some detail to the ground area. It all looks a little barren as it is. I may also ask Jason for some rendering help, though leaving it rendering in the background on my work pc was just fine. But if I increase the passes it could take a couple of weeks.

Midge is looking good Gerry She does look stiff while flying and just before she lands. Characters are almost constantly moving and adjusting their body, especially when they are doing action type things.
Animating a moving character is hard though. One thing that helps is to do a lot of the animation before you move the model bone. Make her look like she is flying even though she is just hovering in one place. Then you can touch up the animation after you animate the model bone.

That clip should not have taken you 5 days to render. I bet there are several optimizations you can do that will render much faster without hurting the quality.
Nightcallers might look good toon rendered. Have you tried a toon render just to see how it looks?

Lessee.... 429 frames over five days, that works out to about 17 minutes per frame.

I guess that's not crazy slow but it would be interesting to see if that can be bettered. In general i'd like a more nuanced look to the lighting but that would take some experimenting.

Yes you're right. It isn't *crazy* slow. I'm so used to rendering with multiple processors, I forgot what an exponential increase in time it is with only one processor

The one thing that kicked up the render time was adding a material displacement to the ground. When the ground was onscreen the render time doubled. Otherwise it was about 10 min/frame. With the ground displacement it went to about 20.

Holmes, that's an excellent suggestion for animating the flying figure. I'll work on that.

Robert, ditto on the lighting.

I was thinking ... as fast as those giant mushroom things go by on the ground you could paint some shadows under them and not need a shadow casting light for them at all.