Topic: blender wip psy ambient trance music video project

[ratty redemption]

these next three videos are the last of my tests with this version of the background mesh deformation and camera animation. they are the same as the last few animations although with different colored psy clouds.

[ratty redemption]

the latest mesh deformation and camera test. i now have about 4 of these combinations that i think are good enough to be used in the final product. each of those can be rendered with my growing library of shader node materials.



top down view from one of blender's 3d editing windows showing the latest mesh deformation and camera animation.



side view of the blender 3d editing window.

[ratty redemption]

the first of the new mesh deformation and camera animations, using some of my previous shader node materials.

[ratty redemption]

the combination of this mesh deformation, camera angle and movement, plus the shader node material, does seem to produce a disorientating effect, hopefully after the alien jellyfish foreground objects have been rendered it will give us something more to focus on. more tests needed on this i think.



the next two are less disorientating.

[ratty redemption]

a slightly tweaked texture warping, displacement node and high frequency layer, blended with my uv test pattern for the latest mesh deformation and camera animation.

edit: he he, i just noticed yt had displayed the following message for me after it had finished processing:

"We detected your video may be shaky. Would you like us to stabilize it?"

i declined the offer, although if the tech they use is non destructive, then that's a cool feature, i just would prefer to do any post processing, if needed, before i upload.

[ratty redemption]

i think this is one of my most effective animations to date, there is still room for improvement but i'm now confident i'm on the right track with the tech and art style, at least as far as the backgrounds go.

[ratty redemption]

youtube rejected this video, claiming it was a duplicate of a file already on their servers, which is bs since i only just finished rendering it and i always use unique file names. so i uploaded it to facebook.

[kat]

Yeah there's not you can do about YouTube's automatic algorithms flagging stuff like that.

Slightly Off Topic: it's good to see what you're doing (*thumbsup*) but you might want to only post info when 'major' updates occur. Aside from colour/effects changes it's starting to get difficult to see the process progression because there doesn't appear to be significant enough change between iterations - in other words, the topic is in danger of becoming a bit spammy, which you want to avoid for obvious reasons (it's also possibly another reason why YT flagged the latest vid).

I think you've got the process down-pat enough to start adding music to these vids, might even be worth using YouTubes own music library system to add appropriate audio.

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, and understood my friend.

most of my work is very similar to each other, even when i'm not tweaking settings in blender. the intended result should be a series of music videos centered around my alien jellyfish as they fly/swim through various environments.

currently all the work i've uploaded has been for the first environment, and although there are a few color palette changes, the movement of both the swirly backgrounds and camera is very subtle. sometimes i have to check which video clip i'm watching, and i have a couple of hundred test renders on my hdd, but the differences are there, and i'm confident the end result should work as intended, at least on a subconscious level.

i'll take your advise and try to update only when i have something easier to distinguish during the development, and eventually when the end products are ready.

re the music, again thanks for the suggestion, although i do have the music for each of my intended videos already chosen. the guy i'm working with has just become one of the top ten most listened to on reverbnation.

[ratty redemption]

here's some test renders of my new foreground objects. they are more abstract, and less intended to resemble any creatures like the jellyfish, but they do still have an organic feel to them.





and here's some renders with these objects with my previous backgrounds, although heavily processed through blender's compositor.

[ratty redemption]

this is the first of my new psy jelly material renders, since i restarted this project about a year ago.

i'm pretty pleased with the results, although i could only get raytraced refractions and fresnel to work, if i also enabled mirror reflections, blender would lock up. not sure if it is a bug in the 2.66 version i'm using, or if i'm doing something wrong?

i'm using blender internal. if anyone here knows the answer, please post.

[kat]

'Mirror' (reflective) renders have always been a bit CPU intensive, that might explain the lock-up. You've definitely learned some '****' rendering techniques doing this project and the end result is certainly very 'trance'! Have you actually put any of these to music and 'published' them yet, as was your original intention, or are you just using the project as an exercise is rendering now?

[ratty redemption]

thanks kat, and i found a workaround by rendering just the reflective pass, which blender is doing at the moment, then hopefully i can composite that with the rest of the layers.

and thanks very much for the compliment. this commercial project is still going ahead, be it very slowly from my end, although thankfully the trance musician is very patient, partly due i would imagine, to him have several other psy artists he regularly works with, so i'm not holding him up at all.

as i understand it, the intention is we have different versions of the videos, so in the end he might have the same track on two or three different artist's videos, and likewise i might offer my services to another musician in the future, but for the time being, i'm happy just to be working with him.

when i restarted this project last year, i was reasonably confident i could do this artistically, i just vastly underestimated how much research and development i would need to do with blender, and this included learning the post 2.5 interface. and although i'm working (unpaid) full time on this, my 7 year old, second hand pc is very underpowered, so it takes a long time to render even at the 360p resolutions.

we're intending to publish those for free and charge for the 720p versions, but i won't start rendering them properly until i've got the 360p ones as good as i can get them.

for the first full length video, with music, i've decided to leave out the alien jellyfish, because i still have to improve my animation skills with them, although the models and rigs are built, so i'm practising on the less complicated abstract objects like you see above. i have a couple more models to build and then i think i'll have enough for the first video. and by the 3rd or 4th hopefully the jellyfish will be ready.

[ratty redemption]

here's some test renders of my new "tesseract" model.

i rigged and animated this with bones, and although the results are what i was hoping for, it was really tricky to get working. blender would often deform parts of the tesseract correctly and screw up other parts. i rebuilt the rig 3 or 4 times to get it to this stage.

[kat]

Double-check you don't have "Envelopes" selected, if you're weighting bones based on vertex group influence and Envelopes are active, they can interfere with deformation (which is what appears to be happening based on what you've said above).

Those vids definitely have an otherworldly feel. They work better visually because they're much 'cleaner' in appearance (maybe due to the metallic look?), previous vid, on a small screen at least, seem quite noisy by comparison. Interesting stuff.