mgbennet

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TROPHY CASE


Two-Year Club

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Can't stop watching this trailer

mgbennet 36 points37 points 1 month ago[-]

Awesome, I'd recognize Paul Robertson of pixel art fame anywhere. (Warning: some of his stuff is pretty NSFW) If you're a fan of the art style in this, definitely check his stuff out.

Azureus Rising - Just some fun, dumb, sleek action animation [3d]

mgbennet [S] 2 points3 points 2 months ago[-]

From the youtube description:

Azureus Rising is the proof-of-concept for an all new feature film trilogy. Azureus is the story of a young man who after escaping death and enduring a life changing journey - matures into a heroic freedom fighter. Azureus Rising is an epic tale of self discovery, obligation and love against all odds.

A feature film trilogy. If this short is any indication of what the final product will be, a drinking game of taking a couple drinks every time a cliche occurs will get you trashed.

The Humble Indie Bundle (pay what you want for five awesome indie games)

mgbennet 4 points5 points 2 months ago[-]

You are aware that you're actually just donating $3 to Paypal, because for amounts below $.30, it all goes to Paypal?

Meet Meline: A beautifully lit and textured film about childhood wonder, featuring the uncanny valley [3d]

mgbennet [S] 0 points1 point 3 months ago[-]

Maybe he exhausted his sources for material, or burned himself out. He had a hot streak there where he was submitting some 5 or 6 items a day, which I fear was unsustainable.

I used to submit a lot of stuff to the short animation subreddit, but gave up in favor of this one which has more activity and members. I'm hesitant to resubmit here all the shorts I submitted over there. But there's always other material I can dredge up.

Dailymotion - PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN. - une vidéo Art et Création

mgbennet 0 points1 point 3 months ago[-]

Any of the modern 3d software programs are capable of doing this, as well as any compositing program. There are tools that convert a 3d mesh into voxels. I know of this script, but I'm sure other, faster implementations exist. The thing that blows my mind about this piece is the seamless integration of 3d into the live action, particularly on the explosion at the end.

Hi r/Animation. I have been wanting to make a stop motion animation for a while now...

mgbennet 0 points1 point 3 months ago[-]

The problem I run into on solo projects is maintaining interest and motivation. If you want to have any chance of finishing the project, it's gotta be fun (or at least fun enough that you get over the half way point, and then feel obligated to finish). If you think you've spent too much time on the script and storyboards, stop and shoot a scene, or just do a small 5 or 10 second test scene of something fun. You'll learn a lot doing those, and you'll have a (small) finished result quickly, which is excellent feedback.

Game AI: Tic-tac-toe is easy

mgbennet 0 points1 point 3 months ago[-]

One weird thing I think about Tic Tac Toe AI is that the small size of the game means that a lot of optimizations are pointless, or even damaging. For example, a brute force method considers there to be 9 possible moves on the first turn, but really, there's only three: center, corner, and edge. All the moves are transformations of one of these moves. So an AI, when considering moves A, B, C, and D, could do some calculations and determine that A and C are transformations of each other, and not have to go down one branch, since both branches would be equivalent. However, given the small size of the game, the transformation calculations might take long than just brute forcing it.

Shake, Rattle, Seattle - It’s only a matter of time before a mega-quake hits the Pacific Northwest, and the loss of property and life would far surpass that seen recently in Chile.

mgbennet 3 points4 points 4 months ago* [-]

What? Predictions of earthquakes are hardly the same as tales of terrorists. For one, the former is a long term danger and the latter a short term. An agenda advocating fear of terrorists has the obvious motivation of short term political gain, but what possible nefarious incentive could harbingers of earthquakes have? Perhaps there's a conspiracy of architects who wish to be constrained by additional building codes. Or maybe some well funded and connected anarchists wish for large companies to spend their money making their buildings safer rather than furthering their plans of world domination. Oh I know. It's some grumpy old men who hate happiness and wish for the old days of the cold war, when fear was food.

In the northwest, we have mixed blessings in the natural disaster department. We avoid the annual hazard of hurricanes and the localized devastation of tornadoes, yet live in the shadow of Mt. Rainer, an active volcano that could blow sometime within 1000 years, and along the Cascadia fault line. To say that we won't have a dangerous earthquake within our lifetimes is to go against the studies of countless geologists. It is at best ignorant, and at worst playing chicken with millions of lives.

If you thought hand drawn animation was tedious and time consuming, check out this demonstration of the pin-screen technique by the inventors Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker.

mgbennet 1 point2 points 4 months ago[-]

There are an enormous number of mediums that can be used to animate. This is one of the more original methods I've seen, but sand animation has also been done in the recent past to great effect. Of course, there's also the mad Russian Alexander Petrov who literally paints every single frame on a glass pane. I just found this making of which is unfortunately narrated in Russian, but still pretty outstanding.

In Defense of Adobe Flash

mgbennet 1 point2 points 5 months ago[-]

Flash has two basic uses, animation and web content. The two areas see some overlap, but generally, the two camps of Flash users, animators and web developers, have very different needs and live strange parallel lives. Initially, the animation was the primary purpose, because video was basically impossible to stream at that point, so if you wanted to make a web cartoon, you needed a special lighter weight format that would load before the user died of old age. Also, scripting in Flash 1 through 3 was worse than being suspended over a pit of rottweilers by your arm pit hairs. As it improved, though, actionscript become more useful, and as web connection rates improved and streaming video became more possible, content delivery became the primary use. Nowadays, if you've got an animation, it makes just as much sense to convert it to a traditional video format and distribute it that way.

Flash has many problems in both areas it is designed to function in. For content, any web developer in /r/programming will be glad to write a lengthy dissertation on the many of sins perpetrated by Flash. It's closed source and doesn't obey the standards, limits SEO, and websites made with it tend to be very unintuitive and ridiculous, even if they look pretty. There are more, but, as animators, we don't really care about these.

In animation, due to its vector graphics, many artists find it unintuitive and get poor results. Vector graphics can indeed be limiting, but they do lend themselves well to a distinct style of animation that can, as has been shown over the last couple weeks here, look fantastic.

The bigger problem for me is that it just doesn't lend itself very well to higher level animation. Look at a program that is absolutely dedicated to animation, like Maya. You have so much more control over your work it doesn't even begin to compare. Support for image sequences is iffy, controlling tween graphs is a late coming feature, and, worst of all for me, exporting the work into anything other than a .swf file is an exercise in frustration. The fact that you basically need to have a third party app to do so is beyond ridiculous.

Even with these faults, though, I still use Flash for what little 2d stuff I do these days, mostly because I know it so well. Flash was the first animation I ever did. It was so easy to get into, and what you see is what you get (for the most part. Scripted effects don't show up until you export, but that's a different story entirely). It's great for beginners, but if I could draw as easily in Maya as I can in Flash, I would never look back.

In general, I think Flash is being left behind by the inevitable march of progress. Animation can be done with better, more focused programs, and content will be more and more delivered with canvas and video tags in html.

Hey GameDev, you still alive? What are you working on?

mgbennet 0 points1 point 5 months ago[-]

As a means of getting my feet wet in game dev, I figured I start from the top and remake Pong, making an effort to make a fully functional game with graphics and sound and menus, rather than just a proof of concept. I also had an idea to start in a language I'm very comfortable with, Java, and then try a language that I'm not as comfortable with but still know, Python, and finally try a language I've never used at all, C++.

Playability and polish is secondary to just learning how to get something up, but the hope is to have something that looks like a real game, if a very simple one.

ATOMIC ROBO ANIMATION production blog!

mgbennet 1 point2 points 5 months ago[-]

Adam Phillips is the proof I pull out when ever someone says Flash is a horrible program for animating. Then I qualify by point to his blog posts where he compares Flash to a cumbersome partner who holds him back as much as he helps, and claims a disproportionate amount of the glory.

Definitely check out his other stuff. There are two pages of movies, the Brackenwood stuff and the other stuff.

ATOMIC ROBO ANIMATION production blog!

mgbennet 1 point2 points 5 months ago[-]

I think problem with the walk animation is the size change and angle is inconsistent with the camera perspective. It's damn hard to get this right with anything besides a profile shot. Most of the time you end up with something that looks like a cycle with a motion tween scraping it past a background, which to be fair, is all it is. Adam Phillips deals with this pretty well by basically being a god, but it's not as easy for us mere mortals. For example, The YuYu.

"Moonboy" : There were no survivors, including the puppy.

mgbennet 0 points1 point 5 months ago[-]

The character animation, sound, and writing are all well done, but it bugs me to hell when a piece that uses cell animation also has photographed backgrounds. It's jarring and out of place. The kitchen and forest, both hand drawn, look great, but the scene with the puppy, despite the pretty fantastic animation on the dog, is distracted by the out of place photographed buildings and lawn in the background. I understand that this was probably made on a budget, and they needed to cut corners somewhere, but that doesn't mean I can't get my panties in a twist about it.

That said, the amazing timing and direction on the moment after he jumps off the cliff gets it a long ways to forgiveness.

Darwinia creators unveil sexy new high-tech heist game

mgbennet 14 points15 points 5 months ago[-]

Link to the developer's blog

I've been following this game for a while. The world generation stuff they talk about in the blog is really impressive, but I worry that making a fun game to play will necessitate cutting out some of the awesome stuff they've made. Introversion's games tend to strike me as technologically amazing, yet not as fun to play as they are to think about. But then I've never played DefCon with a large group of hilarious back stabbing friends.

Too bad /r/animation isn't bigger - we could help raise money for this Russian animator making another Sherlock Holmes parody.

mgbennet 1 point2 points 5 months ago* [-]

Keep on submittin' them links. I read them, at least. I tend to end up submitting a lot to /r/ShortAnimation which gets even less traffic and has no moderator for some reason, and then am afraid of being marked as a spammer if I submit it to /r/animation too.

Back on topic, I'm skeptical of the business model of getting smaller payments from a larger number of independent people. I would love to see this made, but I don't have 100 disposable dollars on me. I would love if animators could spend more time making brilliant short films rather than the commercial work they need to pay the bills, but if this sort of method doesn't work, I don't see how they can finance the projects themselves. At the small studio I work at, we work on our internal projects when ever we get a lull in outside work, which fortunately and unfortunately, doesn't come often. There's a wretched catch 22 in which we can't afford to stop doing commercial work to do a short film, and can't make a short film while doing commercial work.

Oh yeah, and you linked to the blog, not the entry.

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