Sunday 14 September 2014

A better mantacloak animation

I'm not saying I will definitely resume blogging, but I may...

I had prepared some nice new animations for the Loncon3 speculative biology event, and decided to add a few scenes to make a nice animation. The thing is, rendering each image takes so long, that it becomes very difficult to tweak the result: whenever you think something like 'the cloakfish should come in here and not there', or 'the light should shine on it from there and not here', you have to reprogram a scene all over again, and then have to wait while the computer renders the 500 or so images for each short scene. So I do not think I will start a career animating Furahan wildlife documentaries. Just the odd scene every year or so. Mind you, I have some three new tetropter scenes as well. But I will wait a bit with those. I am thinking about the ultimate post on toes: 'why large running animals really need toes or toe-analogues so you should not give them elephantine feet'.


But first: A cloakfish accompanied by Debussy. This is NOT the best way to look at the video, as it is a 800x450 video. I will upload it on Youtube as well: http://youtu.be/IXaR5VxrMSA



7 comments:

Andrew Broeker said...

Are you doing this rendering with untextured meshes first? It would go a lot faster.

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Andrew: I usually do test renders without time consuming atmospheric effects etc., but even when these look well the full size version often shows imperfections less noticeable on small versions.

Dan said...

This was lovely.
And a post on toes would be great.

Anonymous said...

I check out your blog every few weeks in case you have posted something new. The cloakfish is beautiful. A toe post would be a huge bonus.

was said...

A wonderful and Nice animation of the large Cloak fish
It's sad that the movie is so short.

Petr said...

this is really amazing! it has a bit of a whaleshark color scheme! :)

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Dan: The 'toe post' is temprarily halted: I am trying to find a solution for the question why there are fast quadrupedal animals with columnar legs with 'hidden toes' (rhinos, hippos, ceratopsians probably)but no bipedal ones (predatory dinosaurs, ostriches).

Anonymous: thank you

Michel van: well, originally I intended to have at least three more scenes like it, but as it is these scenes take a lot of time.

Petr: the sharkskin theme is not a coincidence; well spotted!