Your animation and voice acting are quite good.
So I'm giving you a 4.5
However, I must say, you need to work on your storytelling / plot skills.
Do that, and you could make some nice videos.
=]
Reviews for "Manhunt"
Kept me entertained.
kinematics were pretty good, though would have love to see more stumbling from the guy around street corners.
Regardless of the films nature, i think it'd be perfect presentation to show kids who are interested in the field of 3d
Damn also reminds me that i need to make some myself, i'm falling short with just art posts.
Great to see more autodesk users on newgrounds!
This is really good!
The only thing that needs fixing is the audio. A bit staticy here and there...
I commend you for having an animation as long as that with everything done by yourself. It's no easy feat creating CG animations at are even a minute long, let alone over 3. It's in sort of a strange middle ground though.
You don't use subdivision modelling for any of your characters, so we can see the poly-flow, and all your textures are very flat, with your shaders limited to lamberts and maybe a few blinns here and there. That would be all well and good if you were trying to show off your animation skills, but for the most part it's lacking - especially in the running scenes. Your facial animation also seems a bit robotic, and limited basically to the eyes/eyebrows, and maybe a bit of mouth. Given the scale of the project, it would be too hard to get good blend shapes or facial rigs for the 20+ characters you have, which is understandable. Also, your lighting is frequently inconsistent (shadows are cast directly behind the main character (and sometimes has two shadows for no apparent reason), your shadows are extremely sharp, and you might even be using an ambient light, which you should pretty much never do.
So basically, since your aren't showing off your modeling skills, lighting skills, texturing skills, or your animation skills, the story is the main focus. The story is definitely interesting, but has some holes. How did that guy wake up in the woods, why was he in a world filled with zombies, and if it was just a bed-time story told to a kid, why is it shown that he actually exists in the end? Also, you have some strange cuts, like when he runs from the diner he's immediately in the middle of the road around the corner. There are some strange slow pans as well, and you don't have enough easing in and out of your camera. Also, completely off topic, you have some parts that are super reflective, which is a common mistake.
I'm not sure what you want from this animation, since it's scale is too large to focus on any one thing enough to make it stand out. Since I can't imagine your render times are longer than maybe 5-10 seconds a frame (or less), it could be really easy to go back in and fix up shadow inconsistencies and mess with camera movements/cuts. Depending on your rigs it might also be semi-easy to really clean up the animation. You can't really do much else to improve it, since you clearly chose a limited style with very basic shapes and textures/shaders. So there's no point in doing global illumination, subsurface scattering, color bleed, or any of that fun stuff. Maybe do an ambient occlusion pass. That generally makes everything look better, and would not be hard to add in post.
So there is my two cents. I just finished the graduate program at Drexel in Digital Media by the way, and teach this kind of stuff. Take from it what you will, and don't think I'm trashing your animation. I'm just used to giving a lot of critiques. Good luck with your stuff.
Genwhite240 responds:
I really appreciate the comment! And, having just now graduated school, I'm used to critiques, so I know where you're coming from. Unfortunately, I wound up creating a story that was fairly ambitious for myself, and the amount of work I had to put in was pretty large, especially considering the time. So, as a result, there's no one part of this that is particularly strong. In the future, I probably wouldn't take on a project of this size, by myself, in such a short time period.
I do really appreciate the comment. I'm always interested in improving.
Pretty neat. any reason why you didn't subdivide the polygons using mesh smooth(not sure what it's called in maya) for any of the models? Awesome texturing and lighting, pretty good animation, the walking and running just seemed too robot to me though, It didn't look as nice as your other animated parts.
also, what was your overall render time?
Genwhite240 responds:
Glad you like it. I originally went with the un smoothed bodies because the entire thing was meant to be low poly, and I wanted that to be a known thing, so I didn't smooth the body. But then by accident, I wound up smoothing all the heads, and by the time I noticed, I already rendered about half of the project, and couldn't go back to re-render.
So, total render time is hard to calculate, since I rendered it out on multiple computers over several days, but I guess my BEST guess would be probably about 15-20 hours for the shots, and about 25 minutes for the actual movie render.