A nice continuation of the saga! That shootout scene was most impressive, as is the rest of the animation. Nice atmospheric effects, filters (like the rain/the force field on the cell bars - though I didn't realize it was a force field at first), and if I'm not imagining things there seem to be some added outlines as well, on faces, etc, anti-aliasing maybe the technical term for it? Looks good! I'm eagerly awaiting pt. 3.
-cd-
A great story that keeps me intrigued! As far as the art goes, this is pretty good aside from some unnatural movement and weird saturations (perhaps from the compression/ codec choice of such a huge video). With that said, very rarely do you see 3D indie animation on NG, and I can easily see you paving the way for it to be a great medium for others to use.
Concerning the 3D itself, if you choose on staying with an anime style 2.5D look, I would greatly recommend watching behind-the-scene works of Paperman. The fluidity of the 3D comes from tracing over existing 3D frames. This would be an exciting area to play around in. Just an idea :D
The voice acting is superb, great performances from all! No qualms with that.
The music was very fitting, and the script was impressive. Keep at it!
P.S- I was thinking of supporting you through Patreon since you were running into some computer problems. External HDDs are very important, but being able to upgrade your RAM, CPU, GPU, etc for high-end renderings is critical. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why I'm building a PC computer before my Mac chokes from my next rendering process lol.
yeah i tried the paperman thing a while ago with extraction. the other way to get that effect is to lower the render frame rate then speed it back in the video editor so its not too slow or choppy. Basically the same thing that happens in alot of AMV music vids.
I tried tracing and recompositing but it takes too long and too much resources for my comp and also i believe the other way is better/ less time consuming and does the same sort of thing if done right.
I wish there was a decent program that did good traces or, I could export the character layer as a jpg or png sequence to go over that in photoshop before recomposite.
I'm going to try the fps tweak thing in the next animation just to test it since I haven't used it yet, if it works then I'll try it in the next ep of this series.
I'm saving the patreon support to get a decent computer- eventually I'd like to use something like Iclone/poser but those use alot more resources and also dont' render with the GPU unless you get an expensive plugin from Octane Render.
I tried this series intially in iclone but the max characters on screen I could have with physics was 3 in some of the shots I wanted and my comp ran like crap even in wire frame mode
I really do like this series, and have seen a steady trend in storyline and character development over the whole so far.
Like a previous comment, the clothing animation seems tricky, but can be amusing at times: the hand in the jacket pocket was one fascinating example.
Looking forward to more of these from you -and watching you develop your talent as an animator.
yeah clothing sucks- unfortunately i can't really do much about the clothing- other than turning off the physics to keep from flapping, things like hands in pockets will kind of always be the model clipping into itself since its low poly
I'm really liking this series so far, such a good story!
I definitely see a lot of potential in this one. You definintely have a story in which keeps the watcher wanting to watch to know what is going on. The voices fit the characters, and the acting is pretty good.
Now for the 3-D animation. You've got a good start, you seem to know what you're doing which is good, but there is always room for improvement. The clothing dynamics for one seems to be getting away, mainly it acts up when it shouldn't acts up too much, or doesn't fold onto solid objects. Needless to say, clothing dynamics can be a real pain, and it takes hours of tweeking sometimes.
The animation of the characters has a great start, you're looking into secondary motion which is great, and you're definitely putting personality into characters with body language. One thing I will suggest is try using arcs more. For example, your motion for your characters is very move to one point move to the next seamlessly. This makes the character more robotic in a sense. Try arcing their motion by having them start quick, slow at the climax of motion, and stop suddenly. Another example would be the magazine of the gun falling. Instead of just hitting the floor and falling over, make it bounce up from the force of falling a little as it falls to its side. Little arcs like this make wonders in animation, 2-D or 3-D. Also don't be afraid to over exaggerate movement with characters. It may seem stupid, but trying to pull of an animation that will look exactly like a real person generally doesn't go over well, people accept exaggeration much more. A good example of this is when the inspector opened his lighter during the gun fight. He really flicked his hand in a large arc to open it instead a small one like a person would, but it's more believable to see that and more eye catching!
The lighting for me is interesting. I'm not sure if your putting a haze over everything to get a certain feel to the animation or not, but I'd say be careful. To me a lot of the brighter scenes get washed out because of this and you lose detail.
All in all I have to say this is good! Keep working at it and I'd like to see where you go with this!