...........
Speechless. Simply speechless. Stunning. Amazing. Perfection in every way. Superb animation and excellent sound design. Well done, sir. Well done. There are not enough kudos I can possibly give.
Reviews for "Sinmara Saga"
Holy shit this animation is amazing.
Do you realize how much I've been looking around, trying to find good cel-shaded 3D character animation that's indistinguishable from 2D sakuga animation?
Sanzigen has come close, but no cigar for them. Polygon Pictures hasn't achieved it. Graphinica had tons of slip-ups with Rakuen; they showed it could be done on a feature film level with great results, but it was still obvious they were just interpolating actions and taking out frames. Even Orange's recent Star Fox short betrayed itself as obvious CGI.
And here you are, beating the entire Japanese CGI industry out with an amateur short modeled around a RPG encounter. You have struck gold without knowing it.
Really, I want to know more about how you and your team made this short, since I'm trying to do something similar. The shading still needs work (as always), but it's not noticeable as in professional productions. You also pose and space out the characters enough in motion to get the stop-motion effect that many fail to properly replicate, without it appearing jittery. Choreography didn't impress me that much, but the fact you pulled it off in 3D is amazing in itself. Editing and cinematography is great and matches that of anime. The 2D effects really sell the illusion that it's 2D; praise to your effects animators for that. And of course having good knowledge of 2D itself was your greatest asset, love how the eyes were smeared around 1:30.
A few nitpicks I reserve here and there, but they're mostly subjective and don't impact your achievement.
500/5 for exceptional, revolutionary work. Are you open to questions?
Jason-H responds:
Yeah go bananas! I've been messing with figuring out toonshading for the past two years since I personally always thought it looked pretty poor even in some professional productions. Either it's mocap or just badly animated. My guess is the schedule is too intense in japan because the talent is there for sure.
It's also pretty dead in terms of people figuring it out in the West. I don't really know anyone else who's really messing with it other than a few indie studios here and there. It's kicking though in Japan and there's a few companie doing a killer job like the work on Guilty Gear XRD and such.
If you're curious I have an older experiment with it from last year that you can check out here. It's more on the roto side instead of a standard 3d shader.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jev9_BZBmhw
What a fantastic animation! In addition to the fluidity of the action, the expressions were particularly great. Nice use of a limited palette for the backgrounds too.
Jason-H responds:
thanks!
Amazing! I love the combat and how the character, Skarr reacted to the situation. Everything is so fluent moving and the music fits very well. But there's just one thing throwing me off, Sinmara's hair, it's just like Elsa's hair but black. I wonder if you used her hair for that 3D model and changed the colors? It's kinda throwing me off a bit but its fiine.
Jason-H responds:
She does resemble Elsa but it wasn't intended at all. It just sorta happened that way during creation. I know a few people at Disney thought so too.
2 words: game genie. Would love to see the player apply this in the fight and watch how the tables have turned.