Attempt at Alternative/Placeholder Intro Animation

[SoulRipper]

Long story shorter: (in other words, the stuff you don't need to read if your in a hurry)
A week ago or so i decided to move my lazy butt and broaden my horizons by finally learning some 3d. So i got myself a copy of Blender and went on to learn something new about it every day. Some two days ago i finally got to the point where i wanted to learn the basics of Animation in Blender. And since i wanted to avoid making those standard animations with cubes flying around, i figured, "hey, why not use some Alien Invasion models?". Some rendering hours later, here i am, writing about it.

First, here's the link to the video file. I propose downloading while reading, since i had to put it on my private FTP that my ISP is giving me (the file size was too big to attach it, 25,4 MB). So i cannot guarantee good download speeds. (Especially for people on the other side of the big pond).

http://soulrip.neostrada.pl/IntroRender02PP.7z
Also, a Megaupload link.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZVO3HD4V

To the point: (in other words, the stuff you wanna read)
Basically i was attempting something from which i could learn Animation, and also something that you might be able to use.
I got my inspiration form the intro animation lying around in the SVN Trunk, it was made by Destructivator if i remember correctly. Anyway, do keep in mind that its very much work in progress, comments are much appreciated. I used the model of the UFO Bomber by sitters, hope that's alright (my favorite UFO model btw). Im not sure how much time i can spend on expanding this animation (time issues), but the general idea is to suggest that whats shown on the video is the attack on Mumbai.

Now, while making this short clip i stumbled upon some general issues which would be very usefull to resolve for future Developers/Animatiors/Artists in general.

First off all:
1- What size are the spaceships and jets in relation to each other? (I do remember seeing a size comparison by Destructivator somewhere on the forum, but cannot find it anymore somehow).
2- What propulsion do the Aliens use? I read up they use Antimatter engines, but what does that mean from a design standpoint of view? I'm especially interested how the engine "residue" should look. I'm not too happy with the particle effect i used in this animation, but on the other hand, don't know what i should be aiming for.
3- Those "green elements" on the UFO's, i read up that they are supposedely some kind of heat expulsion mechanism, but how are they supposed to look? Should they emit some kind of green light? Or maybe particles?
4- Also, engines on the Bomber and for instance Scout look quite different. Should the effect applied to them look different?
5- Fromt what i read on the wiki, 6 ships landed in Mumbai, what class where those ships?
6- Should Animations be made in PAL/NTSC or HD resolutions? Im talking about the aspect ratio here. HD resolutions are probably more future proof.

Some of my personal remarks:

1- I dont really like the Planet, i downloaded it from some Blender resource site. It was licensed on some kind of free license, but i would like to create my own Earth anyway. Since the texture used in that file didnt allow me to scale the mudball up, i had to use camrea tricks to make it seem big.

2- The end of the clip is the epitomy of "Work in Progress", i didnt want to heat up my 2d editing program just yet. Btw, do you have a special font for the UFO: Alien Invasion logo? The one in the Top-Left corner of the website, or on the wallpapers.

3- Somewhere around frame 970, i can see some strange anomaly at the right corner of the screen, i have no idea yet what might cause those little green particles to be displayed, but i'll have to fix it.

4- The next step in the Animation is to show a group of smaller craft being on route to Earth after the UFO Bomber passes by.

5- I would like to try and avoid ground scenes as long as i can since im still a newbie to Blender.

6- I guess i overdid it with the "dark ambience", since i assume not many people are even able to distinguish stars in the background. (My monitor settings are pretty bright)

Puh, i guess that was it. Sorry for the long post. Hope somebody reads this!

[Destructavator]

I'm glad someone stepped up to the plate and is trying to help out with cinematic animations, congratulations.  The old one I threw together that's in the game right now was indeed temporary.

I use Blender too, if you run into difficulties with it I can help out with the animation stuff.

I'm also glad that someone else is willing to do some video clips because that leaves me with less work to do - and I've already got enough to do with other stuff.   

I'll take a look at this in a short bit then come back to comment on the actual video.

[Destructavator]

OK, After watching, these are my thoughts right off the top of my head:

1) First, don't use SUPER software to convert things, I've tried it and looked at it before, its trojan-ware that's rather sneaky.  I'd suggest using WinFF for video conversion, which is free and totally clean, based off of FFMPEG and cross-platform.  http://winff.org/html_new/

2) Text is OK in video clips - as a final end-result in an overlay only.  What I mean by that is that this game is offered in over a dozen languages, and the video files should not actually contain text, just places where text will go when the game overlays them on top of the video the player will see, so that the video clips don't have to contain text in all the possible languages and we don't end up have many versions of every video for every language.  While designing the video it makes sense to temporarily have text in there so we know where the game will end up putting it, but the final product shouldn't have it.  (I hope that makes sense.)

3) As for resolution, don't worry about it for now, just render them in high-quality to start with, and when the final product comes it will be converted to RoQ or OGM anyways, and at that point it can be scaled down from just about any other format.

Last but not least, I think that was pretty good for someone new to Blender!  

P.S. - Winter is really in charge of Artwork, I'm hoping he'll comment soon.

[Mattn]

for UFO:Alien Invasion, please use this font http://ufoai.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ufoai/ufoai/trunk/contrib/7th.zip

and for the text in the intro... as destructavator said already, not baked into the clip please. we should use the sequences (see wiki/scripting) for this and place the intro into the background. (not yet implemented but should not be that hard)

[SoulRipper]

OK, After watching, these are my thoughts right off the top of my head:

2) Text is OK in video clips - as a final end-result in an overlay only.  What I mean by that is that this game is offered in over a dozen languages, and the video files should not actually contain text, just places where text will go when the game overlays them on top of the video the player will see, so that the video clips don't have to contain text in all the possible languages and we don't end up have many versions of every video for every language.  While designing the video it makes sense to temporarily have text in there so we know where the game will end up putting it, but the final product shouldn't have it.  (I hope that makes sense.)

Makes very much sense, in fact i just made the text in the video to see how it could look. I predicted that a game project with so many translations would need some other solution. But it helps to slap some lines onto the video while designing it, so i can see how much "time" i need in the intro to display the text.

3) As for resolution, don't worry about it for now, just render them in high-quality to start with, and when the final product comes it will be converted to RoQ or OGM anyways, and at that point it can be scaled down from just about any other format.

I was more interested in the Aspect Ratio i should use. Since it would be wise to decide early on how to set the camera aspect ratio in Blender. if i set it to widescreen it will catch more footage on the sides, and less on top of the screen, and that would be good to know so i can plan the actual scenes better.
    Also, depending on what Aspect Ratio i use, the video will display differently for users in the game later. If i make the video in 4:3 normal resolution, it will display ok on native resolution, but will have black borders on the sides with a 16:9/10 screen. Now if i make the Video in 16:9 to begin with, users of 4:3 will just have some borders on top of the screen, which i personally think are much better than the ones on the sides, or worst case, a deformed picture if it transforms it to fit fullscreen. (See Attachement) Im ofcourse assuming the video will be scaled up in-game to fullscreen later.

for UFO:Alien Invasion, please use this font http://ufoai.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ufoai/ufoai/trunk/contrib/7th.zip

and for the text in the intro... as destructavator said already, not baked into the clip please. we should use the sequences (see wiki/scripting) for this and place the intro into the background. (not yet implemented but should not be that hard)

Thx for the Font, it'll come in handy later. About the text, as i explained above, its there for testing purposes. I also hope somebody will be able to answer some of the more Designish questions. About scale and engine exhausts. Ah, and also one thing, i didnt find a good engine sound for the Video in the Trunk, so i took one from here http://www.freesound.org/ for testing purposes. Im not so good with the licensing, but would be nice if somebody more experience in that area could tell me if we could use some of the sounds by the artists there. Here's the legal page on there http://www.freesound.org/legal.php

[Mattn]

the final video should be in a power of two resolution - it will be scaled by opengl later - 16:9 is fine, would let us e.g. add subtitles to the video, but even fullscreen is fine. you should only keep in mind the power of two stuff, otherwise every frame must be scaled in software, which is quite expensive.

[SoulRipper]

Yesterday i was making some attempts at creating something along the lines of a skyscraper for use in later City Scenes. In general i would prefer not to show too much city terrain (a lot of modelling and rendering), but yeah, i tried anyway. Now, i went a little overboard and the model is too high poly to use in game, and is a bit** to render. But maybe somebody could use a high quality render once its finished, for a loading screen or ufopedia perhaps? Well, tell me what you think.

I attached the actual picture of the building from mumbai that i used as reference and some renders.

Edit: Its still untextured, and not everything has been optimized for performance yet. Oh, and it isn't even finished yet, its still missing the basement section and some additions in the middle.

[Mattn]

i like it - create more of these and do not forget to share your source files and textures

[Destructavator]

Look beautiful - we actually do need models such as these for video clips, cutscenes, etc.

On a related note, I got your PM - The city generator script I used before works for large numbers of buildings viewed from a distance, but is very low-quality which doesn't make it too suitable for most of the video clips we would need for this game.  If you want to play with it anyways, its called "Suicidator" and is found at:

http://arnaud.ile.nc/sce/

If you need an upload space for your models you can email them to me if they're under ~20 MB in size and I'll add them to the SVN, or if they're larger send me a PM and I'll see about setting up an upload space if you really need it.

P.S. - Please also pick a license, GPL would probably be best but Creative Commons might also work.

Edit:  If you go with GPL we do have GPL building graphic textures in the SVN, walls, floors, etc., that you might find useful if you would really want them.

[SoulRipper]

About the licensing, would attaching this too all my stuff do fine? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.txt
Im not too experienced with licensing, so i'd rather ask. And about those textures, i'll certainly take a look at them if i get to texturing. If i need to create some of my own i'll attach them with the license ofcourse.

About that webspace, in that case i'll send you the *.blend file and all the necessary textures once it's ready. I just want to make sure that everybody who might take an interest in using some of those is able to easily acquire them without waiting for me send them over.

BTW: Thx for the script, it should help out with the animation.