Was it a Dream?

Member : Thax

Image description
Dreams are often dismissed as being impossible or unreal. However, sometimes there will come a vision that is dismissed the same way... This animation strives to depict such a vision... The man goes to sleep, and his mind is taken across the galaxy to another world. He sees an alien that gives him a warning about his planets fate... Waking up, he looks out the window, but seeing nothing, he dismissed it as just another dream. Little did he know.

Description of how this image was created
Well, Ok, here it is... My first total 3D animation! I do have some time between school and other activities, so here I am, with less than a day to spare! Most of the scenes in this were rendered in separate files, with a few exceptions... the last few were in one file using the convenient 'camera switcher' script that comes with Blender. The first scene is rather simply set up, the planet is a simple sphere surrounded by 3 partially transparent spheres to simulate the atmosphere. The title "dreams" was rendered separately with a directional blur. All of the fades to black were done by putting a shadeless black plane in front of the camera, and changing the alpha channel. I was very happy that version 2.49 of Blender included the ability to use Ambient Occlusion without raytracing... raytraced AO takes a long time to render. The lamps have a 'halo' effect on them, and the bushes were made with POV-Tree, a very simple tree generator. The actual trees I didn't want to take time on rendering, so I made an image in Gimp to use... they are a simple texture on a plane. Pillow deformation was done with shape-keys, though I almost used soft-body deformation. The next planet shot I used a halo set up for lens flare... yes, I went overboard with the effect, but I thought it came out cool. The city shot was created as a bunch of cubes with a good texture... the ships were mostly done with the particle system, but a few were key-framed. The temple shot was a huge experiment with animation for me... to see if I could get the walk of the alien soldiers to look good. The pedestal shot turned out to be a little short, but the flame is a simple moving clouds texture, and the alien on the hoverseat was used from an earlier project. The final dream shot, the alien face, is in my opinion, the worst looking, but it is also one of the most experimental for me... rigging and animating a face close up. Nothing special until the last shot... I gave an entire character an clouds alpha channel. I had to play with the light a lot in this shot, as the sun I used clearly outline my alien. In the end, I used a spot light with a negative effect to create an artificial darkness. Now I must say that 95% of everything in this is hand modeled by me in Blender. I don’t like to use the free models off the internet unless it perfectly fits or something; to me, that seems almost like cheating. The person was modeled in Make human. The aliens were hand modeled by me, and all other objects and environments were hand modeled. So there it is! It's not much, but I will be practicing my animation skills much... hopefully I can improve as much as I have in still creation. :)

General statistics
No of ratings	:	1
Min. overall rating	:	36 (12 / 10 / 14)
Max. overall rating	:	36 (12 / 10 / 14)
Sum of rating	:	36 / 60
Date uploaded	:	2009-12-16 23:54:58

Specific details Note: The maximum value below is misleading as the voting system has changed. If the member votes for all the entries and has created one him/herself, there is an automatic 20/20/20 score added to the value (This encourages all members who enter to vote).
Rating type	:	Min : Max : Sum : Out of
Artistic	:	12 : 12 : 12 : 20
Concept	:	10 : 10 : 10 : 20
Technical	:	14 : 14 : 14 : 20
Overall	:	36 : 36 : 36 : 60

Comments by members when rating this image

1.   31-12-2009 A great animation, only two small criticisms. I think that a few of the scenes are too short and move onto the next before your eye can take in what’s happening. The Make human is good but the face is too static in a few scenes for an animation close up. [SMcA]