Dust to Dust Trailer

[Siliconmaster]

Hey everyone,

It's been a while, but our semi-machinima series is definitely still in progress. We made a new trailer over the summer, which took forever to render, but it's finally done and we feel it's ready for release. This time we focused more on the look and feel of the planned series rather than specific plot elements, like we did with our original trailer. In addition, it is now fully animated, so everything looks a lot better than it used to. Thanks to Whiplash Daemon for the animating, as well as Ice Dragon for the city set itself.

We have 3 different resolutions:

High: http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/...h_Res.wmv.html

Medium: http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/...m_Res.wmv.html

Low: http://useruploads.mythica.org/view/...l_Res.wmv.html

Comments and feedback are welcomed.

Also, as a note, we are looking to expand the team to try to overcome the crippling process of set building and animating. At the current time we are open for anyone interested in modeling sets for us in 3ds max. It would help greatly to have texturing experience as well, but is not necessary.

My email is siliconmaster482@gmail.com, or you can PM me if you're interested.

[~ZMT~Trace]

Its nice, but my only complaints are the cars moved too fast, it should of had more cars, & the Spartans should of been "fidgeting". (leaning back & forth & ect)

[FRain]

Spartans were motionless. Unless they are stuffed creations, they should have been breathing back and forth (leaning like trace said).

[SnaFuBAR]

It was ok. I'm not sure if the Spartans were supposed to be totally clueless about the cruiser above or what, and what was supposed to be happening.

[Siliconmaster]

Truthfully, I'm not surprised that these issues have been brought up. :P When we were animating it, or rather, when Whiplash was animating it, we wanted to focus on the feel, the style, and the world, instead of the storyline. We sort of tried that before, and, partly due to my mish-mash of trailer and partly because it wasn't planned as well as it should have been, it wasn't received quite as well as we had hoped. This is our "we'll play it safe on the symbolism and stuff" version.

First of all, the comments about the Spartans are dead-on. I had hoped for some movement, but by the time I pointed that out to Whiplash we were already moving into the rendering process and the decision was made to leave it the way it as. As for them reacting to the cruiser, the original plan was to have a shadow fall over the area, and the civilians look up before the camera did its upward pan. However, due to the same time restraints that was left out as well. There are elements of the storyline throughout that trailer, not necessarily in the same order as it will be, but certainly as a mindset.

As for the cars... you'd have to ask Whiplash about that.

If you are interested in the story, there's a general overview on our website. Just click my sig.

Thanks for the comments.

[SnaFuBAR]

I'll be dead honest with you about the trailer. I only saw noticed a few things, which you could say are the trailer in whole.

1) moving camera
2) moving cars/pelicans
3) used and re-used music from halo
4) unclear noise from the TV being watched

how long did that little take?

[Kalub]

Your kidding... all this time, and this is all you accomplished?

I'm definitely with Snaf here, all you had was an over used Camera Pan, some fades, text, some cars that were moving way to fast, and some pelicans. It seemed everything was "stiff" too, like it didn't have any lifeblood to it at all.

Can I ask what methods you used to animate this? Was it just a simple move the slider set a key, repeat, or was it a dynamic operation, with path modifiers, dummies, and other things like that?

[DaneO'Roo]

That animation can be done within mere minutes. That isn't debatable either btw.

[Siliconmaster]

Unfortunately, I do not know exactly how it was animated. I act as the writer, and the general director. I gave Whiplash a description of what I was looking for, and he came back with this. The obnoxious thing about the animation was not the animating itself- in truth I don't think it took more than a few days max. I'm not sure why we never got the bipeds to move. Before that we spent quite a long time getting the textures looking good- that, along with the rendering, took the longest. We're using vray, and each frame is going at 5 minutes or so. Mix that with a computer that only wants to render 100 frames at a time, and you get 3 months of rendering when it should have taken far, far less. I would love if we could get more people to speed things up. I'd rather not have the series itself with stuff left behind and overlooked. And as for the Halo music, we're using all public domain and custom music from here on out. I liked that music though, and decided to work it in.

Now that we have everything prepared texture-wise, etc., we are working on the first episode, or were when Whiplash's internet died. Hopefully he'll regain it soon s we can continue. In the meanwhile I'm trying to se if we can find a way for him to work offline on the project.

[DaneO'Roo]

Vray fucking fails.........

Don't let Whip pull that shitty argument on you. Mental Ray is better, and Mental Ray plus Mayas hypershade is godlike.

Also, why did that take him days to animate? I've done shitty maya practice animation that was more advanced than that, and it took me a whole couple of hours. Not worthy of posting, so I never did.