Dominance War V - Animation - God of Negotiation - Squarefighter

[squarefighter]

Message from the God:

"Too long have I seen thousands upon thousands of my followers being sent to the netherworlds by senseless fighting. Pride, greed, and bigotry... This kind of pettiness causes my worshipers to fall victim to the gods of war and death. Prayers and tributes from my followers give me strength, therefore I need them alive and well. I will intervene on their quarrels, to prevent the unnecessary bloodshed. And word of my existence will spread to every battlefield, until all know and await the coming of The God of Mediating and Negotiation!"

Final Animation:
<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24149711?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="398" height="224" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[squarefighter]

I'll be using the dragon model made by yung.

Behold, my poorly drawn, haphazardly thrown together concept sketches!

[washka]

Gl with your entry man, theme seems really funny.

[Puckducker]

Love the idea. I think if you really play up the comedy of the piece you could have something really great. It's almost a full little story.

[squarefighter]

Thanks guys. I'm really looking forward to it. Hopefully I'll do it right and it'll be really funny. But if I do it wrong, it'll just end up kind of anti-climactic and boring.

Here's a couple models I dug up that meet the low-poly requirements for the characters. I thought it said 700, but it says 750 triangles, so I can add a little to each of them, but not much.

If the weather's nice tomorrow, I'll run around my backyard for a while to get some good reference material. Maybe I'll post some if it's not too embarrassing ;P

[squarefighter]

Anybody have any suggestions for rigging up a dragon's wing(in Maya)? I'm trying a few different solutions, but I saw this one that's pretty amazing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6fUaurdFho&feature=related

Any idea how I'd get that to work? Does nCloth work with joints and binding that easily?

[squarefighter]

All set on this guy. Now I just have to set up the other characters, figure out how I'm going to make the audio track, and do some simple low-poly scene modeling. Then I can actually start animating!

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/22347260?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;autoplay=0" width="398" height="299" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[squarefighter]

I really should read the rules 10 times before I start a competition... I missed the bit in the first rule about no pre-made base meshes. So I can't use either of those two figures I posted before.

It didn't take to long to model and rig a new character, though. Here he is, all 746 triangles of him. I was able to rig it up really quickly, since the low resolution means I could skip a lot of my standard rigging procedures.

I shouldn't need to do any more rigging for this project, so I'm going to focus on the audio. I downloaded a trial version of Adobe Audition and I'm watching some tutorial videos about it. Hopefully I can figure it out and find some good audio clips to enhance my animation.

[squarefighter]

Tremble before the powerful, low-poly army!

I'm thinking like, 20 on each side will be good. Probably just 6 different idle and run cycles for the lot.

[washka]

Nice work so far, too bad for the rules, I think there is meshes you can dispose of. Hope you'll negociate enough time to get your 8 plans. But once you've rig god and two capitains you'll have your basis.
Keep it up!

[squarefighter]

Thanks to Big Toe for restoring my thread. Here's some nonsense I'm working on:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/22675343?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;autoplay=0" width="398" height="234" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[hulahuga]

This sounds great! Make sure you do all the actions and poses in fun and relaxed ways and I think the comedy part will be killer :). Very cliché story, but as I said make it fun all way through and this will be great!

[squarefighter]

I've got the extra character set up for the intro, now I have to get the main dragon's entrance figured out. :wall: Anybody know a good movie I could get some source reference for a giant crack opening up in the ground? Maybe a disaster movie like 2012 or something.

I'll have to go back and work on the captains, clean up their animations and make them stand out a little better. But right now everything is a jumble of keyframe and trax data, so I'll bake it all out and clean it up at the end.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23389259?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0&amp;autoplay=0" width="398" height="239" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[squarefighter]

Here's an update on my animation. It's coming along, but I'm definitely going to take advantage of the extra week to finish. I'll have time to animate all the extra soldiers now.

The part where the two soldiers are running at each other will keep the captains in frame, eventually. Right now I keep tweaking things and it gets off every time I change something. But it should work out in the final camera.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23696471?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="398" height="219" frameborder="0"></iframe>

[Puckducker]

Love the part where the one dude falls down the crack. Lots of little nice animation detail in there, really sells.

[Pockets]

I agree with puckducker, i also like that part. i like the idea here, the juxtaposition of the big demon like figure with the idea of peace made me chuckle :haha:

[squarefighter]

Well, it's finally over. Hopefully the glitch is fixed that doesn't allow embeding from vimeo... Or they'll let me re-submit the youtube link. In about 15 minutes I'm going to start missing votes... But here's my final animation. I posted it at the top of the tread too, for ease of access.

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/24149711?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="398" height="224" frameborder="0"></iframe>

Good luck to everyone!