my FIRST animation

[Master of Cards]

For the FIRST animation Contest my Robotic teams animation team (me, another guy, 2 laptops and an assload of dew) came up with Eco-Bot The theme for this contest was thinking Green
I did most of the modeling and some of the animation
Alan did most of the animating and some of the modeling
Troy did the voice

[Beowulf]

Wow that sucks.

[Master of Cards]

Wow that sucks.

Thanks for tcontryctive crits

[Beowulf]

Wow that sucks.

Thanks for tcontryctive crits

To be able to give constructive criticism requires that there be enough to criticize.

Avoid any talking in a FIRST animation. HS students can't do voice acting worth a damn. The 2002 National winner had no voice acting whatsoever, IIRC.

Eliminate the black outlines. Makes it look slightly cartoonish. With proper modelling and texturing, you don't need outlines to get your models to stick out.

Objects going through other objects is a big no no. Figure out someway to avoid it.

The hand drawn clouds look really cheesy.

The entire thing being inside a box also looks pretty horrible. Especially since it's set outside. It's not especially difficult to get a terrain around the setting, and then wrap the rest of your back ground onto a cylinder (not a box, you can see the edges).

Learn how to use BB code. The URL goes after the "=" sign, and the text goes between the tags.

[Master of Cards]

1) um no the last 4 years have had sound
2)should be there
3)was rushed
4)good aiming for that
5) that was the last render and didn't have time to fix

[Beowulf]

Fine, your VA can't voice act worth a damn. And I'm not saying no sound, I'm saying no talking. The competition is for a visual medium. If you need someone talking to get your point across, you need to rethink your idea.

Why the fuck should the outline be there? It makes it look amateurish. I just looked at the 2006 national honorable mention. Looks brilliant!

Was rushed. Yeah. Be unrushed.

Cheesy is bad. Cheesy doesn't win you nationals.

Then you shouldn't have done it that way in the first place! At the very least you could have stuck it in a big cylinder, so that you didn't have the edges of the box so damn visible.

[Master of Cards]

Fine, your VA can't voice act worth a damn. And I'm not saying no sound, I'm saying no talking. The competition is for a visual medium. If you need someone talking to get your point across, you need to rethink your idea.

Why the fuck should the outline be there? It makes it look amateurish. I just looked at the 2006 national honorable mention. Looks brilliant!

Was rushed. Yeah. Be unrushed.

Cheesy is bad. Cheesy doesn't win you nationals
Then you shouldn't have done it that way in the first place! At the very least you could have stuck it in a big cylinder, so that you didn't have the edges of the box so damn visible.

1) not arguing
2) We wanted cartoonly
3) give me a time machine
4)think what you want
5) the camera was changed last minute, the other camera didn't go like that

[Covenant]

Wait, you're trying to win a national competition with this?

Or is this for a school project or something?

If you want some constructive criticism you need to specify what you're interested in hearing back about. As it stands it's just sloppy, but if you want to improve it, give us a direction. Otherwise it's just going to sound like we're yelling at you.

[Master of Cards]

sloppy um yeah the editing and sound were rushed. Just any big problems withit really. Beowolf how do you know so much about FIRST animation?

[Beowulf]

sloppy um yeah the editing and sound were rushed. Just any big problems withit really. Beowolf how do you know so much about FIRST animation?

Because my friend made the one that won at Nationals in 2002. (Yeah, it was primarily done by one person). Oh, and I also played an integral role in completing the submission package, uncredited though I am.

And my name is Beowulf.

[salm]

Meh, i like the outlines on the houses and the drawn clouds. Putting it in a box was cool. All of this adds to the cool trashy factor of Ecobot. The recycling rings going through the houses? Doesn´t matter at all.

What i find problematic is the camera animation. You can´t see anything because the camera moves like a dragon fly on speed. If you want to make a camera flight the turns can be fast but be sure to stay on the relevant objects for a while.
This is a typical problem of unexperienced animators. Instead of sticking to one object for a couple of frames they move on right away and they also don´t know how to compensate for the "overrotations" that somethimes come up because they use the wrong In/Out Tangents on the relevant keyframes. You should get used to using the curve editor.

A minor issue is the ground texture in the forrest. Even though it´s supposed to be trashy this ugly tiling bothers me.
Then there´s the texture in the first image of the movie. The wall has the Max standard stucco material appllied. First it´s never good to use standard textures and second this particular material doesn´t fit into the clip at all. It´s got bump map applied making it look like it´s got depth while the rest of the movie has no such thing. All other textures are flat which is even more emphasized by the drawn and outlined models.

Stylewise i think it´s quite good. 3D skill wise it´s, well, how should i put it.... your first animation.


<edit>What contest was this for?</edit>

[Covenant]

Big problems? The biggest problem is that it's just not good. Never go for cheesy, trashy and ugly.

You want to use those as style points, not do them. There's a difference between something that is supposed to look kinda cheesy and therefore becomes a stylish piece of animation and something that actually IS cheesy and just sucks.

Really, it goes too fast, there's really no animation, the box doesn't look good (it's not a worldcube, it's a box) and the soundwork is lousy. I can't imagine this would win a competition for anything. If so, please tell me what, so I can win it.

Don't rush. It looks rushed. It WAS rushed. So... you want to get points for that? Nobody cares if you rushed it, they just care how it looks. If it looks bad then they'll treat it as if it was bad.

SLOW IT DOWN. It moves too fast. Things go through things. Like the legs on that box ship--they should not penetrate into the ground like that. Clipping is bad! And you never see the robot at all. All it does is float down the ramp, and then a purple ring flies out of it's chest. That's the extent of the animation here. It needs a lot more. If you went back and spent one more day, you could DOUBLE the amount of animation involved, and it would suck a lot less.

[salm]

Big problems? The biggest problem is that it's just not good. Never go for cheesy, trashy and ugly.

Why not? Trash rocks. Here´s a clip of one of my favorite trash artists. He presented this as an uni project, i think two semesters ago. That was a good laugh. Admitiedly he´s got a better soundtrack.

Scars - destroidetroyd

<edit>The legs of the ship don´t clip into the ground, they sink into the ground because the ship is so heavy. </edit>

[Beowulf]

Description of the competition.

Link to the 2002 award winner. Also on google

[Master of Cards]

Description of the competition.

Link to the 2002 award winner. Also on google

He won for one reason, his modeling is some of the best I have ever seen, fluid motions and all, and its ckind of odd one board I go to they like it a lot, and you guys are ripping it to sheards

[salm]

Description of the competition.

Link to the 2002 award winner. Also on google

He won for one reason, his modeling is some of the best I have ever seen, fluid motions and all, and its ckind of odd one board I go to they like it a lot, and you guys are ripping it to sheards

Well, the modelling is really good for a highschooler but it´s not that awesome.
This didn´t win just because of the modelling. This is a solid package of everything. The modelling is good, the animation is very nice (nice camera flights, nice use of IK, the chain that drives the robot are well done, some use of reactor) and the lighting and rendering is ok, too

[Beowulf]

He won because his looks professional. It's not just the modeling, but also how he animated it, and his avoidance of things that would show his limitations. He couldn't voice act, so there's not voices, just the music and the foley noises.

I'm ripping yours to shreds because yours doesn't look professional, but rather extremely amateurish.

[Covenant]

Right. His modelling talents are just basic. He can model a machine. So? It's just a machine. Machines are easy to model. There's nothing simpler than an inorganic shape. If you put robots or spaceships on your demo reel, and they're not dancing a fucking polka, you're going to be tossed out before they see anything else. Making a little erector-set robot that tosses a ball? Not hard.

But he did it nicely. It was crisp. The lighting and rendering were slick and clean. The textures fit and gave a good sense of perspective. He used some creative scene creation to give a feeling to it... though I still have no idea what the goddam ballbot was. Regardless, he tackled something he felt he could do, and he did it professionally.

Frankly, that other board that's telling you it's good? They're full of shit. You're probably talking to a bunch of other amatuerish animators and modellers who aren't being as critical as they should because their level of work is similarly low.

The fact that you just attempt to justify everything shows me that you're not ready for actual criticism. You just want us to go "That's good!" or some bullshit like that. But it's not. Even great animations can get better, and yours is sloppy and unpolished. Get over yourself!

Here are my criticisms in chronological order:

1| Lighting in the first scene is no good. That black spot at the top with the flat lighting on the box below? C'mon, Max has rayshading! Use it! There's no reason for a black box either. Everything should have a texture.

2| That shot of the forest is boring. Move the camera, add some lighting, some birds in the sky, something. It's dead. There's no reason to have that scene except as filler and as shows. Do some kind of fancy lighting. Eye-level looking up through the arching bows of the trees with the sun glinting between the blades. Something.

3| Are those boxes factories? Robots? They just look like a pile of boxes with tubes. It makes zero sense.

4| At 6 seconds you can see a yellow plane where there should be a texture. Bad! Fix this amateurish sloppy shit! Put a texture there!

5| The box is way too 'close' to the trees. Put us on a hill or something. You want a cubeworld sky? Fine. Make it look a bit bigger than a mile on each side. It's way too small and just looks strange. Not 'cartoony' or 'campy' or 'cheesy.' It looks bad. Like you didn't know it was easy to do better.

6| At 8 seconds you can see a BLACK PLANE. At the far wall. What the hell. Fix this bullshit.

7| These boxmonsters need to do more than just fly into each other. They should cough out smoke from those tubes or something. And shrinking the trees into the floor is not a good way to make them 'disappear.' It looks super-sloppy. Can't you key their visibility? Or at least clean up the keys you have? Talk about 5 minutes of work that'd make a big difference. Especially if instead of just making the trees disappear, the boxes knocked them over.

8| You should get a better, less repeating grass texture.

9| When EcoBot lands, the ship successfully flies out from behind the clouds, but the background looks bizzare in that scene. Also, don't have the legs look so stiff. If they dig into the ground because of weight (which is nearly moronic when you consider their corklike shape) then you should at least have the legs flex a bit. Your ship is not made of out neutronium.

10| Ecobot slides out of a white plane? Come on. Model some more interior and flood it with a light source.

11| Let us see the robot more. For an animation about Ecobot, we only see him for like 2 seconds. His arms are so goddamn stiff too. I doubt you even rigged him for animation with bones, eh? A little bit of arm flex would have been so much nicer than this 'Coat hanger on a trashcan' look. The arms don't even bounce and flex the way coathangers would. That mighta' actually been funny... if Ecobot had been a crappily-made robot with a body of a trashcan, and a cape. With a clotheshanger 'rabbit ears' anntenae on his head.

12| The 'Eco Rings' are pretty cheesy, but eh, personal choice. The explosion, however, is kinda odd. What's with those rings and the disappearing? You need to ad some fade, and if that's smoke, you need to add some lighting effects or something. Don't get lazy on your money-shot.

13| Shakeycam of trees regrowing? Can't you at least let us see some of that? And why does it look like they're spinning around like a top? There's some serious wierdness going on there. Instead of showing all that gross stuff, a single sprout poking through the blasted wasteland the Industrials left would have been better. And it could have been more emotionally powerful. Show, don't tell. Like in writing. You can imply the rebirth of the forest by showing a seedling, you don't need to show the whole damn forest regrowing and say "THE FOREST R REGROWED" just to get the point across.

14| The last shot is the least offensive. The hold shot on the earth could be done better though--try to get the earth inside of the lambda arrow symbol of recycling rather than clipping through it. The Earth also looks slightly warped--get it to be a sphere.

[Master of Cards]

Right. His modelling talents are just basic. He can model a machine. So? It's just a machine. Machines are easy to model. There's nothing simpler than an inorganic shape. If you put robots or spaceships on your demo reel, and they're not dancing a fucking polka, you're going to be tossed out before they see anything else. Making a little erector-set robot that tosses a ball? Not hard.

But he did it nicely. It was crisp. The lighting and rendering were slick and clean. The textures fit and gave a good sense of perspective. He used some creative scene creation to give a feeling to it... though I still have no idea what the goddam ballbot was. Regardless, he tackled something he felt he could do, and he did it professionally.

Frankly, that other board that's telling you it's good? They're full of shit. You're probably talking to a bunch of other amatuerish animators and modellers who aren't being as critical as they should because their level of work is similarly low.

The fact that you just attempt to justify everything shows me that you're not ready for actual criticism. You just want us to go "That's good!" or some bullshit like that. But it's not. Even great animations can get better, and yours is sloppy and unpolished. Get over yourself!

Here are my criticisms in chronological order:

1| Lighting in the first scene is no good. That black spot at the top with the flat lighting on the box below? C'mon, Max has rayshading! Use it! There's no reason for a black box either. Everything should have a texture.

2| That shot of the forest is boring. Move the camera, add some lighting, some birds in the sky, something. It's dead. There's no reason to have that scene except as filler and as shows. Do some kind of fancy lighting. Eye-level looking up through the arching bows of the trees with the sun glinting between the blades. Something.

3| Are those boxes factories? Robots? They just look like a pile of boxes with tubes. It makes zero sense.

4| At 6 seconds you can see a yellow plane where there should be a texture. Bad! Fix this amateurish sloppy shit! Put a texture there!

5| The box is way too 'close' to the trees. Put us on a hill or something. You want a cubeworld sky? Fine. Make it look a bit bigger than a mile on each side. It's way too small and just looks strange. Not 'cartoony' or 'campy' or 'cheesy.' It looks bad. Like you didn't know it was easy to do better.

6| At 8 seconds you can see a BLACK PLANE. At the far wall. What the hell. Fix this bullshit.

7| These boxmonsters need to do more than just fly into each other. They should cough out smoke from those tubes or something. And shrinking the trees into the floor is not a good way to make them 'disappear.' It looks super-sloppy. Can't you key their visibility? Or at least clean up the keys you have? Talk about 5 minutes of work that'd make a big difference. Especially if instead of just making the trees disappear, the boxes knocked them over.

8| You should get a better, less repeating grass texture.

9| When EcoBot lands, the ship successfully flies out from behind the clouds, but the background looks bizzare in that scene. Also, don't have the legs look so stiff. If they dig into the ground because of weight (which is nearly moronic when you consider their corklike shape) then you should at least have the legs flex a bit. Your ship is not made of out neutronium.

10| Ecobot slides out of a white plane? Come on. Model some more interior and flood it with a light source.

11| Let us see the robot more. For an animation about Ecobot, we only see him for like 2 seconds. His arms are so goddamn stiff too. I doubt you even rigged him for animation with bones, eh? A little bit of arm flex would have been so much nicer than this 'Coat hanger on a trashcan' look. The arms don't even bounce and flex the way coathangers would. That mighta' actually been funny... if Ecobot had been a crappily-made robot with a body of a trashcan, and a cape. With a clotheshanger 'rabbit ears' anntenae on his head.

12| The 'Eco Rings' are pretty cheesy, but eh, personal choice. The explosion, however, is kinda odd. What's with those rings and the disappearing? You need to ad some fade, and if that's smoke, you need to add some lighting effects or something. Don't get lazy on your money-shot.

13| Shakeycam of trees regrowing? Can't you at least let us see some of that? And why does it look like they're spinning around like a top? There's some serious wierdness going on there. Instead of showing all that gross stuff, a single sprout poking through the blasted wasteland the Industrials left would have been better. And it could have been more emotionally powerful. Show, don't tell. Like in writing. You can imply the rebirth of the forest by showing a seedling, you don't need to show the whole damn forest regrowing and say "THE FOREST R REGROWED" just to get the point across.

14| The last shot is the least offensive. The hold shot on the earth could be done better though--try to get the earth inside of the lambda arrow symbol of recycling rather than clipping through it. The Earth also looks slightly warped--get it to be a sphere.

1) Just a title screen
2)should have, spent too much time on the animations of the rings,
3)factories "eating" the forest
4)plane was flipped the render was too long to redo to put it in
5)more time for rendering and fixing in planning would have allowed us to change that
6)same as number 4
7)no aruging from me
ino arguement
9)in what way?
10) um no this was rushed as is we could not make an interior that fast that looked good
11)we didn't, that would have been good
12 :Yawn:
13) time issuse because it has a hard limit of 30 seconds
14) the renderer got fucked up and wasn't showing spheres right, that was a last second addon to go with the VO