Lana's Kata Fail (NSFW)

Lana's Kata Fail

A short animation which will ultimately be part of a longer production.

This introduces the main character, Lana Fisher, a dancer from the UK living in a flat in New York. She lives with "a friend" although I am yet to establish the nature of that friendship.

And I manage to squeeze all of that into 90 seconds. How's that for story telling?

She looks like she is floating in a few places, needs some shadow to anchor to the floor.

Yea it doesnt look very natural the way she is slightly floating above the floor and sliding around on it. But other than that it looks awesome.

Cheers Ken. Shadow is very tricky in 3D as, in real life, unless you are in direct sunlight in space with nothing to reflect light off you seldom get a crisp shadow. Inside, with many windows and no direct sunlight you get very little shadow, especially with a light wooden floor. There is a diffuse shadow on the floor but with such a large window area and the sun so low I didn't want to over do it.

The scene is actually illuminated with 5 lights, only one casting shadow and the rest to reproduce the light which would otherwise bounce around inside of the room. Its a lot like trying to get the look of daylight in a total dark room using only strobes.

You can generate a much more realistic lighting effect with fully raytraced lights and multiple passes but such images can take hours to render an individual image. Not much good when you need 25 images for 1second of animation, so you do have to cheat.

Part of that cheating includes compositing and chroma keying just as you would for standard "green screen" work. The compositing is easier in the fully 3D environment as you don't have to camera and light match to the same degree as often you use the same cameras and lights with more or less detail in each layer of shot.

The floating is a result of dirty animation going from one key framed pose to another allowing the software to mainly fill in the intermediate frames. Without motion capture it is incredibly time consuming to avoid some slip. Worse than slip are limbs passing through each other or going below the surface of the floor which I just about avoided.

Well done chaps on sporting two of the most difficult aspects of 3D animation .

It is only a project for my amusement and when on the clock (subject to budget) such things can receive greater attention. Unfortunately its a bit like tuning a car, the better it gets the more, and more , time is required to get marginal improvements.

look at the positive, you got the story told in 90 secs

Not too bad... but a lil too second lifey for me.