Shark Animation and Stills

[CarlS]

Here are four stills from an animation I did using a terrain generated in GeoControl.

http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_05s22f.jpg

http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_12s23f.jpg

http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_16s14f.jpg

http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_29s21f.jpg

In the GeoControl Project Presets, the Smeary Ring Displacement in the Layer Methods section was used to produce the seafloor.

The shark was modeled in Amapi, mapped in UnWrap3D, and textured using Photoshop.
I used programs I've been developing to create the swimming robot skeleton inside a Carrara file.
The skeleton file and the shark model were imported into Carrara 5 for rendering.



The original 30 second animation was 168 MB.

Here is a zip of the animation compressed as a 2 MB DivX file (http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_grey_test3d_ces_divx.zip).

For anyone that cannot play the DivX format, here is a 9 MB zip of the 14 MB compressed avi file (http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_grey_test3d_ces_cine.zip).

For anyone who has problems with zip files, here is the original 14 MB compressed avi file (http://www.carls-corner.com/animations/sea_life/Shark/shark_05_grey_test3d_ces_cine.avi).


Thanks for looking,
--Carl

[cajomi]

I stongly recommend to look at the animation, and not the stills. While the stills look a bit -- well not so interesting, the animation is a totally different thing.
The shark looks very convincing, and the underwater landscape looks very realistic.
For me, this a good example to understand, that animations are totally different from stills.
Of course, here are some colours and different plants missing, but this may come and is a question of render time.

[RealUser]

Way cool animation! Looks very good, the caustics, the ground and the smooth moves of the shark. Great!

[monks]

Wow! You've got the shark movement perfect. I think adding a little more variation to the shark's movement- small change of speed maybe would make it seem like it is reacting to the enviroment more.

monks

[CarlS]

Hello Johannes, RealUser, and Monks, and thank you very much for your responses.

First off, I should mention that this thread should probably be moved to the GeoControl 1 Gallery forum since that was the version of the software used. My apologies for any confusion, but when I posted this, the GeoControl 1 Gallery had not been created yet.

There will be an updated version of this later on with the greater variety of color and plant life that Johannes mentioned.

RealUser, the caustics were produced using the Caustics Generator (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/), one of my favorite freebies.

Hi Monks, the shark robot was moving with the anguilliform swimming motion used by sharks and eels, but the center of mass was still moving in a straight line for this animation, with no interaction with its environment. The current version of the software reads in a file describing the boundaries of an enclosure, and the shark robot automatically turns to avoid hitting the walls of that enclosure after making a decision on which is the best direction to turn. Later on, it will be able to read in the terrain file in RAW format, and interact with that. Eventually, I hope to get multiple instances of the various models interacting with each other and with their environment on a PVM network, then merge each player’s motion files into one big Carrara file.

--Carl – saying thanks again :)

[monks]

Yikes!- no wonder it looks good :) I think sound would also enhance it.

monks

[RealUser]

@Carl,
thanks for the hint. I did use that software for some TG0.9. renders and it looks great.

-- Markus --