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Animated Short - This Wonderful Life
dfluke2 writes "It's been around for awhile, but Lian Kemp's This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short. Over at rendernode there is an interview with Lian, where additional background information can be found about the flick, including other plans for more animated movies. The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short."
1) She needs to have some pores in the skin. The closeups of the face and nose don't show any pores at all.
2) Tiny jaw. Nobody has a jaw that small.
3) Real tatties sag just a little.
4) A nice touch was the subtle camel toe. Problem with that is the contours of the bathing suit fabric overlying the camel toe. Not enough wrinkles in the right places. I'm an expert.
5) Hair - too perfect.
6) Skin on chest - some effort went into that to make it look like a real chest, but the freckles just had the appearance of being placed on a chest in an effort to look natural.
So it's a very nice attempt, but really too perfect. Lt. Commander Data would be able to pick her out of a crowd as artificial because her blinking pattern was exactly the same as the Fibbonachi sequence.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
um, They = 1 guy, so perfection isn't garunteed...
...who're bitching about the flaws in the movie, please provide a link to a short that you think is more impressively realistic. That is, instead of just moaning about the flaws in the piece, do us all a favor and give us a link to something better.
I swear to god, Slashdot is home to more nasty, jealous pricks than any other open forum on the net. Even Spaceship One had a horde of vile little losers trying to cut down Rutan and Melville's achievement seconds after the craft put down in the desert after an historic first.
No doubt y'all think you're cool in some pseudo-intellectual fashion when you rave on as some self-appointed not-so-expert critic, but here's a newsflash: You aren't! Blasting the achievements of others doesn't make you look cool or chicly rebellious, it just shows you up as a pathetic, common, unaccomplished little man green with envy and burning with vitriol.
And in case you haven't figured it out, I thought the stuff was very nicely done. It's certainly better than anything I could ever do, even if I spent my entire life working at it. The artist deserves kudos, and he's getting them, at least from me.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
My problem with the film, which actually struck me as quite technically accomplished, was its trite sentimentality. It's just unwatchable as a narrative: the syrupy music, all the goo-goo mother-baby stuff, all those lingering gazes and heart-tugging smiles and the itsy-bitsy eyelash-batting. Good bloody lord!!! I had to fast forward, in order not to suffer a whopping violation of Zhe's Rule of Chick Flick Endurance: one minute of wistful gazing at babies is all a man should be required to sit through in a film of any length. I'm glad you were transported to your special place. Me, I needed a shot of whiskey.
And this is a problem that can't be ignored. Art demands to be seen, understood, even judged, first and foremost, as art--not as mere technical accomplishment. If you, for instance, code AI that can autonomously produce Barry Manilow music, that will be a rather serious, er, accomplishment. But as much as you might want it to write the songs that make the whole world sing, don't get bent out of shape if we'd rather not.
1) She needs to have some pores in the skin. The closeups of the face and nose don't show any pores at all.
:) However, it is masterful, considering how often most people botch it.
Pores are usually not necessary for 95% of character animation work and would mean some major memory usage. The textures were damn good, but yeah, could use some work. (The goose bumps on the thighs were a bit overdone in the knee close-up, but that's just me.)
2) Tiny jaw. Nobody has a jaw that small.
Plenty of people do. With 6 billion people on the planet, can you really claim that with any sort of authority? For example, living in Japan, I see women with jaws like that every day.
3) Real tatties sag just a little.
Again, living in Japan, I have been blessed by the company of a woman whose "tatties" don't sag. Asian women tend to have perky breasts, and they're not as tiny as people would have you think.
4) A nice touch was the subtle camel toe. Problem with that is the contours of the bathing suit fabric overlying the camel toe. Not enough wrinkles in the right places. I'm an expert.
Depends on the material the bathing suit is made out of. I agree that the wrinkles aren't correct for your typical bathing suit spandex; this suit would appear to be made out of a thicker, velveteen fabric. A lot of the responsibility for this would be on the cloth-body dynamics software included in the animation package, not necessarily the animator himself. Fabric is hard to do. He did a good job in terms of getting it to flex believably over the model (note the strap over the collar bone.)
5) Hair - too perfect.
Hair is hard to do. Actually, my complaint would be that the hair is not perfect enough.
6) Skin on chest - some effort went into that to make it look like a real chest, but the freckles just had the appearance of being placed on a chest in an effort to look natural.
This comment is so subjective there's not much to say. Damn fine skin-texturing, attention to detail and believable bump-mapping and specularity. Also seems to have used some good environment maps to render the lighting (radiosity, perhaps), and possibly some sub-surface scattering (if not, then some very sophisticated light rigs.)
As the saying goes, come back when you can do better. This is very high-end stuff.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life