Shot 2 Reflective Blog

So instead of creating a brand new scene are developing new assets over an excruciating period, I took it upon myself to reuse elements of the scrapped shot 1, of course tweaking and adding new things in places, to create shot 2 of the opening of our synoptic project game.

I ended up being incredibly satisfied with the animation of the robots, especially with the motion blur added in Blender which I thought was going to look horrible but ended up looking decent! I was especially pleased with the composition and pacing of the robots in the back being followed up by the robots ascending and turning in the foreground.

What I learned about with this shot was using the transparency rendering in Blender to add a custom background behind the shot in After Effects. This saved me taking time to unwrap and plastering the illustrated background onto a 3D plane before realizing the scaling or level of detail does fit or match the scene it's featured.

looking at the robot animations again, even though I had a blast making them and I'm happy with the finished result, I can't help but be drawn to the shoddiness of the propeller blades atop the robots and how slow they rotate. I presumed, and presumed wrong, that by adding a high value like 3000 that it'd be more than enough to sell the illusion but looking back it was clear I wasn't thinking big enough! If I had the time to rerender the shot, I'd have put a much high value on the propeller blades of the robots.