Sunday 13 March 2011

Hot Summer on Furaha

While thinking of new posts, I finally took some scenes I had prepared much earlier and assembled them. I have tried my hand at making animations before (here and here), but will stop doing so for a while. The program I used to to define plants (XFrog), does not allow for a full wind animation, and without that you cannot really animate natural scenes well. Vue Infinite, the program I used to render scenes, can in fact take care of moving foliage quite well, but its plant editor is sadly not open enough to allow me to define interesting alien plants. That is the main reason that this scene depicts a hot day: there is no wind at all. For fairly obvious reasons there are no animals to speak of, or at least none galloping through the landscape. You will need your imagination for that, I am afraid.

When an animation is lacking in movement it cannot work very well. Then again, I did like the way the 'time lapse' scenes came out, particularly the one in which you see the planet spinning during the night. The direction of movement of the stars (straight up) tells you that we are near the equator.

[Later addition: I guess I did not pay enough attention to logic. In the last scene you see the sun setting at a fairly low angle. If we would really have been near the equator, as suggested by the movement of the stars at night, the sun should dive towards the horizon at a more or less right angle...]


Anyway, here it is. There is a large ballont passing by, and look out, or rather, keep an ear out for splatterbugs at sunset.

There is a larger version on YouTube.


8 comments:

Marco Meredith said...

this is really captivating, i love the realism.

Marco.

Anonymous said...

Superb. didn't see the Splatterbugs, but was greatly impressed at the Ballont. and the floating (fruit) was neat.

I'm also going to guess that at least one group of animals was nicknamed "the Chuckling Ones" for their call.

excellent work.

Evan Black said...

Great stuff as always!

Was that little bubble floaty thing one of those plant bulbs that disconnected and floated away, or was it some kind of floating life form that mimics the "bubble bulbs" for camouflage? I find I'm not familiar enough with furahan biology to tell the difference.

The addition of sound to the video really pulls the viewer into the scene. Were those sounds original creations of yours or was it simply stock jungle sounds appropriated for the environment?

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Thank you. Rodlox, there is no splatterbug to be seen. but you can hear it near the end...

Evan: the bubble is supposed to be a balloon carrying some seeds. The other ones that are still attached to the plants will float away when they are ripe enough.

As for the sounds, I found free natural sounds on the internet and changed them a little to make them less instantly recognisable. That was done by changing pitch, changing pitch or reversing them. Sounds need surprisingly little change to alter them quite considerably. Obviously, there is no need for alien nocturnal animals to sound a bit like owls, or for diurnal animals to sound a bit like crickets. I did that only to evoke associations in the listeners.

Luke said...

This looks great, but I'd suggest you lower the volume of the creature noises, and maybe have them fade in and out rather than beginning abruptly.

Bob said...

Ok this is it. I am convinced. Where can i book my trip to Furaha then?

Sigmund Nastrazzurro said...

Hi Luke, concerning the choices of the sound, I admit that I did not think too hard about it. I wondered to which extent I should let sounds flow over from one scene to the next or whether they should be separate. Hard to say which works better.

Bo, well, at one time there was a travel agency in the site, (http://planetfuraha.blogspot.com/2009/01/what-happened-to-galfloat.html) and perhaps there will be one again in the future.

Bob said...

Bummer. I missed that. I hope that in the near future there will be some possibilities to travel again. :)

Concerning the sounds on the planet. Obviously the density of the "air" has a great role in that. Which is related to the size of Furaha. Did you take that into account creating the sounds?