Martynas amazing animated tanks joined the parade. As silly as everything else.

First kind of final renders

Here they are. The first renders. That is how our parade is gonna look like.

Background (first drawings)

Plain background or a nice image in the background?

These are a day and night versions we are testing with at the moment. Not so slick looking yet but more of a proof of concept. Still has to proof itself.

Styleframe

This is a character sheet we made to introduce a few of the characters to the public.

Hello, nice to meet you!

The parade marches

We have been busy making all different kind of soldiers. This is the first time they see eachother and the first time we see them all in one frame.

 

In this 16x9 images it works perfectly. The thing is that during culture night we have to deal with an ultra wide screen of 9x2. So we decided that we are going for an strict side view, with less rows into the distance.

Marching Test 3

We asked the small soldier if he could call his little friend and form an entire army. No problem.

Sadly these compositions don't work as we hoped they would. Still looking for a way to fix that.

Marching Test 2

   

Jonas figured out how to put the same rig onto the small soldier. Works like a charm.

Marching Test 1

 

This guy is a character from Ruud's graduation film Black&Blue. We are planning to use the same rig for the soldiers so we tested if this guy could do some silly walks. Looks silly to us.

Tank movement test no.02

Made some test of tank animations, to see, how they look together, and also to document a progress.

Tank movement test no.01

After tanks were finished modelling, it was a time to check them in a movement. This first example shows tanks animation together with rigged character, toi have an impression how they look in one frame.

Tank's turntable no.2

This is an example of the tank, modeled for Military Parade animation, and there is a chance for you top see, how it looks from any direction.

Tank's turntable no.1

This is a second example of the tank, modeled for Military Parade animation, and there is a chance for you to see, how it looks from any direction.

Early sketches of tanks

This is some early sketches of tanks made just on paper, that later were transferred to 3D. Were trying to approach the style of the tanks to be similar and consistent to our previous character designs.

First Model in 3D

Can I have another D please. We needed to turn the sketches Martynas made into a 3d character. For this project 3d is the way to go. Animating everything in 2d would be way to time consuming.

It took a little more effort then expected to add that extra dimension to this character but it worked. We won't bother you with the details of this process but it has something to do with vertices. If you have four of them they form a square, and then you add another two, two squares now. What? Boring? haven't told you anything about ray-tracing and alpha channels yet

To keep a long story short: We think we have preserved that sharpness and toony feeling from the sketches in our 3d model. 

 

New Drawings

We did some further testing. Still pretty messy. This many characters in one images might be just to much. At least the arms and legs need to be a bit thicker.

Animation Test

For your pleasure two animation tests, it might look like fun, for us it's cold hard science.

The first video is without shadows, that's the look we want to go for. Sadly it kinda turns into a visual mess.. your eyes can not distinguish all those limbs from one another... The second one with shadows would solve that problem but the characters wouldn't look as sharp as they do in the sketches. We need to find a solution, we will.

 

Those tunes, custom made by Evert van der Veen. Not the stuff he usually makes but he did a really good job, and this is just an audio sketch.. imagine that.

Ministry of Silly Walks

Did we mention silly in our last post? And is marching some kind of walking?

Oh yes! We haven't checked the forecasts yet but there must be a chance of COMBINATIONS!

Early Drawings

These are the first sketches we made for our soldiers. They range from silly to sillier.. Hmm so that's what we want to go for... Why not go for the silliest then?

We eventually have chosen the last ones.. They have nice variations in mass and each there own personality... yet they appear uniform, just what we're looking for.

Inspiration

The Chinese turn walking in line with many of them into a true spectacle. Hell yeah, thats a parade we're talking about.

Can't have enough feathers on your hat... Man, that's some difference with all the high-tec suits modern soldiers are wearing. Yeah, yeah.. bulletproof vests, night-vision goggles.. super awesome. But it just doesn't look as stylish as those soldiers from back in the day.

Chassé Military Base

So we got the briefing about the Cultuurnacht. House of visual culture told us they want a piece about the heritage of the Chassé area. Nowadays the area is really nice designed by famous architect Rem Koolhaas and some others. It is in the center of Breda though it's very quiet there. And fairly new. What happened over there the last couple of centuries? Let's find out.

To the archives! (in a superhero tone of voice)

 

Ah, okay, it was military ground. There where barracks but also... (drumroll please)... Music! Till not so long ago there were military parades held at this place. While nowadays it's so quiet there.. it's a shame. We should do something about that!