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so sporky handled most of the character animation, and i handled most of the technical bits. we ended up rendering with mental ray, final gather, raytraced reflections, and some shots actually use the physical depth of field lens and motion blur. all of those effects eat up rendering time like you wouldn't believe, so it took us probably a good week of combined time with our computers just churning out a frame every 15 minutes, even with relatively low quality settings.

other fun technical morsels!:

i set up soft body dynamics on her hair, the curtain at the end, and of course her boobies. it calculates all that bouncing springy-ness once the animation is done, so the animator doesn't really have to worry about keyframing a lot of secondary movement.

we did a super rush job on the compositing! all in one night, about 5 hours (including after effects render time) because the mental ray renders took so damned long to pump out during the week. the actual resolution is at ntsc, but we compressed the quicktime down to 480x360 for your downloading convenience

the champagne bottle and all the other crap falling from the sky was done with rigid body dynamics, which were a pain in the a** to try to control at times, but end up giving pretty realistic motion. the pillow flying off the gurney too =)

once we have the time we're going to re-render with motion blur on all of the frames instead of just some. it's probably the single biggest increase in render time, so we had to cut it out of a lot of important stuff, particularly the rigid body dynamics.

hmmm, that's all i can think of for now. wish i could brag about the character rig but it's really quite rudimentary and a bit clunky =)

I can see you've really outdone yourself here. The character design is solid, and I was most impressed with the intro screen at the beginning, as well as the ones near the end. They give the piece a really professional touch.

I am a person who is very sensitive to camera movements; camera movements that are too fast hurt my head, so I notice them pretty easily. I think the first few shots of the film - where it's switching between Nurse Lacey's body parts - are too fast, they make a little pain behind my eyes. The items falling out of the sky look great, but I think they may also be a little fast. However, a little farther into the animation, things all become very smooth and easy to watch.

Aside from the fast camera at the beginning, I'm not sure if it's the lip synch or what, but it doesn't look like she's actually singing the song.

Great, great work aside from that. I'm serious. I love the solid feel of the character and how you really gave her an environment that suits her. I think the computer/television monitor is a good example of that.

Consider telling her that at that beginning shot, the step is stepped. It looks bad, like the animation missed a frame. Also, her hair goes through the ground and her nurse costume goes through her leg.

That's called a stepped tangent.Where there is no transition between two keyframes.

From the mouth of the Goat:

Goat Wrote:
Consider telling her that at that beginning shot, the step is stepped. It looks bad, like the animation missed a frame. Also, her hair goes through the ground and her nurse costume goes through her leg.


When I asked what he meant by "the step is stepped", he responded:

Goat Wrote:
That's called a stepped tangent.Where there is no transition between two keyframes.

i feel a little out of my league XD. it's hard to provide eedback other than personal opinion. i think i prefer things a little slower paced. I had to watch this several just to absorb all the details.