Glowing Butterfly Portal Test anim

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)*Kassandra of Ellaphae

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Published on May 18, 2011 5:17:27 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3qYGlPzsHU

Duration: 1:01

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9

This is 100% Blender, except for the butterfly wing texture and frames grabbed from the Gosick ED, and screenshots through Paint Shop Pro. All video edited in Blender (not fun). Also the song was edited in Audacity to use the vocal beginning and the instrumental for the rest of the song.

I spent the last ~5 days on this. 3dioot on irc had done a little stream of some glowie swirls that I helped him with the nodes on, so I decided I'd try to do something quickly that would be a bit more expanded. Gosh was I wrong about the quickly part. Blender 2.57b crashed at least about 20+ times through this little project. Mostly in node editing and some animation work, particularly with particles. After I finished the main animation I decided I would get some practice with the VSE and add a couple of little screenshots at the end and some sounds (never worked with sounds in Blender before except my Quakecon anim). I've come to find the VSE to be extremely limiting and inflexible, and particularly problematic when working with multiple scenes. When you switch scenes in the scene menu, the VSE follows, and so you have different scenes with different sequences. It's confusing enough to have to worry about 3 timelines (scene timeline, sequencer timeline, graph editor), nevermind trying to get scene strips in the sequencer to do simple things consistently, like fade in and out. Due to that I decided to try alpha animation instead, which also proved to have issues due to multiple scenes. So lastly I tried layer relation animating, which was just laughable at the idiocy of how that works in 2.5. See the BlenderCookie 2.5 layer anim tut for more comedy about layers. I ended up just rendering my little title anims out to image sequences and bringing them back in. Not nearly half as intuitive as it could have been if scenes were independant of the sequencer timeline. Anyways enough text from me I'm glad this is over with. Despite all that I'm happy with it, and the little extra bit i threw together in the VSE to make this longer was some good experience, albeit extremely frustrating. Sound effects are from American McGee's Alice, and Phantasy Star Online. Music is the Gosick ending theme, "Resuscitated Hope" by Lisa. Nodes were fun on this, and I did some clever things with them I think.I think the butterfly animation is decent for being so basic. The portal rift thing looks cool but I could have done much more with it. This is also my first use of particles in Blender, and I find them to be rather unintuitive, particularly since Blend textures (to control particle fade out etc) are not truly linear gradients. In 2.49 they seem to be more evenly shaded or something, and achieving a similar result (at least in the texture preview) is difficult in 2.5 in my experience with this.

Okay that is all, now I can get back to my other project, hopefully I'll be able to progress more with that since I got a "break" (in hell) with this thing for a few days.

It was a bit silly to make a minute long thing for an 8 second test but oh well, it makes it a slightly less boring video I guess.