We're back

It has been a busy summer and fall. I am in the middle of rendering an animation which is taking weeks (for something that is approx a minute in length it is taking me 2 months--I need a second computer for rendering if I keep this up). My last post mentioned I was hoping to be done with it by the end of april. It was not to be! Far from it. In fact I was close to shelving it entirely. 2 years wasted. I ended up needing to upgrade my computer and discovering that much of the computer crashing I had encountered with the project may have been due to my system not being 64 bit, so I was able to resume working on the animation. It has been very slow getting it to the final stage as I added a few extra things (such as the spaceship above) but I have been able to work on other things as it has been rendering.

Fiery Demon Animation

Here's the updated version of my first cg animation. I added fire to the figure and smoke to the background.
I used entirely computer generated fire--next time I will use real fire footage as the results will likely be much better.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3u43jvSzJXs

More Fire Work

I have the fire layer completed. Worked well enough using entirely computer generated fire although next time I would probably use filmed fire elements as well to add variety-but manipulating real flame footage to match the movement of walking figures is tedious.

I also added a fire light layer--at first I wasnt going to worry about shadows as I assumed that the light from one fire would obscure the shadows generated by another fire source as there are several on the figure but after running a test it looks better with some shadow.
I didnt bother animating the lights so they would not only flicker but move as well.

Getting close so I hope to have this finished by the end of the year.