1625 Won!

[Kevin Thorp]

Congrats to Team 1625 (Winnovation) for winning the 2007 Autodesk Visualization Design Competition! It was a very creative, very professionally done animation.

Perhaps you could share some of what goes into the making of your outstanding entry? Things like how you came up with your concept, modeling, animating, lighting/materials, audio, etc.?

[fireball3004]

Huray Congrats to 1625 for their outstanding animation and to all the other finalists and to everyone who submitted an animation.

[BuddyB309]

Heh, thanks to all who helped work on it. I honestly didnt know who was going to win cause they were all really really well done.

Its really funny how our animation came to be. I dream a lot and i was playing a lot of Neverhood. I originally had a dream about mechanical stuff comming out of a box and thought it would make a very good animation. I drew it down with colord pencil (the titile slate at the begining is the original concept drawing) and showed it to the team. They loved it and wanted to go head first into the project and not wait for the theam to come out. (yes this is happening before any of us knew the theme. We wanted to get done while the mechanical people were still in the design phase). When the theme came out all we had to do was change the voice over.

Createting the animation was very very easy and very very quick. We mainly used path deform and cones for everything. That is how we got the tree to grow. The colors that bleed out from the vines was done with a mask. First after we laid out the vines and where they would go i saved the file as a different file and made a camera looking strait down. Then we animated the radius of the cones to a ridiculous size and renderd the alpha channel. Then we used the alpha channel of the cones as the mask for the colors.

The trees bouncing are done with stretch modifier. We wanted the trees to have a little rubbery feel to them. The Mushrooms were created and animated by a freshmen. The only thing i did myself was the tree growing and some of the animation of the robotic arms.

The reason why we got this animation done so fast is because we locked ourselves in a room with no windows and no internet. So we had no distractions. One of the Freshmen is really good with networking and we set up a beautiful system of organizing our files. We saved all of our files on a shared external hardrive and one computer in the corner acted as a server. We must have spent an hour over a lesson on how we were going to save our files and what the names of our files were going to be. We were very organized.

The end credits were done entirely by the freshmen. I gave them a character that i had previously created and they decieded to use it into the credits. The "No more mountain dew for him" guy he refers too is actually a really funny story. One of the Freshmen decided to down 6-10 cans of mountain dew in 10 mins. Now this kid is normally very squirrly but when he got jacked up on mountain dew he was bounceing of the walls. It was really annoying at the time but now its a really funny story.

Our original music we wanted to use was Bittersweet Symphony from The Verv. NEVER NEVER base your animation off of a copyrighted music. We spent the rest of the time trying to get copyrights for the song and the company wanted $1,000 for it. So we had a friend of ours put together a sound alike. I think he did a very good job.

Lighting is very simple. Skylight with final gather renderd with mental ray. It was a fast job, normally an overnight render.

[Mike200]

Congratulations on the win.

When I first saw your animation, I knew it was going to be in the top 5. It seems so perfect and flows so well.

I'd also like to thank you guys for talking to our character animator down at nationals.

[MadeAtMidnight]

I just wanted to say that I was truly impressed with the top 5 animations (as well as many that didn't make it to the top 5). Each of them had such unique features and it was amazing how different the animations were even though they had the same guidelines (kind of like the robots.)

Burning Magnetos (# 342) -- I have to admit, my favorite part was the dog drinking out of the toilet, but I did really like the backgrounds and your attention to detail -- for example the shower curtain.

Falcon Engineering and Robotics (# 547) -- I loved the beginning with the background and colors that you chose. Having a black and white segment was an interesting idea also.

Team # 1528 -- I liked the music selection. I also liked the transitions you used and the way the pollution spread thru the water.

PhyXTGears (# 1720) --I really liked the concept behind the animation with the continue message. My favorite part of the animation was watching the can sink into the water.

Did anyone go to the animation talk on Thursday night where they talked about what they liked about different animations? No one from 1625 was there before Friday and I was curious what they liked/didn't like about the different ones. I guess I want to see if I am learning to appreciate the things that they do.

All I can say is that the whole FIRST experience was phenomenal. I'm glad that we finally had a kid that was old enough to join the team

[sledfang]

A lot of really impressive stuff came out of the animations this year. I truly enjoyed the Top 5 system, and my original worries that FIRST was trying to phase out the AVA competition were pretty much quelled as soon as I found out about it. All of the animations in the Top 5 were outstanding, and I saw quite a few others that were also very good.

@ MadeAtMidnight
Thanks for the compliment. The grayscale scene was actually the one that I was responsible for. That scene looked pretty good in color and it looked quite a bit more real with the color turned off and Noise added to it. Plus the really-old-TV-style refresh lines going across it if you caught those. That scene and the caveman are probably my favorite.

The "4 completely different art styles" thing proved tough though. Getting the egyptian's texture (hand drawn by one of our newer members) to work on the funky spline outline proved daunting, as well as being forced to separate the arms and legs to make it walk.

Actually, the initial idea that we had in mind started with that evolution drawing everyone has seen of the ape turning into the modern human in multiple stages. After a couple of meetings we narrowed it down to something remotely similar to what the final animation is. The caveman that we used in the first scene was drawn as a joke by one of my fellow seniors and we liked it and ran with it. We added the little antelope and hunters to fill in background space and because we thought it was pretty funny.

The Egyptian hieroglyphics were a nightmare all the way through to be honest. Getting that background wall to look decent took tons of messing around with textures and bump maps (and lighting of course), and i never really got exactly what I was looking for.

The grayscale scene was sort of an industrial age type deal, with the introduction of cars and planes. I sort of went the extra mile with the mountains in the background... probably spent more time than I needed to on them. Displacement maps and whatnot.

The final city scene was mostly done by one of our senior members, and I must say that the environment here is really good. There are posters on the first wall advertising the movie "Cube Wars II." The only reason I mention this is because it's a throwback to last year's 547 animation and I'm pretty sure you guys from 1625 probably saw it at St. Louis last year. I met Peter Casey because of the Death Cube if I remember correctly. Anyway, a ton of time was put into the environment and lighting here, and even though the helicopter that was supposed to be in the background at the end mysteriously vanished from the final render, it turned out OK. The character did some wierd thing with his legs at the end which is why the car drives by in the last couple of seconds.

Anyway, sorry to type so much. And to keep with the purpose of this topic, CONGRATS TEAM 1625! You guys earned it!

[Mike200]

Originally Posted by MadeAtMidnight

Did anyone go to the animation talk on Thursday night where they talked about what they liked about different animations? No one from 1625 was there before Friday and I was curious what they liked/didn't like about the different ones. I guess I want to see if I am learning to appreciate the things that they do.

On thursday they had an awards ceremony instead of just a talk. They picked the five best animations according to the categories of lighting, modeling, camera work, narration, and another category which I have forgotten at the moment.

[EmoMike]

One question, where can we see this wonderful animation?

[hillale]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtzHZsaKiA8

here you go!

[EmoMike]

Oh My God....

That is amazing!
Wonderful wonderful WONDERFUL job!

I have to say though, I still have NOT seen my own team's animation....

lol

*is still amazed*