The Land of Hexagons

It's not everything I'd hoped it would be, but it was fun to do.

Animation project progress

A couple of renders from the hexagon-block landscape.

I've lost track of exactly how long I've spent doing what. A lot of time went to messing with settings on the block particle system and the grass one. Also to doing tests with animated textures, for the water and for the displacement of the ground. Total I think I've spent about 5 hours.

Things I have learned:
- Making flowers that look decent is harder than I thought.
- Displace modifiers are cool.

Flatland

Reading Flatland was pretty interesting. I was only familiar with the concept of Flatland as an explanation of dimensions and why we have trouble imagining or describing what a fourth dimension might be like. I had not realized that the original story was more about politics and society than mathematical ideas.

I'm no expert on class hierarchy issues of England in the 1800s, but a couple of things stuck out to me about the society of Flatland. One was the importance of recognizing someone's class or occupation on sight. There mas much more concern for that than for recognizing an individual. The other was the idea that shapes act the way they do because of the shape that they are. In part seven the narrator dismisses the idea that an Irregular shape might behave badly because they are mistreated, rather than because they are irregular. That's still a relevant issue now -- are people just products of their environment? How much of someone's behavior is an inherent trait?

I also like that the narrator breaks the fourth wall and talks to the reader as a citizen of “Spaceland.” He talks about how wonderful the third dimension is, since it has light and shadow, etc. It makes “Spaceland” seem like an alien universe, like we might imagine a fourth dimension would be. It also gives a little perspective on how much changes between two dimensions and three.

Bipedal Critter

Doll Animation

Yeah, it's a masterpiece, I know.

Notes on Fantasia

Timeless:

- Use of light-on-dark color schemes.
"Night on Bald Mountain" uses glaring colors and a dark background to make the scene visually "loud." The "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy" sequence also has bright colors in a dark scene, but the colors aren't so contrasting, so the effect is very different.

- Pacing. High energy scenes have much faster, busier motion in them and use more camera motion. Calmer scenes tend to have long panning shots.

- Blur. Blurred colors make things like clouds look soft, and it's also used very effectively for reflections in water. Backgrounds also tend to be more blurred to put emphasis on the foreground.

- The use of angled lighting. In the clip "Night on Bald Mountain," the demons are lit from below and there are a lot of long shadows. It makes everything look sinister.

- Use of moving light source. The Nutcracker suite makes use of this, an the illumination moving across objects gives it its "magical" feel.


Outdated:

- Over-exaggerated motion and expressions. The simple line-drawn characters don't have much ability to be subtle. More detailed animations don't need the same overacted motion.

- In some places the animation seems jerky or skips a little. This may be done on purpose in some places, others not. But modern animations tend to be much smoother.

- Monochrome. Large areas of the scene, usually backgrounds, tend to be a single color. When each frame was hand drawn this must have saved a lot of time.