Hello dear friends,
A little horror film, even if it’s not Halloween yet.
In this film, I used a few new special effects techniques and practiced my animation skills (instead of creating 10-second clips, I made a short film).
The characters were created and edited with Character Creator, the animation was created in iClone and partially refined in Blender. The props come from iClone and Blender, and the rendering was done in Blender.
Important: Watch the film beyond the end credits!
Enjoy!
OK, here we go:
The good:
The aerial city scenes look pretty good.
Foot contact is pretty good for the most part.
The camera work is decent.
Sound effects are serviceable.
The not so good or things to consider:
Rendering quality is only so-so (not what I would find acceptable on my own content), I also noticed distracting flickering in many scenes (often in the background), could be GI artifacts. Rendered with Blender Eevee?
The people on the sidewalk don’t appear to move/be animated much until approx. minute 2. The cars mostly seem to be the same model in different colors.
Logical/continuity/story issues:
The city has Asian lettering on buildings, American street signage, but the bus has a European license plate. Some of the tall buildings are extremely thin, they appear to be no thicker than a car is long.
The doors of the bus are on the right-hand side, but the bus stop that the woman does not reach in time, appears to be on the left side of the street. Any passengers getting on or off the bus would have to walk around the bus, which seems very odd.
Why would Mr. Butterfly stand in public with his knife already out and risk the attention of law enforcement and/or other people? Also, why did he leave after he was standing outside the graveyard gate? Did he know, the graveyard was off limits/that she would be attacked by somebody else and thus decided to called it a night?
Why did the woman not simply wait for the next bus instead of wandering off into a graveyard? At night? It’s not like she was all alone in the streets. Also, that gate is pretty tall (more than twice her height), and, made of iron, thus heavy. She should have been exerting more force to open it (its hinges certainly aren’t properly lubricated if the squeaking is anything to go by…). After she falls backwards, why does she keep just sitting there (totally silent) instead of getting up/crawling away or at least screaming? Why does she not express any gratitude for being saved?
Mr. Hunter’s job (on his calling card) is a bit too much on the nose for my taste. I would have either changed his last name or his job “title”. Also, his outfit looks a bit weird, like it’s made from latex or so.
Who is the dude in the post-credit scene? What is the point of this scene? To show there are more than just one of the undead?
I appreciate the effort that went into an animation lasting several minutes (something I have not been able to do yet), and the points I raised are meant to provide food for thought for your next project.
Hello Nirwana,
Thank you very much for your detailed comments on my little film. They really help me reflect on what I’ve created.
The story only served as a small starting point for some animation experiments. You clearly identified the license plate. I only discovered the error here after the animation was already created.
The crowd population is still moving too slowly. I still need to create and implement some animations here that run more quickly.
The flickering during rendering has improved, but I still don’t have an optimal yet non-time-consuming setting in Blender Cycles. With these settings alone, rendering took about 2.5-3.5 minutes per frame. Maybe I’ll switch to Blender Eevee after all (it didn’t hurt the “Flow” movie either). I wish iClone was better at rendering.
This time I tried a lot with the animations. Using iClone Motion Director and integrating Mixamo animations, intensive work on transferring to Blender, and using Rigify in Blender. For this, I had to re-rig some characters in CC4 so I could use Rigify. Foot sliding can be easily solved in iClone alone or Blender alone, but transferring from iClone to Blender (especially on uneven surfaces) requires a lot of fine-tuning afterwards. Now I understand why many animators recommend always creating shots without the feet.
The advantage of such longer projects is the ability to rethink your own workflow and continually adapt it.
Best regards,
Thorsten
I’m not a Blender user, but 2.5 to 3.5 minutes per frame at 1920x1080 seems not exactly fast. While I do have similar render times (and longer), that is, however, usually at a resolution of 3840x1688 (i.e. approx. 3x the resolution)—unless we are talking about YouTube Shorts—and a corresponding render time of 7.5 to 10.5 minutes a frame would be more than I’d be willing to up with for an animation that make me no money whatsoever.
That said, I found that small tweaks in render settings (or the scene itself) can sometimes have a huge impact on render times with the render engine I use, while making practically no difference in the visual quality of the output.
Perhaps people better familiar with Blender have suggestions to improve flickering while keeping or reducing render times. I’m not sure that Eevee is going to help; in fact, because of the flickering, I thought the render was done with Eevee. (BTW: What kind of hardware did you use for this?)
I use Cinema 4D to render my animations, but I don’t re-rig the characters imported from iClone in C4D. Any changes to the animation (unless extremely easy to fix manually in C4D), I make in iClone.
Sure, “advantageous” framing (e.g. no feet in the picture) may help, however, sometimes it does not work for the frame composition. So far, I have not had to deal with uneven terrain, but if I did, I’d probably export a proxy of the ground to iClone to fix foot and/or hand contact there.
It may also help to go through the animation at 1/4 or 1/2 speed to catch problems. When I do cloth simulations, intersecting body parts mess up the simulation (up to and including a freezing/crashing PC after hours of simulating), so I have to be fairly meticulous when checking the motions of the character in iClone.
So far, I have only done “test” animations (quite a number of cloth simulations, and fluid, fire and smoke simulations) usually 30 to 45 seconds in length, but if I did a longer piece (perhaps after a hardware upgrade in the not too distant future), I would try to make sure that the “story” is on point and that as many problems (in terms of story logic, character motivation (why do they do what they do), assets to be used/combined) as possible are caught at the planning stage before I end up re-doing or throwing away many hours’ worth of rendering.
Perhaps people better familiar with Blender have suggestions to improve flickering while keeping or reducing render times. I’m not sure that Eevee is going to help; in fact, because of the flickering, I thought the render was done with Eevee.
The flickering in the video is actually distracting
With cycles there is no way to get clean frames and low render times as it is a very slow render engine in general.
I find I can get decent results with EEVEE(legacy)
with higher sample counts with nearly no flickering even with effects like smoke and a fair amount of bloom
This is EEVEE legacy
(not the ruined EEVEE “next” in Blender 4.2+)
Pretty cool video Thorsten.
The city looked great but I agree the crowds often felt unalive and static.
While I get that you were tossing some things together while working on techniques it was pretty weird (story-wise) to see the knife assailant drift off while the zombies become the main issue. Might have been cool to see knife guy continue into the graveyard and get attacked by the zombies before they turn on the lady.
Looking forward to your next flicks!
I wasn’t talking about “low” render times, but rather “lower” (say, by 30 to 60 seconds per frame). 
Obviously, it’s not going to be real-time or anywhere close to that.
While I did try to render some of those Blender benchmarks (Classroom, BMW, etc.) as stills (with the settings that came with the files) just to see how these would work on my hardware, I have never attempted any animation renders (wouldn’t know where to start with that in Blender), so I have no idea how “high” or what the settings need to be for a more flicker-free animation render.
@ThorstenMihm
I would run some render tests to find the best compromise between output quality and render time for the next video. Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds the flickering in this one distracting.
When I use “fast” (i.e. low-quality) settings with my render engine (Redshift), I get noise/grain in the image but not this kind of flickering (unless I use the wrong type of GI—depending on the scene and its lighting).
Exporting the interface to iClone and adjusting the animation is a good idea. I’ll try it next time.
Compared to previous projects, I was able to reduce the flickering, but unfortunately, I haven’t completely solved the problem. I’ve watched numerous tutorials and adjusted settings. It works in brighter scenes, but as soon as depth of field is used, I can’t resolve it sufficiently. Perhaps switching to Eevee will help. Since Blender is also working on other rendering engines, I’m hopeful that this problem can be resolved.
In my next project, I’ll definitely try to achieve similar results with Eevee. I just often get the impression that the images tend to look artificial. Perhaps the flickering has been eliminated.
Thank you very much for the tips
Even the demon with the knife was afraid of the zombies. 
Thorsten
Congrats on seeing a film through until the end (even if it’s just part 1). Very few of us get that far! I’m ashamed to admit I’ve only ever fully completed one film and I’ve been an iClone user since Iclone 2! Started heaps of others, but haven’t seen them through, usually because I end up hitting some big road blocks when iClone does stupid unpredictable things, I get really frustrated and give up.
A lot of work has obviously gone into this one.
Love all the detail in the scenes. Lots of traffic moving around mostly in a realistic way, which is a bit of an accomplishment with iClone as it offers very little support for animating vehicles.
Lots of details in the scenes, really helps the atmosphere.
Some nice facial animation on the girl which many neglect.
Motions are nice and smooth, realistic in most parts.
I would have liked to hear some more vocals/screams etc to add to the feel and maybe some more background music to build the suspense in the right moments.
But wow, that’s certainly impressive. Great to see more actual short movies popping up. I know how much effort goes into just a 5 minute film.
Hello Darren01,
thank you for your kind comment. Yes, iClone can be challenging at times, but especially in the area of animation and facial animation, it’s relatively simple. What makes it complex is its use in other environments, such as Blender. If iClone had a better rendering engine and, above all, a decent (!) particle system, this wouldn’t be necessary.
I enjoy making films because it forces me to solve problems, even if it means tying my brain to knots. Where I’m not yet well-versed is dubbing. I’ve tried many things in my films, but haven’t found the optimal solution yet.
I agree with you, a little screaming would have been good for the film.
But please use the community if problems arise. There are plenty of experienced users who will be happy to help you with any problems.
In any case, I’ll have a lot of people screaming in the next horror film.
My next project will probably be a sequel to a science fiction film (HORUS: https://youtu.be/rJMM_sCyQsg?si=z89MFJTnz56DTfu9 )
Until then, best regards, Thorsten
Great short film, Thorsten! I can tell you’ve put a lot of work into it.
I really like the cinematic direction you are aiming with your style, the shots of the city, some of the camera work later on etc.
Some suggestions:
Hello Delphoi_Studio,
I don’t have any experience with shape keys yet, but I’ll give it a try. Thanks also for the tip about the flickering. I didn’t know about the option in DaVinci Resolv, but I’ll try that too.
Yes, the compression in YouTube isn’t optimal. A lot is lost here. Maybe the upscaling above will really help.
In any case, I now have a few starting points to try out, thank you very much.
Best regards,
Thorsten
Hello Thorsten, nice little story with some really great sets.
I really like the city. Is it from Iclone? The effects are also very well done. All in all, an entertaining but good film, but it could have been expanded. I have nothing to criticize, except for the zombie that makes a bit of a strange noise. I would have chosen a different sound effect and made the scene a bit more action-packed. But as I said, I really like your film. Maybe there will be a sequel.
Hello Vlado,
Thanks for your nice comment. I generated the city in Blender (significantly cheaper than iClone). The zombie sounds come from a collection of zombie sounds (purchased specifically). I wasn’t able to create such a sound (I wasn’t dead enough yet ). A sequel is planned, but it will take a while.
See you soon,
Thorsten
Hey Thorsten,
as others already pointed out the flaws in your animation,
no need to elaborate on this further…
It is just good to see you are still animating, well done…
Hello Pieter,
Thank you very much. Unfortunately, I don’t get to inspire much, as my job currently takes up so much of my time, but it’s always fun to discover new things.
I hope to reach the level of others over time. It’ll be a long time before I reach your level.
Best regards,
Thorsten
Hm, that is definitely an overstatement!
Your work is pretty good besides some render issues and here and there the lack of “perfectionism” as seen in 2:13/2:14 when your ladies hand penetrates her body.
I meticulously try to avoid things like this…
Hello Pieter, there’s still a lot to improve, but as the saying goes: you grow with your challenges.
Best regards,
Thorsten