We recently created this 3d animated music video for the Edinburgh based band ‘The Valkarys’. The song is called ‘Honey Hill’ and is from their album ‘(Just Like) Flying with God’. This is our first real adventure into the world of 3D rendered animation. Our previous asset creation and motion capture work has been focused primarily around Games, SL and VR. This is the first time we have created a cgi animation of our own. It took us about 3 months in total, although for the first couple of months we were working on it between our other projects. Aside from all the content creation (mostly handled by Debs) rendering the animation took ages! Unlike machinimas which are largely recorded in real time this had each frame rendered one by one to calculate the lighting and reflections etc. It makes for nice video with realistic shadows, reflections, displacement maps for detail etc. but it takes much longer… About 8 seconds of footage took over 12 hours to render for some scenes! I cannot begin to express the frustration felt when you do that, and then find a problem you somehow missed and have to do it again! Fortunately our motion capture studio at least cut the time involved on actual animation.

The video is about three cats and what they get up to when they go out that cat flap. We hope to continue the story when we have time and possibly create a small mini series around it. We have set up the (currently very basic) website www.wherestiddles.com for any future instalments just in case.

There is a distinct possibility these cats will also be made into avatars at some stage soon, and we will probably be making some virtual cuddly toy versions too. For now though we are busy working hard for Christmas. We plan to have our advent calendar again this year and as always we are working hard to put fresh new content together for it. We have lots of fun stuff lined up! 🙂

Anyway here is the video. I hope you like it!   Please share it around if you do! 🙂