Lightwave Demo Reel - Judge Dredd

[carzi]

Hi all.

I made this demo reel last year for my final year project at university and I thought I would post it here for some feedback. It got me a good grade from uni and I have received good feeback from people I've showed it to, but there is nothing like critique from hardened 3D artists to let you know how your work really stands up, so feel free to tell me your thoughts on it.

Here are the links:
http://daveycarr.com/demoreel/demoreel_2007.mov (Quicktime required 42Mb)

or a lower res version is available on YouTube at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwrlhkxYaa0 (Not very good quality)

Cheers guys.

[HappyMantis]

Hello carzi,

Well, I really understand why this work give you a good grad at university, that's really nice!
For the moment I've only watch the youtube video but it's good yet. What I really like is the "comics" look of your video, how the details appears, the very comics white borders around the pictures and how you show the wires (like a scanner). May I ask you how do you got that result? (the scanner look), with Lightwave render or in post?

Then what I would like to see more is the character moving, here they make only little and slow movements...so animation seams to work, but it would be nice to see them really in action

By the way I really enjoy your work, it's not only 3D but compositing too...hope to see more of your works!

[Alien]

totally agree with HMantis, great and original demo reel, with clean compositing and a good feeling of comic book, may be the texture work on the lawgiver is under the rest of the demo, i would love to see some different style like Judge death, the one in "Judgment On Gotham" by S.Bisley is amazing with a more organic look, Mechanismo is nice but about pure modeling, an ABC warrior would be better to show different type of shape/modeling skillz, but it's a matter of taste, a little touch of comic is sometimes usefull and u can easily find some good character in Dredd's world, judge Fish for exemple...

i stop here cause i can talk about comic books all the night if needed

[Shuggs]

My only crit would be to speed it up some...

...other then that its pimp...I envy your skills....

[carzi]

Hi guys.

Thanks for the great feedback on my demo reel. I appreciate you taking the time to comment.

HappyMantis

Thanks man. I'm glad you liked the comic book style . I agree that these should be more animation in there but to be honest the rigs were built in a hurry as I was on a timescale and there are some deformation issues so I kept the animation to a minimum but I'll hopefully correct them in the future.

I created the wireframe scanner effect in Adobe After Effects by compositing a wire render over my textured render. To create the wireframes in LW I set all my object surfaces to black with 100% luminosity, turned on all my edge options and set them to white and swiched off all my lights. I rendered with full anti aliasing to get the edges nice and smooth. Then I just comped the wires render over the textured render, set the blending mode to screen and used a linear wipe filter to get the scanner effect.

BTW: I loved you site, I'll hopefully get a flash site up and running soon.

Alien

Thanks for the comments. I take your point about the lawgiver. I used procedurals rather than maps and it shows. I only decided to include it at the last minute as a way to end the reel but it could be that i should have left it out. You hit the nail on the head with the Bisley comment. Judgment on Gotham is one of my faves. I would love to model Bisleys version of Mean Machine - his Batmobile was pretty awsome too! One for the future maybe.

Shuggs

Good point. 3 minutes for 4 models is a little long and ill bear this in mind in future reels. Cheers.

[JoPPa]

Hi carzi,
Nice reel and beautiful comic style. Love it!

[carzi]

Hi JoPPa. Thanks a lot for the comments. I checked out your CGPortfolio. Your comic style is awsome too. Your Superhero character in particular is an excellent concept. Well done.