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balistic · Posted: Mon May 20, 2002 2:23 pm

Eggington Productions just finished work on an intro/identity animation for a game developer called Big Ape, featuring a giant gorilla.

There are three different flavors of the 30-second spot available for viewing at the following URL:
http://www.eggington.net/BigApePage/BigApeF.html

Animation credits:

Nathan Lindsay - creature design and storyboards
Joe Cosman - creature modeling and animation
William Eggington - compositing and animation
Brian Prince (me) - surfacing, lights, and environment
David Sykes - city and vehicle modeling

Sumaleth · Posted: Mon May 20, 2002 9:37 pm

That's very nicely done. Have to wonder about copyright issues though.

balistic · Posted: Tue May 21, 2002 7:24 am

I think that as long as we call it a "parody" we're legal

Thanks, mate.

Awetopsy · Posted: Tue May 21, 2002 10:00 am

thats pretty cool man.. I liked the fur.. felt like a old cheesy King Kong Movie. Nicely put together.

Holyoak Powerlifter · junior member Member # Joined: 15 May 2002 Posts: 19

Looks great, superb even.

But there is no chance in HELL that is a parody. That is a straight up copy of King Kong. If the ape was wearing a Tutu, or a propeller hat, or funny sunglasses, or maybe if his fur was pink, sure then it would be a parody. But that was pretty much a blatant depiction of King Kong, with "Big Ape" put in front of it at the end. You might as well put an exact replica of superman up there, but call him "SuperGuy".

But the animation was great, add some funny sunglasses are you are golden!

balistic · Posted: Tue May 21, 2002 9:10 pm

"But that was pretty much a blatant depiction of King Kong"

Actually, if you examine King Kong, he ain't a gorilla. His posture, movement, even the distribution of fur on Kong is somewhat removed from what gorillas really look like.

We intentionally avoided any physical similarities to him. You'd never confuse the two, side by side.

Ours is a much more expressive ape, who isn't carrying a woman . . . I think we're okay.

Certain movies have become so entangled in their genres that its impossible to seperate the two anymore . . . guys in rubber suits stomping fake buildings, and animated apes climbing things, are just stapels of monster cinema at this point. Same goes for cheesy rotating saucers and marauding giant insects.

Pat · Posted: Tue May 21, 2002 9:59 pm

Looks great. Question: I've never heard of the codec that .mov is compressed with. Do you know anything about it, or perhaps where I can find more information on it? Did it wash the colors any?

-Pat

balistic · Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 7:25 am

Thanks Pat. You mean the On2 codec? We've found that it provides the best image fidelity for a given filesize, but it needs a fast CPU for playback. My 700 MHz Athlon at home won't play the full-sized movie without dropping some frames.

Quality-wise, it blows Sorenson away, but its not something you want to use if your audience is primarily on lower end systems.

edit: Oh, and I think its Qualcomm who developed it. It also gets called VP3. I'm not sure what the proper name of it is . . . Qualcomm On2 VP3 maybe?

[ May 22, 2002: Message edited by: balistic ]

sfr · Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 9:19 am

Good stuff! I've been recently fiddling with animation and rendering myself, and I can appreciate the work you've done with the shaders and lighting, it looks great.
The only thing that came to mind is that the big guy's eye might have looked better with a more realistic reflection map instead of just a plain round specular, since we see it so up close...
Which software btw - Lightwave?

AFAIK, On2 is an independent company, not related to Qualcomm. Their latest codec is VP5, which seems very promising, and they've also released the older VP3 as open source.

But despite the high quality of their codecs, they're not very well known. Although it sounds stupid, I seriously think part of the reason is their codec's utterly boring name, I usually don't even remember their existence whereas Divx and Sorenson come to mind immediately...!

Saffron

(edit: typos)

[ May 22, 2002: Message edited by: sfr ]

Big Jay · Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 10:22 am

I like it,

Did you do this in Animation Master?

Jason

balistic · Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 12:11 pm

sfr: I agree, a reflection would've helped. Unfortunately the client needed the animation done in time for E3, so some smaller details ended up being skipped in favor of making sure the piece as a whole was presentable.

And thanks for the additional info on the codec!

Big Jay: The ape was modeled in A:M, and Messiah was used for animation. It was rendered in Lightwave.

empyrios: if you're running the movie in the Quicktime player instead of within your browser, try dropping it into Internet Explorer and letting the QT plug-in deal with playback. For some reason, it seems to play smoother that way.

empyrios · Posted: Wed May 22, 2002 11:34 pm

quote

Quote:

We've found that it provides the best image fidelity for a given filesize, but it needs a fast CPU for playback. My 700 MHz Athlon at home won't play the full-sized movie without dropping some frames.

I've got an Athlon XP 1700+ running with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce2MX/64MB card and I couldn't play the 6MB on2 file smoothly at all. It pauses every 4-5 seconds or so. So maybe the video card is the key component for that filetype?

No time to grab another version to try, but what I saw looked great. Nice job.