Rather straightforward Euroclash from French DJ crew Birdy Nam Nam, with bitchin’ vintage animation designed and directed by Will Sweeney and Steve Scott for Not To Scale.
The Flash-on-illustrations look comes off as a 70’s cartoon mashup, with Hanna-Barbera characters running around Fantastic Planet, but somehow less ridiculous and more self-aware. I think it has to do with the balance of hard-rockin-ness with obvious goofiness — something Heavy Metal got exactly wrong in 1981.
It’s a bit long, and the voice work undercuts the already stiff acting and weakish plot, but the visuals carry the piece. The cel shading is used to make space for the stellar texture work, with fantastic layout and color design supporting the kind of balance of form and texture that you normally only see in expensive anime.
It makes the rest of modern animation style seem even more about spazzy reactionary trendiness. Fish barrel bang, I know, but there are waaaay too many fish in there, and they’re evil.
10000 pyramids in 26 minutes. This is much better.
I found a bit of optimization I missed; now I’ve got one more list, which marks the position of each pyramid, obviating a calculation step. Now it can do 5000 in 11 minutes, and 1000 in a minute-twenty. The collision detection is still only mostly polite, but the sheer speed of this code boggles the mind.
Behold a 5000-pyramid smoothly-growing shrub! That’s it! Keep beholding!
I’ve been working with a lot of largish loops lately, iterating a series of nested processes over lists of ever-increasing size, and bumping into some soft walls.
However! Whether through inspired genius or cargo-cult pigeon-pecking, I have arrived at a superior method.
First, I will bore you with the setup, followed by code and cake. Continued »
Lordy! Conceptually, it’s a stretch, but the animation by Wizz is nifty, based on illustrations by Edik Katykhin.
This is the best of the three they’ve done, starting last year, maybe because of the music. The others are a little too try-hardy.
Looks to me like it was done in After Effects or some other 2.5D setup, with a whole lot of hand-drawn inbetweens to keep the scaling and rotations from being so obvious.
Great characters; and really excellent texture work, in a way that exploits the advantages of texture layers and 3D space to make something that neither can do on its own. It’s obviously a merging of 2D and 3D, but it’s all harmonious and well-integrated, and doesn’t grate or jar.
This kind of syncretic style is something that I see more and more often coming from the schools, and that makes me happy, because it means 3D is no longer solely the domain of geeks with tin eyes. It’s finally a design tool, instead of a world all by itself.
I had to mute the sound; the song (while no doubt perfectly appropriate) has a choir in it. I had a bad experience with “We Are The World” as a child, and I’ve been violently allergic to choirs in pop music since.
Back to MEL, because this would have taken for-freakin-ever to run in Pymel. This is 500 pyramids.
Figured out the strategic flaw in my collision-detection. I need two lists: one of objects available for growing from, the other with everything in it, for collision-checking.
…that didn’t have anything to do with the code, it was a personal revelation. Although now I think about it, it applies to the code too. There’s still the occasional sneaky intersection, but they’re much rarer now.
I was doing so well, placidly retracing my steps through my MEL code and converting it to Python, like a responsible citizen. But then I got impatient, so I skipped straight to the last version of my worm-building code, and Pythonized it all at once using my still-rudimentary Pymel knowledge.
It took a bit longer than I expected. I ran into some funny roadblocks, some because Pymel is still evolving, and some because my brain is. Anyway, it seems to be working, with some small improvements, and only one teensy drawback.
The Python is easier to read and write than the MEL, but it takes eight times longer to run: for 100 pyramids, over 10 runs, an average of 97 seconds versus 12 seconds for the MEL. Whether this is a dirty secret of Pymel or my own ineptitude will take more eptitude to discover.
I may do a side-by-side translation/comparison in the future; there’s a lot of MEL floating around, and some kind of Rosetta stone may be useful. For now, you get the Python.
A whimsical if stiff ode to everybody’s favorite mock crab ingredient. By Supinfocom students Jean-Francois Leroux, Thibaud Floutier, Gerome Payen Kennedy, and Pierre-Alain Dubois.
From Supinfocom students Clement Crocq, Margaux Durand-Rival and Nicolas Novali — HD here.
I love these French student pieces, though they all seem to be variations on the same theme — quick festival-crowd-pleasers, with a plot arc like a daredevil’s ramp. I guess it’s difficult to do much else in 5 minutes, when you’re young, and in love.
