206 posts · 2008-10-24 16:51:02 to 2008-11-13 08:07:08
Rarebit wrote:
Hm, Niobe's up next. Not really familiar with drawing her. Threw some reference shots together for myself:
And then took a stab:
Distract them with lighting effects!
Not a bad first try, but hmmm... maybe a bit broader in the jaw and a little less "long" in the face? at least if she needs to look like the char RSI we got. and maybe the shadows on the cheeks under the eyes are bit too heavy? She looks a bit too skeletal I think with the shadows forming her face.
Synapse777 wrote:
Not a bad first try, but hmmm... maybe a bit broader in the jaw and a little less "long" in the face? at least if she needs to look like the char RSI we got. and maybe the shadows on the cheeks under the eyes are bit too heavy? She looks a bit too skeletal I think with the shadows forming her face.
Ah hm yeah a little wider in the jaw would work.
Rarebit wrote:
Likeness this.
Pretty sweet!
Ghost or a cancer patient... I'm not sure
ZaneZavin wrote:
Ghost or a cancer patient... I'm not sure
Gasp... storyline...
ZaneZavin wrote:
Ghost or a cancer patient... I'm not sure
Heh! Yeah I have to agree there ZaneZavin that's what hit me with Niobe that she had wasting disease or something. Rare you might want to make them less heavy shadowed under the cheekbones they look a bit too... sick... because you get the cranial form with the extended cheekbones too much 
and yeah I know too many chefs but of course if the pic is moving it's different than what we're seeing when it's a one take but yeah.. you know me, just saying =) A face all white with some thin dark shadows instead of the heavy ones for faces unless they're sitting in very dark rooms?, just suggesting Thanks for giving the customers the opportunity to look at the art and come up with a few comments btw 
They look pretty lame to be honest. Can we donate money to make the cinematics like the previous ones? I think a couple a hundred should do the trick.
TakuyaX wrote:
They look pretty lame to be honest. Can we donate money to make the cinematics like the previous ones? I think a couple a hundred should do the trick.
What do you suggest to make them better, other than donations?
Darminian wrote:
OH MAN A CALCULATOR?!?!
Don't hurt yourself busy little bee.
Question for you - if you felt like stopping the support to epn and cypherite orgs because of an inability to do them justice why in the world are you attempting cinematics.
Side note - your drawings albeit stylish and good are effectively if continued at this rate going to burn you out and more then likely as is noteable now become your main focus, a minute and a half of sketches doesn't exactly account for a solid event let alone several of them - that being said those are also things we've not had in ages. So do what you will, i'm just looking forward to:
A new approach version 2.0.
~Darminian
Although cinematics do seem able to bring the matrixy feeling and a sense of storyline back, i have to agree with this.
Rarebit is doing a great job mastering this drawing style simply te please and get us silly players up to date with the story, but i don't really see how this will make the matrix franchise, the events or the whole game's past justice.
Hyperviolent wrote:
i don't really see how this will make the matrix franchise, the events or the whole game's past justice.
Hard to do justice with as low resources as the Dev's have, even so cinematics are a great help in making sure those who are interested in the continuation of the story are able to keep up with it, it also allows for events that can't possibly happen in the game due to the mechanics of the game yet still have resounding consequences.
Because of this and due to the lack of funding they had for previous cinematics, Rare has taken it upon himself to continue this feature the best way he can do hopefully without impacting on a quality storyline.
But yes if Takuya wants to try to get the community to pay extra for cinematics like the old ones, fair enough, but after a while when people realise that their donations are also paying for those who aren't donating to enjoy the cinematics, the amount of people donating will rapidly reduce.
Or we could do a pay for game content idea where people pay to get the cinematic, unfortunately those who can't pay anymore per month will miss out on a large part of the story and the story is what MxO is about.
eval wrote:
TakuyaX wrote:
They look pretty lame to be honest. Can we donate money to make the cinematics like the previous ones? I think a couple a hundred should do the trick.
What do you suggest to make them better, other than donations?
Rarebit to step down?
Honestly, for the higherups to hear our concerns and actually base their decisions on our feedback. It feels like rarebits new cinematics are forced. They canceled the old ones then a couple of months later we get a downgrade? That's pretty messed up.
Rarebit wrote:
Synapse777 wrote:
Not a bad first try, but hmmm... maybe a bit broader in the jaw and a little less "long" in the face? at least if she needs to look like the char RSI we got. and maybe the shadows on the cheeks under the eyes are bit too heavy? She looks a bit too skeletal I think with the shadows forming her face.
Ah hm yeah a little wider in the jaw would work.
Yep, looks more like her now. =) not so skinny now I just think you still need to be careful with the cheeks and the temples shadows there not to get her eyes too deep looking into the skull 
I hope you've finished on time
Really excited about this!
Sigma
It is done.
Not quite the compact download I'd hoped for, but I've learned that what I laid out for this one was probably just too much to try to put in a single cinematic. I also learned a lot about pacing, and the various constraints this format puts on it. I'd like resync the first scene in particular, but ah well, got to let go some time. ... Hopefully the push Live actually works. ;)
The swf file is 14 MB. Run time is a tad over 3 minutes, I think. I'll have some handy links for you guys tomorrow (direct links to the Live files, if you guys haven't dug them up yet, and gif renderings of each scene that you can use if you want to get an individual frame or something), and I'll probably drop a bunch of spoilerish source art on you.
3 minutes! Thats quite a long cinematic! Well today is the day so I'll be waiting anxiously!
Rarebit wrote:
I'll have some handy links for you guys tomorrow (direct links to the Live files, if you guys haven't dug them up yet, and gif renderings of each scene that you can use if you want to get an individual frame or something), and I'll probably drop a bunch of spoilerish source art on you.
Thankoo ^_^
Hrm, I guess the "3 minutes" figure may vary... Just as well for this one that *some* browsers play Flash back a little slow (I clocked one that took four minutes to get through the file).
Could we get a link to the cinematic so that we can watch it while the servers are down?
Mathalos wrote:
Could we get a link to the cinematic so that we can watch it while the servers are down?
This would be a nice idea, gives us something to do while waiting for the servers to come back up.
Just this once you're either going to have to guess it, or you're going to have to wait.
Is it definitely on the server now? I've tried a few combinations based on the old format with no success, but for all I know there's been a delay in uploading it. Not exactly unheard of. 
Yeah, been trying all sorts of URLs here at college, heh.
Heh! As much as I don't like the wireframed RSI's (I do like the Oligarchy storyline in general.) I'm quite excited about our dev's making the movies now to the story... as it comes out as he wanted instead of something that is misunderstood by some artist somewhere in production from the script and gets shown wrong... Nice you finished on time, heh. Now go sleep,Rare-man!!! =)
And grats on your work and experience from this! You're now a level 101 dev in cartoons Yay!
Pre-emptively flagging this thread for spoilers.
Rarebit wrote:
Pre-emptively flagging this thread for spoilers.
whos this it looks like one of those magic eye picture things maybe if i squint at it long enough it will jump off the page
I found the link.
Epic Cinematic. Period.
Holy potatoes!!
Is Veil sporting a new do?
Vinia wrote:
Is Veil sporting a new do?
Remember this is in the real.
Honestly at first I didn't really think much of this, but now that I've seen the cinematic in its final stage, it's actually pretty decent. I miss the sound effects though, but this is still a hundred times better than just the one image we got every chapter.
That's pretty flippin' good, Rare, well done! I had to watch it a couple of times to catch everything, and I think some people might take a while to get used to your artistic style, but it's pretty groovy.
Not sure what Wright did, though. Did she warp a building to get inside it or something?
Anyway, it'd be grand with some music. And it still reminds me of Another World (Out of this World for you US sillies).
All good apart from the second merovingian angle where it looks like he has no eyes and the scene of Ghost hyper jumping.
Part from those, pretty sweet and look forward to seeing these evolve as time goes on.
Hmm, it was pretty good, but it could use more cow bell. Oh and YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Go Veil!
That's pretty good for a first attempt. Good job, Rarebit.
Wish I hadn't been spoiled by the thread title in General Discussion. Anyways, I loved that, and if that takes 3 weeks then 3 weeks should be spent :O
Bloooooooody good first attempt Rare! I was like omg omg omg let me jack in. And the new stuff aside from the wireframed stuff is aweeeeesome.
EDIT: Definately a good feeling to have our cinematics back!
odj wrote:
lol is it me or does the Merovingian in that pic look like President Abraham Lincoln?
Anyway good first attempt Rare, very good indeed. The Veil looked like a female Counterpart to the Joker in that Cinematic lol
Fen wrote:
MatrixRefugee wrote:
Ooh... who's that? New character or someone we know? Nice pic!!
Naturally, it's me. Rarebit lost a bet with me, and now he has to make me into a storyline character.
I'm gonna take this moment, now that the cinematic is out, to laugh at you.
Haha, you look like a chick.
I gotta say, when I first saw it, I was initially disappointed. But the more I watch it, the more I like it. I really like the little combat bit with Veil and the jack.
I see Mathalos found the swf file. The actual page loaded in the cinematic view window is
http://thematrixonline.station.sony...cs/cin11_3.html
which will keep it at the right size and prevent it from automatically looping. You'll probably see an "unable to load" notice below the cinematic if you view that page in a browser other than IE--that's the fallback image you'd see in the in-game browser (which is just a fancy skin over your IE install, basically) if it wasn't able to load the cinematic for some reason.
GIF versions of the cinematic (broken down into the somewhat arbitrary chunks in which I worked on it):
xenin wrote:
odj wrote:
lol is it me or does the Merovingian in that pic look like President Abraham Lincoln?Anyway good first attempt Rare, very good indeed. The Veil looked like a female Counterpart to the Joker in that Cinematic lol
I always think "Ask Jeeves" when I see that particular shot of him.
You're right about the Joker thing--I think particularly in the two shots where her lips are mostly black. Probably hard to avoid *not* looking like the Joker if you've got a white face, black lips, and a wicked smile, I guess. I was thinking last night why I ended up drawing her lips darker there, and I guess it mostly had to do with wanting to make her face look heavily shadowed, and to make the smile stand out more. Black and white has a lot of choices to make when it comes to rendering mid-value surfaces.
I thought these wicked smiles were a little more successful, though:
My only beef is that it actually went TOO fast. Since there was no voice acting, I had to take time to read the subtitles which would distract me from watching the action, or vise versa. For next time, I'd suggest slowing down the pace a bit to allow more time for reading, especially for the slow readers, and especially since you can't rewind it without having to watch the whole thing again.
But other than that, really great job! The outcome was a lot better than I thought it would be! :)
Cervacius wrote:
My only beef is that it actually went TOO fast.
Yeah, that's what I meant last night about "pacing." It took me a while for instance to figure out that all but the shortest subtitles have to be visible for at least 2-3 seconds in order to be legible; in my planning for the animation, I'd thought I could get away with 1 second clips--which is a good speed for action scenes (even 1/2 second clips for some of the Veil shots), but not long enough to handle a subtitle, as it turns out. That was the main thing that bit me in the first scene (Merv & General). That scene wouldn't have been easy to slow down because of the flickering light...so you probably won't see me trying to have another scene with a constantly animating environment on top of a lot of dialogue. The environment is a factor because it means I can't simply freeze a frame of dialogue for a second or a split second to give it more time to be read (as opposed to, say, the computer messages in the last scene), since the background would stop animating and it would look jarring. That means I'd have to multiply the frame count every time I needed more...time in that type of shot, and especially as I was starting animating the art, I was sort of paranoid about going over my frame limit.
I did come pretty close to maxing out what I was able to work with, so I guess the first scene ended up taking one for the team. Pacing will always be an issue when longer animation = larger file size. It's tricky, and definitely the main thing I'll have to focus on improving. I have to find ways to slip in pauses for dialogue (the dialogue that I absolutely have to have, at least--there actually isn't much dialogue in this cinematic) while avoiding ending up with a boring succession of non-animating talking heads, which was a major concern of mine going in.
My original rough outline called for 900 frames. The final frame count is 1297.
