montanamocap wrote:
Nice! I like the look, with the simple textures but high quality rendering (is that subsurface scattering?), I think that comes across much more in this version. It almost looks like extraordinarily smooth stop motion, as though you had done this with little models.
Thanks for the nice comments!
Yes, the higher resolution did bring some detail that I didn't expect to be noticeable even in HD. I'm glad we were finally able to do this version. Believe it or not, the original 'Gothtober' version from 2011 was rendered at 320 x 180 and bumped up to 640 x 360. This was because our old render farm completely died when we started our final rendering and, with less than a week to meet our deadline, we wound up rendering the entire short with only two desktops and a laptop. Eek! :)
By comparison, our four new 'render only' computers allowed us to re-render or the entire short at 1280 x 720 in just a couple of days. These machines were also a lot quieter and stayed a lot cooler. Our next short film is much more complicated than 'Happy Box' was and now I feel confident we can actually get this done.
Glad you brought up "stop motion". Because of our tight deadline, we rendered the original version of 'Happy Box' on twos to cut our render time in half. A side effect was a slightly stuttering 'stop-motion' look which we liked very much so we decided to keep it for the HD version.
For our next short film, we're trying some techniques which should pushing the 'stop motion' look even further. Will post more info as we get closer to finishing.
G.
