Hello fellow Snowdrifters,
Here is the new and for the time being from my side also last version of the Snowdrift intro video. It now has super smooth 60 fps, much less banding artifacts and a nicer snow animation when the buy sign pops out. The rest is unchanged.
Newest Video:
I ran into quite some problems that makes changes very cumbersome. My new notebook can’t render the blender scene anymore, as it completely messes up the alpha transparencies. And on my old notebook Blender often just closes while rendering this scene. So I always have to start the render again and again and again…
For future improvements and big changes I guess it would make sense to update the scene to the Eevee render engine. Unfortunately Blender2.8 and Eevee is in alpha stage right now, so it is to early to switch. Besides that it only make sense if the used plugins are finally ported to Blender 2.8…
Anyway, if someone of you want’s to play with the scene or change things, feel free to do so. Here is the blender file of the last version:
For editing the scene you first need to install 3 blender addons that have been used for this video: “Sniper” (used for Camera animation), “CutoutAnimationTool”
(used for characters) and “CubeSurfer” (Used for snow animation when sign pops out)
While working on the animations I always use 24 fps because I started it this way and I didn’t want to change all the frames and timing afterwards. For final rendering I just go to the render tab and under “Dimensions → Time Remapping” I set “new” to 60. (Tipp: Make sure the interpolation mode for keyframes that animate the “frame_index” value of COA (CutoutAnimationTool) Characters are set to “constant”. Otherwise this frame remapping will result in several sprite changes instead of one like in 24 fps.)
In case someone of you wants to just change the audio I have uploaded the image sequence of the last version. So it’s super easy to build the video in best quality from scratch. Just import the image sequence into a video editor like open shot, make the beginning a bit longer, add your audio and render it. I made a quick and easy tutorial on how I did it:
Tutorial:
PNG Image Sequence:
Maybe in the future I can help out convert it to Eevee and make some changes. But for now I think it’s time to use and release it.
Cheers,
Johannes