===== From sshelby@shelbyvision.com: Kind of reminds me of a scene from "Toy Story". Very well done. ===== From emperorofrome@yahoo.com: presented well , but yet again , color is everything, and more texturing would have been way better. Gray is commonly used for futuristic looking things, but almost nothing , is a solid gray, it don't look good. ===== From rich@brickbots.com: Generic Note: I really enjoyed watching these animations, but I personally think that pointing out the low points of an animation help more than pointing out the high points. As such, I usually only mention the problems. Please don't take it the wrong way :-) Technical: All in all this is good. You have some nice lighting setup which is a good first step. However the modeling and texturing could use some improvement. In the first sequence when the the boxes are passing on the production line, the front of the box is texture mapped, but the sides and top just use the last pixel in the front map. IIRC there is a good example of multi-texture placement in the blender book involving some dice. I used to use blender and even though the blender book is layed out strangely, it has some really good stuff and I would really recommend it. A very nice touch in any 3d package is to knock off the sharp edges of objects. Nothing in the real world has the super-sharp edges that virtual 3d cubes have. If you bevel the edges it looks more realistic because there is a tiny surface there to catch highlights and fade lighting between the two sides. Almost all of your objects could have benefited from this little trick. Some of your shadows showed strange moire artifacts... they do not look like MPEG compression related issues, maybe something about the filter type of the shadow maps? It is most noticable at ~1:05. I don't know enough about blender to suggest a fix if it was there before the mpeg compression. Artistic: Spice it up visually! The flat walls could have used some more life. A nice way to get a realistic touch is to add just a bit of a noise texture, maybe not enough to even notice, just to break up the flat areas. A better way is to make things actually dirty, for instance most walls are dirtier towards the bottom. The acting was very wooden, this is part technical, but mainly artistic. You just did not move the bits and pieces of the robots very much. I know they are machines, but I think a key to storytelling is to get your audience involved with the characters on some level. This can be done within the confines of a machine. I really thought all the reflections were way over the top. The checkerboard floor is pretty cliche in CG as are the unrealistically reflective surfaces. I don't know if blender can do fuzzy reflections, but they are much more realistic, if you are producing reflective materials. I found the super-reflective surface of the robots made it difficult to see thier outlines, which is a key communication mechanism in movies/animation. Making it easy to seperat the characters from the background makes your film a joy to watch and allows the viewer to focus more on the story. There are lots of cool things that can be done in CG, which probably just shouldn't be done in most cases. It think these sorts of reflective surfaces are one of those things. On the other hand, I liked most of your camera moves. My only suggestion would be to study photography and films to continue to improve your framing and composition. http://www.silverlight.co.uk/tutorials/compose_expose/thirds.html has some great ideas. Theme: The general idea was exciting, but the lack of dialog and emoting made it fall a bit short. At the very end there is the hint of emotion from N2, but your model has very little room for expression, and what is there was not used very much. One of the bits you do have are the arms, which are stationary though almost all of the work. Dropping them along with the head right at the end might have helped. Giving them eyelids would probably help an enourmous amount. All in all, I would have liked to feel more for the little replaced robot. Have questions about my comments? Rich at brickbots dot com ===== From irtc_mail@yahoo.co.uk: The opening sequence feels very drawn out. Do we need to see 5 boxes go past on the conveyer belt with a 6 second gap between each one? The first time we see 4N2 he sets off from the corner and stops at the table leg. When we cut back to him, he is back in the corner. There needs to be some movement of 4N3 after the dejected 4N2 moves off. As it is, 4N3 is left staring into empty space. Being as you used a modelling package I would have expected the robots to be a bit less boxy and a bit more animated. They hardly move their grippers at all. When they do move, it is very slowly. I was suffering severe sympathy-loss as 4N2 trundled slowly across the floor. Overall this feels a bit too slow and I would have expected such small robots to be much more zippy and animated.