Focused Critique (for quality feedback)

K1TesseraEna · **Joined:** Sep 22, 2012 **Posts:** 2089 **Location:** US

Ocean sunset

The only real thing in this animation is the sky image, the shot I took in St.Petersburg, Florida past January.
Everything else is a fake made with Blender. I can't say much of an effort was put into this work, and I did not
follow any of the tutorials and there was a lot of things I had to figure out by myself.

I welcome your comments on what you DON'T like in my work.
Skies, ocean, lens glare, overall animation, whatever.

There is a lot of room for improvement, so feel free to give your honest opinion.

href="http://vimeo.com/user9542890">K1TesseraEna</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

Thanks!

YAFU · **Joined:** Nov 09, 2011 **Posts:** 726

Oh K1TesseraEna!, Is a scene that gives a lot of peace. Beautiful.

Two things. If glares are moving I understand that this means that the light source or camera are moving. And both seem static in the scene. Secondly, the surface of the water is very clean, no impurities or foam floating in it. I think with a bit of impurity and perhaps also with small dots that reflect sunlight in a different direction (like sand, but not so extreme) would be better.

How have you achieved the effect of the camera lens flares? I have seen that there is a script out there, but I'm still far from knowing how to use it.

K1TesseraEna · **Joined:** Sep 22, 2012 **Posts:** 2089 **Location:** US

Thanks YAFU!

Yes, camera is moving (mostly up and then down sharply - almost diving at the end) this is why lens glares move too.
I used camera constraint fixed to the infinite point. Glares is the combination of script and compositor node editing.
As for adding some realistic imperfections like foam and bubbles, I have the actual footage in the Gulf of Mexico made last
January about 1 mile off shore, and there was no foam. Sometimes wave crests create splashes of water but that would be
impossible task for Blender. That's something that would require RealFlow's Hybrido particle simulator.

Akros · **Joined:** Jan 10, 2013 **Posts:** 863

K1t
I'm sorry ... but unfortunately found it very good your animation, I found nothing that I disliked.
The feeling is of being inside a canoe.

I noticed that between the second 10s and 11s, it seems that the wave recedes strangely. At the very end of the video.

As Yafu said: "If I understand glares are moving que que this means the light source or camera are moving. And Both seem static in the scene." But I liked that effect anyway.

A great image for screen saver! :clap

Caz · **Posted:** Wed Jul 03, 2013 1:02 pm **(#5)**

First off the swell of the ocean is very convincing. Toward the end of the animation it almost appears as if it is about to pour out off the screen. I love the movement off the waves too. I wouldn't change any of the sea animation as it works perfect from my point of view.
Why the glare from the sun is tracking across the image is a mystery to me, there is nothing about the image that suggests that the flare should be behaving in this way. The effect itself though works well.
The sky is static and not overly interesting. Maybe more of a twilight feel to it and some twinkling stars might look better. In my opinion the sky is too plain for such a smooth flowing image.
At the end of the day this is a good piece of work and my comments are about small niggles that I've found.

K1TesseraEna · **Joined:** Sep 22, 2012 **Posts:** 2089 **Location:** US

Akros wrote:

[
I noticed that between the second 10s and 11s, it seems that the wave recedes strangely. At the very end of the video.

Thanks for your feedback, Akros!

Yes, you're right about that. I've noticed that only after seeing the final render. I have no explanation for this phenomenon,
but somehow wave movement kind of froze on 11th second. This 'effect' continues up to 14:00 second of the video, that's why i faded it out.
Blender must have decided not to render past 10:30 second by some reason. I know that it was not my mistake.
Maybe a bug. I'll have to investigate further.

K1TesseraEna · **Joined:** Sep 22, 2012 **Posts:** 2089 **Location:** US

Caz wrote:

First off the swell of the ocean is very convincing. Toward the end of the animation it almost appears as if it is about to pour out off the screen. I love the movement off the waves too. I wouldn't change any of the sea animation as it works perfect from my point of view.
Why the glare from the sun is tracking across the image is a mystery to me, there is nothing about the image that suggests that the flare should be behaving in this way. The effect itself though works well.
The sky is static and not overly interesting. Maybe more of a twilight feel to it and some twinkling stars might look better. In my opinion the sky is too plain for such a smooth flowing image.
At the end of the day this is a good piece of work and my comments are about small niggles that I've found.

Thank you for very detailed critique, Caz. I agree with almost everything you said.
I should have mentioned in the OP, that I tried to reproduce the actual footage. Lens glare does move across the screen
when camera is rotating bit in this scene my Blender camera does not (otherwise we would have seen the shift of the Sun position
relatively to center of camera view.

P.S. I think I can move the Sun position, it's doable in Blender, thanks again Caz!

Lurifax73 · **Posted:** Wed Jul 03, 2013 5:49 pm **(#8)**

Very good. Maybe little bit to bright. Did you render with cycle. For how many days.
My Ocean sunset blendfile look like this.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/22531

K1TesseraEna · **Joined:** Sep 22, 2012 **Posts:** 2089 **Location:** US

Lurifax73 wrote:

Very good. Maybe little bit to bright. Did you render with cycle. For how many days.
My Ocean sunset blendfile look like this.
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/22531

Days? No, it took about 1.5 hrs to render with internal Blender render.
Thanks for the blend file, i'll take a look.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16197

Felt like i was floating in a raft. Very peaceful.
Only thing i thought looked a little wee bit faked was the glossiness of the water. Just seemed too shiny in my opinion. Oh and maybe darken the water color.

AnMal · **Posted:** Thu Jul 04, 2013 12:14 pm **(#11)**

k1tesseraena:your blender work just gets better and better. beautifully made animation and restful to look at. i have a question about the horizon: if i was standing up watching this scene i would see the far horizon and it would be a straight line, no matter if the waves were high where i was standing, but maybe that would be different if i was sitting in a boat, l0ower than the water? i'm so rarely out in boats i really don't know

. and you say you were looking at some real footage of the ocean, so maybe it's all as it should be?