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Daft snail clips

32

Dragons Tale films have published a series of funny clips featuring a bunch of, err..., snails!

James wrote:

Mark (the smart one) wanted to try out light matching and other mystical thing, I wanted something daft to animate and some clients wanted to see what we could do. So we came up with these.

The first two are the main tests and the third one is this years Christmas card from us.

Hope you like them and merry Crimbo!

All the best

James

Dragons Tale Films

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

32 Comments

  1. Actually the 'quick' snail on the second clip was imaginative, but very convincing. That's not an easy thing to do.
    A lot better than some of the other featured animation on BN.

    Good job.

  2. I also would like to know a bit more about the snailskin shader, is it SSS? Raytraced ref? Both? or some kind of custom mapping type shader?

  3. Hi all,

    Thanks for the feedback. I had no idea James had posted these over here so it was a nice surprise to find them in the headlines.

    So you know, James does daft, I do technical - mostly. And to answer a couple of questions, the shader is a combo of SSS, Raytraced reflections and IBL; using Matt Ebb (Broken)'s amazing IBL patch - many, many thanks there.

    The SSS is really cranked up to make the snails almost see-through, using the texture to bleed into the SSS layer. The whole thing was rendered using Blender Internal and several passes; all mixed down into a Multilayer .exr and composited/graded using a combo of Blender and Shake. Blender's Vector Blur was used for the motion blur.

    I've had a word with James, and if people are interested, I'll look into releasing the Snail Rig under a Creative Commons License for people to play with.

    Cheers,

    Mark

  4. But you don't have to be taken seriously either when all you have to say is 'crap'.

    In other words: give a reason why you think it's 'crap', or just keep your other worthless opinion to yourself. It contributes nothing.

  5. Perhaps Jack was simply exclaiming in surprise. Y'know, like "Crap! I didn't expect that!" Anyway ... who do I talk to about obtaining a gross of these snails for my garden?

  6. Nice renders and funny small movies! Besides the story itself, the snails look pretty good and I think a lot of people could learn from this.

    I think people will be interested in the snail rigs. Always great to study! Maybe include it with a composite example as well. The downside could be other snail movies and renders showing up, hmm.

    Keep'em coming I would say.

    A snail sits on a turtle and goes "Wheeeeeeeeee!" :)

  7. Strange, but I like it. Especially since the snails are made more comic, not having to be realistic. BTW, did you use Voodoo to camera track or was the brick wall simply a photograph? Anyhow, good job... singing snails rock. ;)

  8. @smrgol: Yes, please do! That would be great. And any extra files, even a tut, would be great! Good job. ;) Talking snails... :D

  9. It was actually a full HD video plate, James added the motion in post.
    The final animations were rendered out at 720P.

    Previously, we had tracked our "Go Elephants!" viral using an off-the-shelf 3D tracker.

    I'm not near my computer for a while now, but will dig out the snail rig and textures when I get back.

    Cheers,

    Mark

  10. I loved it, its a great example of blender.

    Very funny... it should be made into a full length story type animation :)

    ps. my 5 year old daughter now wants to watch it over and over again.

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