Dude, you clearly went above and beyond to get this done.
This is a magnificent effort. You're and inspiration for independent animators everywhere.
Interview time.
How long did it take to complete this project? From concept to completion.
How long did it take to render each frame on average?
Did you use any plugins or was this pure LightWave?
Did you build the assets yourself or did you use third party models?
Where did you get the idea for the story?
What was the most challenging aspect of the project?
What was the easiest aspect of the project?
Why did you create the animation?
Thank you for making this and sharing it with us. I, for one, really appreciate that. I loved it.
Thanks very much for your kind words. Since you asked, here are a few answers. The genesis goes back several years to when I first created my old man character. I thought I was going to make a short film with him but I never could work out a story I thought was worthy. These things take SO long to make, you have to be absolutely sure it's going to be a worthwhile project because you're going to work with your head down for months and months, not coming up for air. The advantage that companys like Pixar have is not just the numbers of artists (and computers) they can throw at a project, but the atmosphere of collaboration among supremely talented people – really, the best. Their artists get feedback at every single step, every texture, every nuanced change in a model is signed off creatively by the group. So my old man story, and the assets I'd created for him, sat on a shelf, so to speak for a few years. Once I'd settled on this particular story, my rather odd version of Wall-E's origin, it took the better part of a year of work. That's 8-10 hour days, six days a week. Basically I had to create everything from scratch except for my old man model and a Wall-E model I'd made a few years ago that I then extensively revised, rebuilt and re-rigged. Keep in mind there are two versions needed here, the pristine, fresh creation version and the beat-up, rusty Wall-E we know and love in the future. Render times on my one old Mac were not too crazy (the bigger chunks I rendered overnight), but that was because I spent a lot of time breaking down each shot into layers, planning out my compositing, so that I could isolate the more problematic elements. For example, I only used motion blur in very limited areas and on selected actions. Most of the shot compositions involved one or two dozen layers, but some had many more. There's no global illumination in any render. One trick I devised was using a soft edge gobo in every spotlight so that they have very feathered edges in their fall-off. I used various gobos a lot to break up the harshness of the lights. I didn't use any volumetric lighting in the renders and only a few instances of flares. What LOOKS like volumetric light in the factory is a single image that was textured onto a couple of different flat shapes that I could place at various positions inside the model so that as the camera moved we'd see it from different perspectives. These were rendered out as a separate pass with the foreground elements of the factory matted, then comped back together using After Effects. I didn't use any plug-ins because I don't have any, so this was an out of the box Lightwave production, granted with older software that didn't have any of the latest bells and whistles (which I envy, but can't afford). I built all assets myself except for a few low poly cars that I got for free online. I ended up modifying them so much that I might as well have just modeled them myself. They probably cost me more time than I saved. In the end, there were no shortcuts. The most challenging part for me has always been rigging. I'm still learning and have a long way to go. I used Genoma with my old man, young man, and the wife, but when only needed, such as scenes at tables where smooth and steady contact with an object is required. Otherwise I had versions of these characters that I rigged with bones. I found certain scenes easier to animate that way. What I am terrible at is walk cycles so there is only one low poly character who actually walks (at the start of the first shot inside the factory) where everything else is my attempt to distract the viewer from my clumsy animating, making it kinda, sorta, look like characters are in movement. That's why the old man is in a motorized wheelchair! I could never have done the action scenes in the last part of the film if he'd had to walk or run! You ask what was the easiest aspect of the project and my answer is that I'd have to think about that, which is a kind of answer in itself.
