Cyber Punk Shoot Out

Zap zap pew pew pew kaboom arrrrrrrgh! It's time to shine up your laser cannon and make sure the batteries are charged! Those crazy cyber punks are having a proper shoot out and it doesn't look like they're planning to quit till things get crispy.

I have been saying that I was going to post this video for months and now I have finally got round to it. Would you believe the only thing stopping me was that I needed to do the screen grabs you see above? Well I finally got my act together. I am feeling a bit burnt out today working on a set of animations for my current project. I am working on a really cool game at the moment that as usual I can't talk about (I think saying that it's cool and something I've always wanted to work on is allowed).

I finished making this video months ago but I still remember how much of a pain in the ass the rendering program Mental Ray was. I got this horrible error message when I tried to use motion blur "shapes are not equivalent, no motion vectors computed". It took me quite a lot of fiddling about to get it to work. It seems it's one of those errors where you find lots of dead ends when trying to search for a solution online. I wasn't prepared to give up on having motion blur, it seems like a basic right that no animator should be denied so I persevered. It can be as simple as deleting history from a model but in this case it was because I was animating visibility, so be warned. I still find it utterly ridiculous that Mental Ray can't cope with animating the visibility channel. A very basic and useful technique that I've been using for years.

The video pretty much speaks for itself, lots of crazy punks with laser guns blow the crap out of each other. Enjoy!