Black Rose III animation (now with 90% less bloopers)

The PC spent 18 hours solidly rendering yesterday, and we now have our 3 clips assembled and in-game.

There's a couple of different experiments happening here.

I wanted to continue playing with parallax; I really enjoyed the effect when it worked in Emily's Day 75 scene, so time to test it again. The 3 clips use backgrounds in 3 different ways.

Clip 1 is using actual geometry in the scene to ground it. It does nothing positive to the rendering time (and invited in some bugs the first time), but the grounding feels believable. 

Clip 2 I thought I could use the background to do parallax scrolls. I was wrong. The clipping edge is too noticeable; I'd write it off as an experiment that went wrong, but I liked the angle of the clip. 

Clip3 uses geometry that's all anchored, but where the anchoring positions are off-screen. The lizard brain agrees that things look like they should, and doesn't worry too much about the background. I felt the parallax pan worked quite well here; I took the background from the Starcucks, added a box blur and darkened it a little, then placed the plane at a longer distance from the camera. To complete the illusion, the characters are set to face the camera, but the background is not, changing the angle between them subtly when the camera moves.

Another experiment was trying to get it to loop smoothly; the human eye is really good at spotting discontinuities (sharp changes) in things. I guess all the monkeys that didn't spot things moving suddenly got eaten long time ago. I usually use cross-fades to hide things, but to get that cross-fade across the entire clip was a bit of work. I duplicated the video, shifted it in so the last 1 second of the video overlaps with the first 1 second, and faded it out over that one second. Hopefully it's enough to fool the lizard brain into thinking it's a single looping clip.

As always, it's not perfect. But it's a slightly better failure than the last one :)