Stock footage is a strange discipline for the 3d artist. You have no brief so you can create anything you like, but at the same time, the overriding need is to be generic – if your footage doesn’t appeal to a range of people for a range of reasons, it just won’t sell.

And that, you’d think would work against the creative spirit – because it means you’re trying to create work that’s individual and beautiful and unique, but you’re trying to do it in a way that appeals to the most general market possible.

If that wasn’t problem enough, stock has very low margins. An average piece of stock might net you a few 10’s of dollars over 2 or 3 years, so when you’re creating it, there’s a massive requirement to work fast and efficiently, producing as much of it as you can (because at the end of the day you don’t really know what will sell and what won’t).

This wasn’t helped this week when other things kept cropping up to delay me – not least the fact that I wrote three reviews for a magazine, then lost them and had to do them again.

I also took delivery of another package for review – and I just had to try it out. This was videocopilot.net’s Action Essentials – a fantastic stock resource if you’re creating action footage. Take a look at this quick composition I did using a bit of CGI, a bit of shot footage, some photos and a few explosions from Action Essentials:




great stuff –

anyway, for the stock I’ve concentrated on simple settings and one character and just worked on really high quality rendering, so that hopefully the shots will look great – even though they’re fairly simple in terms of animation. I’ve also used a lot of motion capture data for movement, so that should give me a really effective look.

The downside is that rendering will take a long time even on multiple machines. The finished set of animations probably won’t be ready for weeks…