RUIN
March 16, 2012 12:53 PM   Subscribe

RUIN: a post-apocalyptic animated short. [via]
posted by brundlefly (56 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was fantastic. And I had no idea that Modo had such a great renderer.
posted by hanoixan at 1:11 PM on March 16, 2012


That's astonishing for an amateur production. Not terribly long ago, Lucasfilm would have had to spend millions to do anything comparable, and it would have taken dozens of people at least. I gather from the comments on the video that this was done by one person.

You can still tell it's amateur in some ways, but if anything, that heightens its impressiveness.

We have ridiculous amounts of computer power at our fingertips, and most of us hardly use what we have available.... it's creators like this that make our embarrassment of CPU riches a little less embarrassing.
posted by Malor at 1:29 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


I have to remind myself that it's fucking amazing that one person can make something like that today. Because if I don't, I can only think about how nothing made any sense at all.

How does his hat stay on??
posted by cmoj at 1:33 PM on March 16, 2012


Um, it did take dozens of people to make. They're the ones listed in the credits
posted by Riptor at 1:37 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


/Film has more details on the director
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 1:47 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Outstanding. Thanks for the link!
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 1:48 PM on March 16, 2012


What was in that datacard? What strange electricy powers did the hero have? Why were the robots chasing him? More more more!
posted by Meatbomb at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2012 [5 favorites]


I hate to point things like this out, but my pet peeve in sci-fi is when future weapons are weaker than today's conventional weapons. For example, here's a terrifying example of the AC-10 Warthog's gun in action. Based on the thrust necessary for the rapid acceleration and course alterations we see the gunship do, this kind of weaponry could easily be used, if not something horrifyingly more powerful, which would have instantly annihilated the target. Yet useless light machine guns were used instead. Second, unless the missiles we see are being used for scanning, trapping, something non-lethal, which is unlikely as the ship open fires on the man, there's absolutely no reason a ground vehicle should be able to outrun them, considering we have light missiles like the Starstreak which travel well over Mach 3, and our current navigation systems have no trouble targeting at this speed.
posted by Algebra at 2:11 PM on March 16, 2012 [11 favorites]


Amazing work, so much detail. (even if James Cameron's spidey sense is tingling right now) Nice 'camera'work as well. To nitpick: you uh, kinda need your right hand on the bars to work the throttle on a motorbike. (Even on a poser douchemobile like the Yamaha MT-01) /bikenerd off
posted by Pathos Bill at 2:19 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it was made pretty obvious that the drone and systems were NOT well maintained, which I suspect made them less effective.
posted by Samizdata at 2:20 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


my pet peeve in sci-fi is when future weapons are weaker than today's conventional weapons

Trying to realistically approximate robots vs. humans doesn't make for good entertainment.

Act one: [Hero is minding his own business. 70,000 feet above, a sinister UAV fires one smart bullet, hitting Hero neatly between the eyes]
~ The End ~
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 2:38 PM on March 16, 2012 [15 favorites]


Um, it did take dozens of people to make. They're the ones listed in the credits

Well then never mind. That was dumb. The behavior of the guy's dynamite things was inconsistent. There was no reason the last blast should have disrupted the missile things when the previous ones hadn't. At the end, why would he not even be scratched by either crashing into the drone at 60mph or the crashing/exploding drone? The grip on his magic electro sword would even make it totally unusable.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it was made pretty obvious that the drone and systems were NOT well maintained, which I suspect made them less effective.

I didn't catch that at all. Either way, a badly maintained rocket isn't a slower rocket. it's either a rocket or not.

~ The End ~

It's the future. The hero has future crap too. A shield, cloaking, bullet time, whatever. What he doesn't have is road flares and a crotch rocket.
posted by cmoj at 2:44 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


The set designs were the highlight for me. Mindless action is mindless.
posted by Doleful Creature at 2:57 PM on March 16, 2012 [5 favorites]


ATTENTION WES BALL

THE INTERNET HAS CONSUMED YOUR OFFERING

IT IS NOT IMPRESSED

RESUME PASSIVITY
posted by R. Schlock at 3:08 PM on March 16, 2012 [4 favorites]


That was fun to watch. Thanks for posting it!
posted by zarq at 3:21 PM on March 16, 2012


The plot doesn't really matter in a short demo animation like this, now does it? What's impressive is the skill with which the film itself was made.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:23 PM on March 16, 2012


I loved the design on the missile bots. The burst-jets used for hovering and control are pretty menacing and realistic, and the careful act of firing their lasers showed resource management for risk/reward, which is also realistic.

I think the idea about the final bomb being successful was that the ceiling of the opening was low enough to force their flight path into the blast.

It's a good futuristic David/Goliath story, if anything.
posted by hanoixan at 3:24 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Oh, and I'd like to have a chat with the TD who wrote the greenery coverage code. It's perfect.
posted by hanoixan at 3:25 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


It's great work and this is definitely the future of animation, however parts of it do look subtly wrong: the shrubs and trees on top of buildings (how do they get seeded up so high, and what dirt are they growing in?), the main character's strange running, and the weird physics of the bike (invariant speed and smooth travel over what should be very rough terrain) to give some examples. Nitpicks, and all easily fixable.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 3:52 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Oh look, someone rendered a Half Life 2 level!

(rather well done though)
posted by BungaDunga at 3:53 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


Whelp mefi pissed all over someone's demo reel. Again.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 3:56 PM on March 16, 2012 [7 favorites]


Pretty. Nice find.
posted by mochapickle at 3:58 PM on March 16, 2012


hanoixan: "The burst-jets used for hovering and control are pretty menacing and realistic"

Inspired by something like this, I suspect. Battle: Los Angeles Did something similar.
posted by brundlefly at 4:14 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


parts of it do look subtly wrong: the shrubs and trees on top of buildings (how do they get seeded up so high, and what dirt are they growing in?)

As the first pic here shows, life will find a way.
posted by stargell at 4:18 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


Um, it did take dozens of people to make. They're the ones listed in the credits

Ah, I didn't stick around for the credits... I just spotted one person down in the comments talking about how much he/she had learned, so I thought it was a solo effort.

For one person, this would be a superb effort. For a big team like that, it's much less impressive.
posted by Malor at 4:21 PM on March 16, 2012


Stargell, a hollow clay chimney is a much dirt-richer environment than the flat top of a building. To grow trees there needs to be dirt. Dirt, broadly speaking, is a mixture of minerals and the remnants of previous organic life: dead animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, etc. Wind and rain bring it up, animals bring it up or die and become it, plants and lichens grow and die, etc.

I could be wrong about this, I'm not an erosion scientist or even a gardener, however it seems to me that for a city block of skyscrapers to accumulate sufficient dirt that trees are growing out of the tops, a lot of time would have to pass, and the fact that the hollow skyscrapers are still standing seems to argue against that much time. Maybe there were a lot of dust storms, but on the other hand the roads are still flat enough to ride a high-speed motorcycle across them.

As "graphical effect intended to show deterioration due to the passage of time", it's fine. My comment is just a realism-nitpick.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:37 PM on March 16, 2012


That was pretty damn cool.

To nitpick: you uh, kinda need your right hand on the bars to work the throttle on a motorbike. /bikenerd off

I was also distracted with the big twin sounding like an inline four. /bikenerd off again
posted by calamari kid at 4:52 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


How does his hat stay on??

Gel

But seriously that was fantastic. A whole lot of fun. How does it look in the new iPad?
posted by mattoxic at 4:56 PM on March 16, 2012


Well then never mind. That was dumb. The behavior of the guy's dynamite things was inconsistent. There was no reason the last blast should have disrupted the missile things when the previous ones hadn't. At the end, why would he not even be scratched by either crashing into the drone at 60mph or the crashing/exploding drone? The grip on his magic electro sword would even make it totally unusable.


Ahhh. So you're saying it wasn't a documentary - unlike that that one where it rained food, or that old guy who floated his house away by thousands of balloons - and I think were all still reeling from the discovery that ice age creatures had rhythm.
posted by mattoxic at 5:01 PM on March 16, 2012 [6 favorites]


I can't believe how not realistic this. Now excuse me while I go watch ANY SUPERHERO MOVIE EVER and be "that guy" who points out how Inspector Gadget should have died hundreds of times over by now.
posted by Brocktoon at 5:09 PM on March 16, 2012


It doesn't need to be realistic, it needs to be plausible within established in-world rules that can be stylized.

Iron Man can do the stuff he does because he has a suit that's basically magical. Same with Inspector Gadget some to think of it. That's their character. Guy-whose-hand-glows-a-little has no reason to be jarringly immune to physics. The premise of Up is that the balloons carry the house off, and everything that happens because of that is consistent with the premise.

It's really cool that this kind of thing is relatively trivial to make now, but that's also the problem. When Jurassic Park or The Matrix was made it was hard and expensive and it took a long time to do this stuff, so it had better be done right. No fudging the running animation.
posted by cmoj at 5:21 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


I really like the "nature and plants all over stuff" post-apocalypse look instead of the "everything is grey and brown and dead FOREVER."
posted by The otter lady at 5:35 PM on March 16, 2012 [3 favorites]


I really like the "nature and plants all over stuff" post-apocalypse look instead of the "everything is grey and brown and dead FOREVER."

Obligatory
posted by mikelieman at 6:31 PM on March 16, 2012 [3 favorites]




I interpreted the sparkles as being the nanites he was infected with after several sites of Haven nanosystems labs had a failed quarantine. The protagonist clearly uses these nanites to interface with the data slate and the sword. In order to control their nanotech features. If he's infected with nanites, and the drones are trying to enforce the long irrelevant quarantine, perhaps the drones aren't programmed to just blow him up, perhaps they have an agenda? Perhaps everyone was infected and the drones killed everyone. Perhaps the quarantine failed and the nanites killed the population of the city.


My only real question is how they built a high tech science facility smack dab in the middle of Lake Como just south of Jacksonville FL.
posted by Megafly at 6:53 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


Oddly, the detail that did it for me in this video was the insects. When society falls, it'll take the animal population decades to rebound to pre-modern levels. Insects, however, will reclaim the Earth with quick and horrible ferocity.

As you wander the decaying cities, you will be inundated with swarms of gnats and mosquitoes. Spiderwebs will fill the nooks and corners of every crumbling building. Your precious hidden stores of food will be overrun with ants and cockroaches. And every night you will hear a deafening cacophony of insects droning and buzzing in the blackness around you.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:40 PM on March 16, 2012 [6 favorites]


My only real question is how they built a high tech science facility smack dab in the middle of Lake Como just south of Jacksonville FL.

Easy.
posted by mikelieman at 7:48 PM on March 16, 2012


however parts of it do look subtly wrong: the shrubs and trees on top of buildings (how do they get seeded up so high, and what dirt are they growing in?)

I've mentioned here before - trees do get seeded high up and grow out of buildings. As to the mechanics, my lay understanding is that almost all of a tree's mass comes from the air, not the dirt, and what it gets from the ground is mostly water. Wind and birds can carry seeds a lot further than you'd think - that's the job description of seeds, and they're highly evolved.

And as windows break and roofs leak, incoming water will turn the contents of buildings to rot and a kind of soil.

The ruins of the city near Chernobyl weren't as far gone as this one; it's only been quarter of a century while some of these RUIN trees are older than that, but the reclaimed city I saw was not clearly on a different path. (And both were very green. :)
posted by -harlequin- at 7:56 PM on March 16, 2012


Why are you all assuming the biker is a guy? Clearly the hidden face plus shapeless clothes point to the big 'he's a she' reveal that SF tropes know and love.
posted by kokaku at 8:01 PM on March 16, 2012


I likewise assumed a she from the eyes and hair, but the proportions of the figure are slightly inhuman, so it's just guessing.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:06 PM on March 16, 2012


my lay understanding is that almost all of a tree's mass comes from the air

Yep. Plants convert CO2 into glucose using photosynthesis and thence into plant materials like cellulose, so plants are largely composed of air and water. However, there are also other nutrients plants generally require. They depend on bacteria for nitrogen fixation, for example, and the availability of nitrogenous compounds in a skyscraper is something to which I cannot speak. I would imagine some plants are more dependent on nitrogen-rich soil than others. It wouldn't surprise me if some enterprising species are capable of getting nutrients by other means (legumes, for example, have symbiotic bacterial populations).
posted by dephlogisticated at 8:23 PM on March 16, 2012


Incredibly well done.

Althought I was kind of baffled as to why (s)he didn't just run back into the building when (s)he heard the drone approaching.
posted by xigxag at 8:28 PM on March 16, 2012


I thought it was very well done and interesting, I had similar nerd objections to all of you above (no right hand throttle on the bike being the one that I was most hung up on, funny about that) and then I watched the AC-10 Warthog strike video Algebra linked and fell down a small Youtube hole of airstrike videos and felt pretty sad, briefly sad enough to kind of hope the actual post-apocalypse doesn't include humans at all, but I have some fresh ragu Bolognese I just made it the fridge and it's spring-ish in Cape Cod and well, I guess we have to soldier on and shit.

Cool video.
posted by Divine_Wino at 8:45 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]


Very Well done. Was half expecting a " Coming this fall to PS3 & Xbox 360 " at the end
posted by manny_calavera at 11:34 PM on March 16, 2012


Excellent. Better than most of the CGI features of the past 5 years.
posted by zardoz at 12:32 AM on March 17, 2012


Pretty much struck me as 'Speeder Bike chase from "Return of the Jedi" meets "Motorcycle vs. Semi Truck" chase from "Terminator 2" meets "large portions of Half-Life 2".'

Cool for a demo reel, but there's TONS of equally impressive work out there just like this (not that it detracts from this example's quality at all, just kinda...I dunno, "off-putting" to see one example go viral when many others have to be content with a few hundred views on YouTube.

That being said it seems like, as is SO often the case with CGI, they made gravity too fast again. The lid of the metal crate seems to slam open too fast, and when the character jumps down towards the end, (s)he appears to fall too fast. It works in Pixar type movies, but not when it's supposed to be realistic.

Great modeling and scene design, though.
posted by ShutterBun at 1:05 AM on March 17, 2012


Okay raise your hand if, while washing, your left index finger and right thumb started to twitch.
posted by The Whelk at 9:13 AM on March 17, 2012 [2 favorites]


More! I want MORE!!!!
posted by kinnakeet at 11:15 AM on March 17, 2012 [1 favorite]


To think that in my lifetime, we have gone from stuff like Land of the Lost, to Star Wars, which blew pretty much everyone's mind and set a new standard for science fiction movies in the 1970s to "amateurs" making something of this caliber, it just blows my mind.
posted by 4ster at 7:04 PM on March 17, 2012 [2 favorites]


I don't care about the unreality of weapons or the messed up physics. I just want to know why would you toss a fridge, that you're trying to loot, out of a building into an open courtyard, where you apparently already know there could be drones hunting around for you?

For a chase scene being an end unto itself, it was fantastic.
posted by P.o.B. at 7:33 PM on March 17, 2012


I just want to know why would you toss a fridge, that you're trying to loot, out of a building into an open courtyard

It was a safe, and the fall breached it.

What I don't get is how those delicate glass looking datacards could survive that fall.
posted by Meatbomb at 3:09 AM on March 18, 2012


What I don't get is how those delicate glass looking datacards could survive that.

It isn't glass. It's clear aluminum.
posted by 4ster at 9:18 AM on March 18, 2012 [1 favorite]


What I don't get is how those delicate glass looking datacards could survive that fall.

Which is also implicit in my question. If you're looting for such things, why toss them off a skyscraper? Don't worry though, the answer is always going to be so (s)he can jump on the cycle and have a chase scene.

By the way, they were destroyed. (S)He uses the nanite technology to jump start the device.
posted by P.o.B. at 4:03 PM on March 18, 2012 [1 favorite]




cmoj: "Um, it did take dozens of people to make. They're the ones listed in the credits

Well then never mind. That was dumb. The behavior of the guy's dynamite things was inconsistent. There was no reason the last blast should have disrupted the missile things when the previous ones hadn't. At the end, why would he not even be scratched by either crashing into the drone at 60mph or the crashing/exploding drone? The grip on his magic electro sword would even make it totally unusable.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but I think it was made pretty obvious that the drone and systems were NOT well maintained, which I suspect made them less effective.

I didn't catch that at all. Either way, a badly maintained rocket isn't a slower rocket. it's either a rocket or not.

~ The End ~

It's the future. The hero has future crap too. A shield, cloaking, bullet time, whatever. What he doesn't have is road flares and a crotch rocket.
"

Watch it again and look closely at the large patches of corrosion and damaged paint on the primary UAV.

And, yes, it's the future.

But not a space opera future - a everything's seriously blown to shit future. Those are not well known for high technology, especially as there are no magic sky god aliens to give us cool toys.
posted by Samizdata at 4:11 PM on March 18, 2012


See, this is my whole point. When you have to make up major plot elements in order for things to make sense, someone has screwed up, and it's not the viewer.
posted by cmoj at 4:12 PM on March 18, 2012


kokaku: "Why are you all assuming the biker is a guy? Clearly the hidden face plus shapeless clothes point to the big 'he's a she' reveal that SF tropes know and love."

According to the stuff on their concept page, the biker is a guy.
posted by the_artificer at 9:56 AM on March 19, 2012


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