Games Short Cinemachine video 'Gateway' : harsh criticism wanted.

This is my first 'finished' project in Unity and Cinemachine. I saw some cool science fiction videos on Vimeo after Cinemachine and Timeline became available and decided to (try to) make something similar.

Scenes build in Unity3d.
Tools: Timeline, Cinemachine

This is the last version before the final upload.

Harsh critisism welcome!

Edit:
Intention: Artist's Impression of a Moon to Mars journey.

 

nice, the singularity dims too much...would be much brighter., more contrast?..that is the only thing that caught my eye..and, there is no story line, not even a hint of one...but great proof of concept. Patrick

 

Thanks Patrick, very useful feedback!

 

Harsh is asked for so I'll give you semi harsh constructive criticism instead! I tab opened the video on vimeo so I could see it properly.

1. Background (starfield) could be improved, including the distant galaxy image.

2. Lighting in ship is a little flat. Films will add visual interest by way of light sources from windows, from little lights etc, something to give it shape and form.

3. Planets lack atmosphere so they don't render as interesting as they could.

4. Unity's shadows seem low resolution on the ship. The ship would probably benefit from adjusted cascades in this case, or blacksmith character shadows or screenspace shadows.

5. Ship antialiasing was a struggle for you but could've been largely fixed by LODs but this is time consuming.


I particularly liked the camera direction and framing ideas you had. Overall well done! What were the challenging aspects for you in the making of the short?

 

Thanks a lot @hippocoder , will definitely take the feedback into account.

1-3: Yes, definitely needs improvement.
4: I did not realize this but will look further into it.
5: I had a look into LODs but need more time to understand how to apply it.

Since you asked about the challenging aspects, here's a rundown of the actual workflow.

• Building a spaceship while I didn't have a purpose for it, other than becoming better at 3d modeling/art. Hopefully one day will become at least half decent.

• Importing said spaceship model in a Unity project and experimenting with animation when I learned about Timeline and Cinemachine.

• Imported a really good sounding sample track (.................ha, ignorance is bliss).

• Continued building scenes, animation and camera movements in Cinemachine and further building and improving assets. (Spaceship, Moon, Mars etc.)
  
  
• Wow, this soundtrack sample is awesome but, wait a minute, it's quite long and the animation doesn't really sync.

• Looking for another soundtrack with identifiable rhythmic events in it while further working on assets. After days/weeks of searching, found a good soundtrack.
  
  
• Wrote down the rhythmic against animation events on piece of paper to determine scenes.

• Just then, a Unity/Timeline update allowed import of soundtrack with visualization into timeline. How cool, now I can see the soundtrack visually against timeline events!

• 'Blockout' of the entire project completed and further finetuning assets, animations, renders, camera movements etc.

• So far all issues where solved with the help of Google but now I'm stuck on an aliasing problem. Next step, after trying many different quality and graphics settings:

• Spamming the Unity forums!

• A few individuals have been very generous offering help and finally, a solution is found.

• Recording the animation with FFmpegOut to Mp4, it didn't capture the UI elements (fade/title) though. (I was unable to get Unity recorder to work unfortunately).

• Although there are alternative solutions within Unity, I decided to add fade effects en title in Da Vinci Resolve.

• Done! Now looking at some jaw dropping videos of the Neon Challenge and realizing that there's a lot more to learn.

 

Awesome... yeah lots to learn, in fact I didn't even enter which meant I did not learn anything