I’ve gotten requests to publish a list of free-licensed resources used for Lunatics, and I have accumulated a very long list of them in my browser bookmarks collection. I don’t really have time to edit this down into a more digestible format, but i wasn’t too hard to export the bookmarks and import them into my news blog here. So here you go: links to all kinds of free art resources!
As we’ve already mentioned in an earlier update, Lunatics! will start out with two soundtracks — one in “original language” and one in “English-only”. These tracks will be nearly identical most of the time, but they will handle the few cases of characters speaking other languages differently.
Our show doesn’t really have a single star. Instead we have an ensemble of several colonists, each of whom gets their own stories. But we also want to get them together as for ensemble moments, like this scene of the two main families having their first meal together on the Moon.
There are several factors we have to balance in coming up with a style of animation and rendering for “Lunatics!” You might think that 3D animators should always try for maximum realism (“photorealism”) when making animation, but this is not necessarily a good idea. First of all, the human eye is extremely good at spotting errors in photorealistic renderings and especially in animation. This is the basis of the problem known as the “uncanny valley effect”: if you have extremely photo-accurate models and renderings of characters, then even the slightest error in movement creates a disturbing “creepy” effect. Such animations are often described as “zombie-like” or “doll-like”. This is because we are very sensitive to tiny differences in the way real people move.
