The year is 2013 and Minecraft is exploding in popularity all around the world.
oooaoaaaaggghhh Villager News 1
has just been released and everyone is screaming at us, demanding more! Umm…
please may we have another one kind sir? We couldn’t escape them, everywhere we went
there were people asking about villager news. Aren’t you going to ask about Villager News?
No.
With all this new pressure placed upon us by our audience
Nope, you take all the time you need, no pressure. With this new pressure placed upon us by
ourselves. We decided it was time to make a sequel!(s). And of course, when making
an animation for youtube, you have to get it done fast! Which leads to mistakes! So let’s find out:
EVERYTHING WRONG WITH OUR VIDEOS and this time
it’s Villager News 2, 3 & 4! We’ve got a few this time.
Thank you very much to everyone who watched and commented on the last video. A few of you
mentioned that you wouldn’t have ever noticed the problems we found! And that’s a good thing,
it means they didn’t get in the way of the story. But! It’s still fun to try and find them!
A HA! FOUND A TECHNICAL ISSUE! What?! I’m not a technical-
Just like last time, I’m not going to be commenting on the animation style choices
because that has evolved over time. But on that subject, we did get rid of the pixely faces!
Achoo! Oh no, my pixels!
It’s almost like people didn’t like them
But anyway! Let’s jump into the first video!
Villager News 2 revolves around this UFO wreaking havoc in the background and
also a swat team that raids a house because someone forgot to stamp their library book.
Your book has been stamped Thank you!
Ok the first one isn’t really anything wrong but it gets an honorable mention. This sound
effect is a fart! Ew
Ok, ok the first real one. The villager news studio gets a big window in this one,
where you can see all the way to the - lack of a horizon. The outside world just ends here.
In the last video we said we usually add trees to block out the view.
It looks like we tried here but we missed a spot .
This shot had to be completely reanimated from scratch on the very last night,
so a lot of the animation is super basic to save time.
Like check out how this guy just zips from one side of the screen to the other.
This actually looks kinda like the animation in layout on our newer videos.
Layout is where you bring in all the characters and
props and you get everything ready to be animated.
Speaking of animation problems, later on we have this huge catapult made out of villagers,
firing at the UFO there. So this one villager gets
yeeted at the UFO but if we go through frame by frame, he just sort of stops in mid air,
But then some more janky physics takes over. He bounces off the UFO, does a little flip and
then speeds up ??? Like I’m no scientist but I don’t think you can just gain momentum like that.
So a few seconds later, The UFO is doing it’s thing, sucking up all the villagers.
It gets this guy and wipes him up the glass and then it moves over to this guy. Villager #4 just
carries on reading the news and we assume the UFO has gone on to suck up some more things...
but it didn’t. The shadow is right here, it just stays there hanging about.
That happened because when you’re animating and a character or object goes off-screen,
you just stop animating it. There’s no point in animating something you aren’t going to see
It’s a good job you can’t see it too because some really weird stuff can happen off-screen.
And while this is super efficient, we don’t always get to see where the shadows fall until
way after animation is finished and if we don’t notice it, we can end up with problems like this:
- to end, A rocket with our best and brightest-
Did you see it? Uh, yes?
Lets go back, so we’re looking at this guy. So in the file, he runs past the camera
and then once he’s off screen he starts running on the spot.
And that’s fine, but in the video, the shadows give it away.
Look at that, it’s 2021 and we’re still making these mistakes 8 years later.
And its not just when characters go off screen that we stop animating,
sometimes entire body parts aren’t animated. Like, if you can’t see them, whats the point?
What are you talking about? This is fine.
So here the swat villagers break in to this “house” and as the camera goes through the door
you notice it’s massive inside!. Like, huge!! We were toying with the idea of the villager
houses being sort of like the ones in old school RPGs, you know, like, bigger when you’re inside
them. And while that’s a cool idea, we never really expanded on that after this video.
Awww.
So to do this we just had two different sets, an outside and an inside. And then we just used
a hidden cut to switch between them as the camera gets to the door. There it is. But
you can see that inside there’s all these lights! Whereas a few seconds ago before we
get into the door you can see clearly through the window that it’s the small house interior. So...
This is literally unwatchable!
This villager is floating!
So you remember those motion blur issues in Villager News 1? Well this one had tons!
As the tom cruise villager rappels down we
can see that there’s actually nothing outside the windows, it’s just white!
Then as Tom Cruise stamps the book. His rope suddenly becomes a pole stuck to his back???
You may have noticed that the window here isn’t standard minecraft glass, we changed it because
you wouldn’t have been able to see anything going on in the background. If you’ve ever used the
Optifine plugin in the game, it’s kinda like that. That in itself isn’t what I want to point out here
though, it’s the fact that we only did it on that window. We didn’t do it here, we didn’t
do it there. And the worst offender of all of them is the window right here, Right next to it!
That’s it, we’re done
So that brings Villager News 2 total count to….
Oooh that’s gonna be a tough one to beat, but lets try..
Villager News 3! An innocent villager is making himself some toast when all of a
sudden he’s surrounded and accused of kidnapping another villager.
Release the hostages! I just want to make toast! We actually couldn’t find that many technical
issues with this one Yay!! I’m a hostage too!
But let’s see what we did find:
Right at the beginning, the sign says Villager News 3! It’s the only video
to actually have a number after villager news. So that’s a ding for inconsistency.
Here there’s a villager watching all the action unfold on the TV,
but if we go through frame by frame, the screen changes size as it sort of settles into place.
This is because the screen isn’t really there,
it’s added on afterwards in post and the tracking wasn’t perfect!
What!? Noooo!
In this shot, there’s a light directly above this villager’s head so when he moves he’s just
going in and out of dark and light. This isn’t really a technical issue, but it is bad lighting.
Uh, how about this? Yeah a little bit
better. Yay.
We also found a couple of texture issues,
check out the texture on that megaphone, it’s all blurry!
Minecraft textures are super small, usually only 16 pixels wide. And when you stretch that
over an object a lot of 3D software likes to smooth it out to get rid of that pixely look.
But we want it pixely, it’s what makes minecraft Minecraft. So you have to tell
the software to not to do that. Here’s what our videos would
be like if we didn’t do that. Eeugugugh! I hate it! Switch it back!
Here the texture on the villagers helmets are all stretched and I don’t really know why. It looks
like a UV issue but in the file, they render fine! Sometimes things go wrong and there’s no
explanation for it. ooOoooooH
ANND this video has
its own share of MOTION BLUR glitches! So that brings Villager News 3 total count to…
Not bad - I bet there’s more that we missed though, let us know if you find any.
And finally, VILLAGER NEWS 4! The villagers are sent into battle with the testificates
in a D-Day style attack. So this video was actually animated before Villager
News 3. But it was left unfinished for about a year. If you watch them
both you might be able to see that number 3s animation and lighting are a little better.
Ok so our first problem is right here.
Yay, I am now a boat. YAY - let’s go.
Alright, let’s slow that all the way down, so when the camera whips over to the right, you can see
this villager here is actually two villagers inside each other. also the motion blur is an
issue we’ll leave that for the inevitable barrage of dings at the end. You know it’s gonna happen
Villager news 4 has janky physics all around because the bullets fired from the guns are
simulated dynamic objects and that means you can just fling them around, smash things into them..
Or make a bowl of nice tasty Villager Soup. Mmmmm
And the simulations are rarely perfect. Over here we have one of these dynamic
villagers getting nudged by a villager running past and you think he’s safe,
but then this guy comes along and just blasts through him as if he weighs nothing.
Also this villager is floating
What are you doing here? This is not your battle He’s right it’s not, that came later
But check out this villager on the floor here, he gets pushed right into the sand blocks and then
Poof! he’s just gone. Like where did he go?? So when physics messes up that bad,
there’s a couple of places he could be, either he just got pushed through the
block and ended up under the world. Or he got yeeted 50 miles in a random direction.
Tank!
This guy just disappears!
This shot is probably the worst of all of them when it comes to physics and motion blur glitches,
it’s just a mess. There’s an explosion from the tank throwing all these villagers in the air,
but as they all land everything goes a bit crazy .. Look at them all,
glitching all over the place, it’s hard to keep track of just one of them.
Back on that creeper shot, watch this villager. He just wall-runs up this block…
Now when we animate crowds of villagers, we simulate them. Each one has its own animation,
they can even have their own health system. That big battle in war was mostly simulated.
But back in the olden days of villager news 4 we had to do each one manually.
So what we did was we drew out a path for where we wanted the villagers to run
and attached them to it. But if the path made a right angle up the block, So did the villager.
So this villager here is some kind of explosive. Everyone runs away and BOOM!
There it goes. But look! He’s still there. Someone forgot to make him invisible after the explosion.
GASP! That’s me! Ok yeah it was me, oops!
And finally, we can’t finish up one of these without pointing out all the motion blur issues!
So Villager News 4s total comes to----
Yeah, that one uh.. That one had a lot of problems.
Of course there will be lots more issues there that we missed so if you spot them
let us know in the comments! You guys found some last time!
In villager news 1, this guy running along was floating the entire time!
Nice spot CasamSaturnBOi is cutie - that’s a name. Zoopygoopert noticed this weird light shading on
the arms here. I’ll have to figure out why it did that! I have no idea. Again, nice spot!
And a bunch of you noticed that in the video talking about the mistakes,
there was a mistake. - Transparent is spelled wrong.
We do notice some issues on our videos before we release them but for a lot
of them you have to weigh out whether fixing them is worth the time or money.
And being an animation studio on youtube isn’t exactly lucrative.
We’re a small team of people but this is our full time job,
and youtube revenue is rough at the best of times.
You take how much from us? 30%
That seems a little high 35%
What?! That’s ridiculous! 40.
45.
So that’s why we rely on you guys over on patreon! Becoming a patron helps us out immensely, like,
These amazing people here are responsible for the videos we’ve been able to make recently.
I’d also like to give a little shout out to our Ultimate Patrons:
the Warfenhorten Clan and destructodino142. All of these guys are the backbone of our content
and if you want to join them you can get some really cool element stuff when we releaseit.
And if you watched up to this part, thank you very much, and that’s it for this edition of
Everything Wrong with our videos, Let us know what video you want us to cover next!