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Cool!
Okay, here is the scene of entering the city . The story calls for a sunset timeframe which I think looks pretty cool for a desert setting..
MDO2010, I tried to downloaded your streetscape but couldn't so that is not in here. It was very large (280mb) which could be the reason, I have to add your debris as well as other stuff
comes together pretty good ... awesome
Beautiful! Lizard and everything!
I usually use a much lower reflection for ordinary windows, like a max of 4, but often even lower - but that's me ;)
If someone wants to model a couple of signs that would be great. A stop sign and a city sign like this link that will be put in the first scene, so you could say "Cactus Corner" "Straight Ahead" or something similar.
Also, here is an updated image with some vehicles added, moon,MDO2010's buildings and reflectioni tweaked a bit.
Awesome! :)
Mike, I've got a soda can modeled which can also be used for a beer can... still have some crush morphs to work on yet. I'll see what I can come up with for a sign... I'm thinking of "Welcome to" nl "Cactus Corner" or "Cactus Corner" nl "Welcomes You" or "Friendliest Town West of the Rockies"... Oh the possibilities. :)
Here is a can with 2 crush morphs. Sorry for no graphic yet.
Wow... kewl modeling and rendering taking place here... I'm blown away!
Everyone,
I've been following these threads a little bit here and there but today I'm getting more involved. I love the videos I've seen so far. Excellent work, I stand to learn so much. Hopefully I can contribute something useful at some point. Keep it up!!
Sweet!
Awesome! Welcome Home, Rashad!
Got a start on the sign... As you can see I don't get along with wood... what terrible textures I chose. :(
If I don't doze off I'll start creating some texture maps.
Hello Rashad... been awhile since I've seen you post... are you still frequenting the DS threads? Glad you popped in. :)
Hey wgdjohn, check out the credits in this video starting at time 14:00 - Pretty darned nice!
That's looking great mmoir! I've had unexpected work this week (which is a really good thing
) so my contributions are lagging. I was able to start some low-poly prickly pear last night, here is a quick WIP... Gotta run now, hope to upload something by tomorrow evening if that's not too late.
Dartanbeck, really sorry to hear about your neice's husband, that must be really hard on everyone. My sympathies and hope there is some miracle treatment so he can recover.
Rashad Carter - nice to see you back here!
Something like this... all in attached zip file.. love those cactus
Rashad,
Good to hear from you again.
Desert Dude , Just post your final model here and hopefully whoever puts together the deserted downtown scene will download and use your model.
Stezza,wdgjohn, great work on the signs. Too bad both of you did the city sign , this was the more important one .
I will upload the carrara scene file that people can animate Scene 1 and maybe 2 with shortly . I was planning on animating scene 3 I think where all the vehicles are pouring out of the city . If you want to animate a scene just give us a shout to let us know.
Dart, Yes... quite cool FX but very time consuming. I like the clean ones you did for the past anim.
Mike, I just had to keep modeling today to stay awake... now I'm nodding off again working on the texture map for mine... Stezza's sign is nicer looking. Oddly enought I had Welcome To nearly ready for mine. No problem... I'll use it at my house. :)
DesertDude, nice looking prickly pear cacti.
I'd like to thank mmoir, Dartanbeck and 3DAGE for getting me interested in animation again. Kewl... thanks folks.
Okay , here is the opening scene image with the sign and some pop(soda) cans included. I will upload the carrara scene file shortly, if you want to animate this scene just let us know. Hopefully you can use this to animate scenes 1 & 2.
Thanks Desert Dude and all. Yeah... it's really harsh. His daughter #2 is brand spankin' new and they're saying he only has a few months at the most. He's just a kid! Argh.
Enough of that though... I really didn't want to say anything in here, but if that wasn't the case, I'd have a few buildings and some other stuff done by now.
Fantastic models everyone! Mike, that scene looks amazing!
I'd love to do the animating if nobody else volunteers.
But I strongly urge anyone wanting to get into 'moving images' or motion graphics to give these things a try - even if you only want to do it in private at home.
But if anyone wants to grab this and run the animation, go for it!!!
Some tips:
Test your timing - and be honest with yourself! Run test renders at half resolution with reflections and all of that extra stuff, even bump and transparency turned off for fast renders. You'r only looking at the timing of your animation at this point, as well as looking for poke-through-type issues that need fixing.
Once happy with the timing, run the same lower resolution render with all of the render options you need (reflection, bump, transparency, light through trans, etc.,) turned back on. This time we're looking at render quality - how are the shaders, how is the lighting, etc.,?
Okay, here is the Carrara file for scene 1.
I should note that in the "Top" view when looking at the whole terrain, things get clipped so you don't see the terrain which is very frustrating. What you have to do is Select the terrain you want to work on and then click View/Send working box to object. The terrain should be visible and hopefully you can animate as usual. I also included a folder with the Tmaps for the Foreground and Desert middle ground, I painted these in carrara's 3d paint room and I am not sure these tmaps get save when saving tmaps internally.
Also, let me know if you have any issues with the download.
Have fun with this.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/szk00aj8gqs7eu8/OpenSceneFinal1a.zip
It took me a bit of practice (years, actually) to learn to NOT move the camera in awkward motions. Yes, bezier tweeners can help smooth out transitions, but nothing (short of starting over) can make bad motions look good.
On the other side of the coin, a steady motionless camera can have a bit of movement added in post afterward, as long as it doesn't require too much zooming, resulting in poor quality.
There are many 'acceptable' ways to move a camera in a shot. So please don't take what I've said above to mean that you shouldn't move the camera!
One of my favorite tools for getting the best motions I could is the Batch Queue in the render room. I'll set up several cameras in the same scene using different angles and motions - often with one or two at least that don't move at all. Then I load the scene into the Queue as many times as I have cameras, and set the render camera in each queue to a different camera, and let it render until it's done - over night is my most used time for this.
As soon as I can, I'll instead have two Carrara workstations - one for building and one for rendering - so I can render scenes as I work on others.
The technique of using several cameras also works really well when it comes to editing the clips together as we can use bits of different clips to create a complete shot. This is a great way to extend an action without having to slow down the motion - switching from one angle to another.
So let's look at an example which might relate to this scene:
Why not assume that this zooming is us (the viewer) driving into the town? This gives us an excellent means of creating a fun approach. Start with:
with a still, motionless camera or, perhaps, a slow, gentle pan
For scene 2, we''ll put a car on the road and animate it driving toward town - perhaps right up to the town.
Use the same camera as in scene 1 to render a low rez test to check the speed of the moving car - we just want to watch the car move at this point. Try the difference between using a bezier tweener on the movement of the car vs a linear one. The linear will give us a nice constant highway speed look, while the bezier might work great if we want there to be a slight variance to the speed of the motion.
Once happy with the speed of the car, insert a new conical camera. At frame 0:00, select the car first, then Shift/Select the new camera and use Ctrl + K (Edit > Align) to move the new camera to the car. In the Align dialog, select all three axis in the xyz indicator icon, then hit Okay.
Deselect the car so we only have the camera selected and rotate it to look out the windshield of the car. Now look through the camera and set up how you want the view for the 'driving view'. Then name the camera: "Driving View".
Next drag the camera in the instances tray onto the car to parent it.
Do you want the driver's head to turn somewhere along the timeline? At least a little motion might be nice.
Pick the point in time where you want the head to turn. It might be easiest to actually use the Director's Camera to view the camera from above and select the camera (not the Shake group, but the actual camera within) and rotate it manually, then look through the camera's view to check the view. This will keep the camera where the driver's head needs to be.
Once that's done, select the first keyframe for the group and Alt/Drag it to about one second before the keyframe you've just made. This copies the original keyframe to where we release the mouse button and we can now select the keyframe and slide it around to taste.
Select that new copied keyframe and Alt/Drag it to one second (no need for accuracy, just roughly one second, more or less) AFTER the keyframe which turns the head - this will turn the head back towards the original direction. This step can be skipped if the view is to remain in the turned position.
I mainly wanted to demonstrate how quickly we can set these things up by copying keyframes and placing them before and after others.
Then it's always a good idea to look through the camera at each keyframe and adjust it according to how you think it should look. This is why it was so important that we set up the camera shake onto a group instead of the actual camera - as it's just too easy to accidentally add extra keyframes for the camera itself, since we have to look through it, tweak and so on.
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Now duplicate the original motionless camera, and name it "Drive By", then drag it somewhere closer to town than where the car is at frame 0, and further from town from where the car ends up. We want the car to drive right past this camera, and we want this camera looking at the town along the roadside - either on the road or just off to one side.
Look through this camera and scrub the timeline to see how the car passes the camera. We don't really want this camera to move and we're actually only planning on using about one second of the final render in the edit - just a nice clip to break up the drive toward town, so we're not forcing the viewer to take a boring ride in our digital car.
So we want a good view of the car driving past the camera from behind us, probably remaining in the camera for the rest of the time line. Who knows, using the whole render might work really well!
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Now duplicate that camera and rename it to "Car View"
Select the car while looking through this camera and type "0" (zero) to center the car in the frame.
Now reposition the view so that we're close to the car, seeing one side of it, but most of the view is the scne ahead of us - looking at the town along the direction of the road.
Now parent this camera to the car and just leave it. It's done unless you decide that it need a slight shake as we did earlier.
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The same method could be repeated putting the new camera in front of the car so we don't even see it, etc.,
What ever types of shots you think would add interest to the scene.
Cool Thanks!
Yeah... frustrating. I'm very used to this. Sometimes if it drives me too nuts, I add a few well-placed target helper objects knowing why they're there and what it means - often just a depiction of where something is that disappears like that.
Awesome! I can't wait to play!!!
About the download, was it supposed to go through a service called MediaFire? I got a pop-up saying that Google something or other needed updating with a Software Updater. I clicked that and all of a sudden notices that the download was coming, so when my AntiVirus asked about the updater, I just blocked it.
But I got the download without issues! ;)
Dart, Yes I uploaded the file to mediafire, as far as I know Google shouldn't be involved in the download at all.
Wow, Dart. Lots of good information in this post.
I know for a fact that is quite a bit of kewl and great information... a look at any of Dart's animations speak for themselves or rather Dart. I'm understanding some parts of it but others since I've simply not used them yet. One does not learn by not trying.
Hope Dart doesn't mind... I saved his tips to a text file with the pic file also.
A note on target helpers, how I use them,... I will have multiple helpers for even a single frame render, still pic, to tell spot lights etc what to point at. I've gotten into the habit of naming each one for what it is needed for and placing it under, not grouped, the light/camera the uses it... "Target Helper for spot light 2" etc.
Yes. I use Target Helper Object all the time for many, many things. Let's say I'm making a 360 degree spherical render for use in the background channel. I'll assemble a scene in front of my current view and group it all together. next I use Insert > Target Helper Object so it's place precisely at 0x,0y, 0z in 3d space. Now I drag the group I just made onto the new Target Helper, Duplicate it, rotate it a bit, continue duplicating until the entire 360 degree circumference is filled.
Then I open each of the Helper Objects, grab the groups individually and randomly rotate them to taste.
Works like a charm!
Thanks. I thought we needed some stuff like this to get more folks into this whole animating gig ;)
It's so fun to do, and these techniques I do in my sleep half the time. I get much deeper into it, however. This is a basic start up. I'll often have a group within a group within a group - all for various animation needs.
And like I just mentioned above, using Target Helpers as Null positioners helps a great deal as well.
Scroll forth in the timeline and use the Align function... bam! One well-placed set of Target Helpers can save a LOT of time in animating.
I'm actually suprised to see so few animators here. I love motion!
wgdjohn, I mention this to you because of your apparent interest in credits and how they're added to the project. Well in my pursuit to learn various VFX tools and techniques, I just ran across this and thought of you right away!
I love this guy!
Here is more of an explanation to this "Text Plus" tool - this being part 1 within a playlist which will play through all four (and more) if you click the YouTube button in the video window (I think?) Edit: Nope... it doesn't work that way. Here is my Playlist, and the below video is #18 in the list, three more to follow, if you're interested. Pretty cool stuff.
So it does take time to learn this stuff... but once we figure out how it all works, the individual jobs will take no time at all - and since Blackmagic Design bought it, Fusion is now... wait for it... FREE!!! Unreal deal!
Here's more stuff I'm studying - Motion Graphic using HitFilm
Brain's gonna splode!