Creating an animation.

15 years old, eh? No wonder your work is so good now. And I do understand your worry in rendering before learning extra stuff. I’m just like that as well, when I learn something new or mange to do something more difficult, the first thing I want to do is set a scene and make a render of it. :)
lorddarthvik said:
Maybe I'll finish this one up eventually (?) :)
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I truly hope so. In what depends of me it will. :)
 
I'v taken a look at the modells you made. I'm missing the radar, it seems. The other meshes are OK, I can start working them. They'll need lots of textureing. Thats a:
-Good thing, cause I need practice at drawing and mapping modells with my own textures, and I'm starting to enjoy it. It's like painting your plastic modell :D
-Bad thing, cause it will take lots and lots of time, and memory usage dureing rendering. I'll convert to 8bit palettes, it keeps the colors but much much smaller. No one will notice the difference 640*480 :D ( you said that it will be enough) :D

(no, working with jpegs does not help with memory issues)
 
Oookay, so heres half of a render.

I experimeted with grass. I mean 3d looking grass, not just a photo of grass. This is mostly unnoticable on the render due to some error in the way I set up the scene, and the scale of the scene. But, the msot important part is, that we will NOT use VRay Displacemnt for grass. Why? Cause it took 3 and a half hours to render this small part of the picture :D I'll try to do it with another tehnique tomorrow, cause we need tha fastest solutin for animation rendering.

And here is a full render of it, without the grass. All materials (for non-3d guys, it means textures and shine and such on the things) are temporary. I just didn't wanted to use plain grey. So do not complain about that just yet. Also, the layout is temporary, there will be a lot more stuff.
BUILDING MODELLS MADE BY KILRAH. I just addded ships and rendered.

(someone will complain, there's allways someone who doesn't read, just looks at the pictures, and complains about the "textures and shineing")
 
As for the missing radar model it’s the first model I’ve sent you two or three weeks ago, but don’t bother I’ll send it again tomorrow.

Your renders look great. I really like them, good work. Just for curiosity, the Arrow model, is it mine?
 
That's pretty neat! :) At 3 and half hours a frame I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to render an entire clip with those settings...
 
I allready like the general setup. For high render times. Did you thought about spliting/layering the thing and render stuff seperatly and then later combine them via postpro?
You could for example make just a render with the grass, one with the tower, one with the hangar and so on and later combine them again. So if you make changes to one of these things you would only have to render that special part again and not the entire thing.
 
Yes, thats Kilrah's Arrow also. Sorry, forgot that one. I'll be useing that one probably, but not sure yet. (depends on poly count, will check)

Thats a good idea Lars, I just don't know how to do it exactly, and I'm not sure with wich program I can combine it later again. I gotta look into it :D

I don't think I'v received the radar as a mesh, only as pictures??? Gotta check that too.
 
If you are using Max their is a little simbole that looks like 3 papers layed over each other. Thats the layer system in Max. You can select objects, select the layertool and then a window will be displayed where you can add new layers, assign objects to it, hide them or set them to be shown in the scene but not be rendered.
Using that you can easly set up what will be rendered and what not.
I also use it for hiding things that are in my way. For example when I make a light setup I make an extra layer for the light. When I am finished with the lights I simply hide the layer but set it to renderable. That way I don't see all the lights in my scene as objekts but still have them in my render.
I do the same with cameras and other stuff.

When you render the scenen best use TGA, TIFF or PNG with Alpha-channel.
For images you can combine them with Photoshop or Paintshop. For animations you could use most likely and composition software like After FX or Combustion...thats special usefull when you want to add some postpro effects. Else you could also take a cutting software like Premiere, Finalcut or Avid.
 
Thanx for the info. I'm useing Max5, but I never needed to do layers before :D It'l be about time to learn that too.
I don't have compositing software just yet, allthough, maybe I can do it with corell photopaint?? I don't know if I can insert multiple animations into another. I know I can edit one, add new layers, images, and then save it in one new file, but I don't knwo if it works with two .avi-s. I'll try anyway.
 
Mh haven't used Corell but it will most likely not work for animations or lets say it would be quite timeconsuming and complicated..when the program works like Photoshop. Also you would have to get all the single images into an avi or whatever format you want to use.
For animations I would realy recommend an composeting tool. If the files aren't to big and I have the time I could maybe do the composition for you.
 
@ gevatter LarsThanx, I shall give it a try first. One thing though: don't you need full frames for composition? Wrapped into divX it can get really small. Personally, I hate photoshop. It's so overcomplicated to do even the most simple things. I'm used to Photopaint, it can do all the same things and even more, and its so much more intuitive to use. And it can work with one avi, thats for sure. I usually apply the cinema-style black stripes in it, adjusting it so it is the perfect size for the actual anim.

So, last update for tonight... I mean, for this morning :D (1:59AM)
This is the grass I wanted to use, but rendering this very simple image (200polys) took over an hour, cause of teh grass (and the GI lighting, and the VRay light soft shadows, and HDRI lighting as well.. so it was a full extra render :D)
The modell is Kilrah's missile turret, I just added the tubes and some really bad old map I found. I'll remap it with a new one someday.
Oh, and a little post work, just to make it even worse :D

Dont forget to click the image a second time for full screen (for those who have resolution set to 1024* or below)


(sorry if I'm missing letters from names, words. My keyboard is starting to give up the coop with 5years of coke,chokolate, and gulasch. :D )
 
Nice grass...realy like it. How did you made it?

About the composition stuff. Well their is the problem that while its easier to replace stuff the filesizes can get much bigger since you work with frames and not a compressed movie. So you aren't rendering movies but image-sequenzes and put these together to an animation. Means if you have 200frames and 4 layers in your animation you will have 800 pictures in the end.
As all things have their advantage and their drawbacks.
 
It simply a 10*10 plane primitive, poly edited to have some bumps,added UWV map, added the deffault 3dsMax Ground_Grass material, changed its glossyness and specular level to something low value instead of zero, and turned off bump map slot.
Than came the trick, the VRay Displacement map. The wonderfull thing compared to 3dsMax's displacement is that you don't need a dense mesh for it to take effect, because actual geometry is not affected with VRays solution. Max moves the vertices, VRay just distorts the modell based on a map. I made a separate map made out of black and white noise, but any kind of map would do.
This is by far the best grass I ever made :D (combined with the grass map as diffuse it looks way better)
The good thing is, that polygon ount is not affected, so it affets the rendertime with the same ammount in any scene. Although, it adds a lot of rendertime. But, it even looks better than acutal geometry grass :D
 
It also roks for fur, in a way. Not for hair though. Got any idea for hair?
I couldn't get my Kilrathi mapped properly though, so the "fur" turned out to point in the directions of a sphere. SO it became a furball :D
It works nice for tires too.
 
lorddarthvik said:
I'll be useing that one probably, but not sure yet. (depends on poly count, will check)
Click to expand...
I hope the poly count isn’t too high. :) It would be nice to see it in your animation.

The missile turret looks really great on that good-looking grass. :)
Keep it up.
 
I'll echo that, those renders look really good. Because of you I started making some of my own HDRI renders. I haven't had one that's taken 3 and a half hours yet but most of them are averaging about 40 to 50 minutes. :)
 
@ Maj.Striker :Good to hear that :D 3 hour render time is not because of HDRi, I had one of my cars rendered with HDRI lighting only, under 5minutes! (300.000 polys, relfective paints and such). So HDRI can even shorten render times, in some cases. Much depends on the software used, GI setup, and of course the HDRI map.

At the end of WC4's opening space fighting scene, after the transposrt is flaspacked and blown, the last dragon jumps out with the mine-trick. After this part, a piece of burning junk floats into view, and burns up totally, just like a piece of paper. I was allways wondering how they managed this burn-disappear effect.
I managed to create a material that can simulate this, in a very basic way. It's not that beutifll, and I'm still struggling to get the edges burn brightly.
I'll post up a progress video soon.
 
I would guess that the burning-paper effect could have been made with an animated texture and then have been reworked in postpro..making the glow stronger for example.
 
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