 | | | See what some positive feedback can do. | See what some positive feedback can do. 2004-07-02 - By Dave Angelini
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Don,
Okay, here are some pointers:
1) The track was created with sweeping a basic 6-sided polygon along a path.
I then used the shell tool to create the openings.....I thought the tool
would choke on such a complicated object, but it just worked fine. Make
sure you select all faces prior to using the shell tool otherwise you won't
get the lattice work.
2) The texture was generated in Darktree...but it really killed rendering
time as the camera got quite close to the track. So using the texture layer
capability in tS, I blended a few Darktree textures together and rendered
out to a large jpg image which was then mapped back onto the object.
3) The background was NURBS sphere with a skydome rendered in Terragen
mapped to it. The panorama plugin for Terragen was instrumental in creating
this skydome.
4) The BIG issue with the sweep tool is that all swept objects end up being
90 degrees out of phase to the original orientation of the swept path. I
really wish Caligari would solve this issue. Normally, you would just sweep
the object and then use the same path for the camera....perfect fit. But
the above problem keeps this from happening...is there something I am
missing? Rotating the path back into the object also never seems to work as
the path is never a perfect fit. So to get around this, I manually had to
KF the camera position around the track. I did this in as FEW key-frames as
possible with only 1 frame between each KF position. When completed, there
was around 20 KF's making for a 20 frame animation. To smooth it out, I
then just expanded the animation in the KFE to around 200 frames. I then
went back and made some adjustments....there was one spot I missed...which I
am sure you also spotted.
5) The animated path was then copied 4 to 5 times for each of the balls and
the camera. In the KFE, I just offset each set of key frames for each
object by 10 to 15 frames so that all the objects would space out during the
bulk of the animation (they would all occupy the same space at the beginning
and end of the animation, but you just don't show that). I varied the
amount of offset and length of animation for each ball and camera to create
a slight beat to their motion so it wouldn't appear like they were all
connected like a train but a bit more independent.
6) The titles also do not fade in and out...though they appear to in the
animation. Rather, the titles are rendered against a black background and
the lighting rig that was used to light the track in the main animation was
just rotated 180 degrees around the titles. When the light was directly
behind the titles and pointing up at the camera, there was no surface of
the titles that were both seen by the camera and exposed by the light, so
they went to black. When the lights rotated around above the titles and
pointed down at them (as was the camera), they "faded" into existence.
7) The music selection was pure inspiration....I was watching Fantasia 2000
when it hit me....what a perfect fit!!!
Thanks,
Dave Angelini
-- -- Original Message -- --
From: "Don Rhodes" <drrhodes@(protected)>
To: <truespace@(protected)>
Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 9:18 AM
Subject: Re: [TSML] See what some positive feedback can do.
> Once again very nice! Ive been trying to do something similar for a while.
> Could you put up some pointers or a tutorial on how you accomplished this
> animation.
>
> Thanks
> Don Rhodes
>
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