gra4mac

I was inspire by Xtaz's image and desription of Image Based Lighting using HDR images. My results weren't as impressive, but i don't have the patience to wait 6 hours to see how it turns out. I do like how it worked, but I added 2 lights to give the object some shadows. I didn't get shadows from the IBL alone. I don't know if that comes with more passes. Maybe someone can fill me in. Here are the images I did get. I'm showing the fully lit image and ones with IBL only and Kleigs only for comparison. I plan on doing more testing to get IBL figured out better. Any info or comments appreciated.

Impressive detail on the doors. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the interior.

I'm impressed! the first time I watched the catwalk I found it a bit confusing, but after seeing it a second time it makes sense. The other 2 clips are great too. I don't know if you two have more plans, but I hope so. Keep up the awesome work.

Cool looking chair. I'm no interior designer, but the room looks more clasical than modern to me. Most modern construction doesn't use moldings along the floors and ceiling, and fireplaces are gas, simple and built into the wall. At least in this part of the world. Try Googling images "modern livingroom" and see what comes up.

Hi. I work for an A-V event production company that does lighting and sound for concerts. I wanted to see how it would work doing lighting previz in A:M, and try out my own ideas for shows. I tried to incorperate a few basic lighting styles, with plans to add more once I had a system worked out. I found that it is a lot of work and I need to work on setting up a good system for general light control. To control the lights I use a combination of poses, actions, and cho actions. I would preffer to have a library of premade actions, but that didn't always work. Anyways, here are some stills and a short animation of the work so far. C+C welcome. ,, The video is 7 meg Stage light test

Thanks for the comments and suggestions. I'll work on some variations of the head movement to try and make it more natural, for a dragon. I am generally happy with how it turned out, and the kids think it's cool. Luckinly young kids aren't jaded by alll the high quality animation put out by Pixar etc, so it is quite easy to impress them. This is one of the reasons I like working with kids, they llike the level of stuff I am capable of. I expect things will be different with teenagers.

I run a lip-sync music video class at my kids elementary school. I wanted to have an opener, or whatever you call them, like Disney's castle or Dream Works boy in the clouds. What is that short studio ID bit called anyway? The school is called Charles Dickens and our team mascot is the Dicken's Dragon, so I made our video logo with a fire breathing dragon. The compression makes it look a bit rough. You can see it here, 1.4 meg, streams well over highspeed: http://www3.telus.net/imagestreamstudio/te...n_logo_full.mov I'd like to tweak it and change it a bit for each video, so any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks, I'm rather happy with the results. After almost 4 years of struggling with many things in A:M, I found the best way to make a smooth head is to model it in another app, 3ds Max in this case. The head was box modelled, Max has splines too, but I find that starting with a spherized box and adding what I need is much simpler. Sorry for the sour grapes, but I have fought with A:M for almost everything I've done and I finally realized, I'm slow some times, that A:M just doesn't cut it for me. I greatly admire those who can make it work. Not only does Max do a great job smoothing, but the equivalent of copy flip attach works every time, as does mirror mode, and after 2 weeks of testing Max out and trying all the knobs and dials, it crashed once. I haven't tried rigging and animating a character yet, but I'm really looking forward to it. I expect this thread to disapear soon, so I'll say see you and the best of luck with whatever you do and whatever app you do it in. Happy animating.

It took a while to figure this out, but I finally modelled a reasonably smooth, human looking head. The technique is fairly simple, but still takes a lot of tweaking. With practice it will go a lot faster. Comments?

THis is a great looking setup. I am wondering how long it takes to configure compared to setting up pose sliders?

Go David.

Well done Zack, very cool.

Awesome. I'm looking forward to more.

I call it crude because the characters have a green, or white, halo, the lighting doesn't match with the actors and animations, the edge of the characters are very pixely, and the animation is rough. It is a good start and I am proud of it. When the actors look like thay are really in the scene, then it will be great. To do green or blue screen work you need to have a fairly specific colour of screen. It can be either blue or green depending on what colours your actors are wearing. If your actors are wearing blue, then use a green screen. The idea is to have the screen colour unique so that nothing else gets keyed out. The other thing I found out is the screen needs to be a very saturated colour so when brightly lit, the colour doesn't bleach out. A well lit screen is very important, with the actors far enough away that they don't cast shadows on the screen. Also, digital cameras are better at picking up the green colour, film picks up blue better, and when editing on a computer, green is preffered. I'm guessing the green colour that works is very close to a pure RGB green and computers can pick it out well. There is lots of good info on the net about colour keying, aka green screening. I use a single CCD camera and the green does bleed into the actors more than it would with a 3 CCD cam. After I re-key it in FCP, I'll post the results. I think good keying software will do a much better job even with a cheap camera.

I have QT 6, I don't remember if the Vp3 On2 codec came with it, was copied from QT5 or I downloaded it. Sorry I can't be more help.

Looks like you have glow on some things. Try turning the glow radius down or lowering the ambiance, if it's on.

Not only the kids but me as well.

You guys are very encouraging. It was fun , my kids had fun too and want to do more. We spent about 2 hours talking about the themes and filming. Most of what they did was improvised. We actually filmed it in 3 sessions, with about 5 takes each session, as I learned better technique. As for the white halo in the Disney scene, that comes from the trtransperancytencil I used in A:M to get them to shrink while running. I tried to do it my editor, but it shrank the background too after keying. I'm really looking forward to getting FCP. Getting Thom to walk around the kids was quite easy in this situation. When he is behind them, they are keyed on top of him, when he is in front, he is alphaed onto them. It would be much trickier if Thom was between the 2 kids.

Cool, nicely done. Thanks for posting the wire with the controls showing, interesting stuff.

Hi. I decided to give greenscreening a try. I started off with dying a sheet green, which sort of worked, but ended up buying a peice of cycloth. This was filmed in my livingroom with my 2 kids. The whole procces was challenging and at times frustrating, but in the end I learned a ton and had fun. The quality is poor because I have a miny DV camera, my editing software is crude at keying, my animation is "developing", I had to compress the crap out of it to get it to 11 mb, wah, wah, wah. This is just the beginning. I am getting Final Cut Pro which will help with the keying, and I'm starting to understand how action blending works, I think. When I get FCP I want to redo a lot of it, so any comments or suggestions would be helpful. Next time I want to do a shorter peice focussing on better intigrating the real and CG lighting and interaction. Keep in mind it is rough, 11 mb file size, 2 1/2 minutes long. I would be interested to hear what some of you use for keying. I use both Macs and PCs so platform istn't an issue. I am listening My Greenscreen attempt.

I have seen lines like these caused by klieg lights. It's been a while since I last saw this, but try changing the shadow type, or width softness.

Great frog Phil. When do we get to see it squished? BTW have you seen Cane Toads? I was thinking of the hiway scene.

I can't help with your project, but I like what I see so far. Are you going to tell what it's about, or do we have to wait and see? In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing more.

Thanks xade. No AP here. I built the set, cubicly, ie the walls form a cube. Put a camera in the center with the focal length set to 17.5 whatevers, and the hight and width set equal. This makes the feild of view 90 degrees and each wall fits exactly. Then aim at wall 1, rotate 90 degrees to wall two, and so on to get an image of all 6 walls. These 6 images are used to make a QuickTime cubic. That's it. I'll add hotspots for the links later.

I'm redoing my web site and wanted to do someting interesting. I decided to try doing a cubic gallery with the stills on the walls. Being a big fan of M.C. Escher I used Reletiviy as my insperation. Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions. When it's uploaded, each image will have a hotspot link to a larger image. I'll be doing a video gallery next. wall_640x480.mov