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Eric2575

*A:M User*
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Everything posted by Eric2575

  1. What was it that you did to send the camera back to 0,0,0? Did you play with the enforcement setting?
  2. In the mean time...I couldn't resist another still. This was one pass and took about four minutes at 1920x900. Added the waterline shadow and did a slight sharpen in PS. I reduced the render time for the animation quite a bit by taking out all the lights except one for the green water illumination. The first still I did used 8 green ambiance lights, this one uses one for pretty much the same effect.
  3. I feel like I'm in the witch's cauldron brewing up some secret potion. That's a great start and points me in the right direction. Thanks Holmes
  4. Quick question: We have all played with swirling white smoke in the fire tutorial, but can we produce grayish fog like this? - http://activeden.net/item/fog-video-effect/949 I tried changing the sprite, but haven't gotten it yet. Edit: Spoke too soon, just didn't save the tga with the alpha channel. Ok, now I have a grayish fog, but still want to explore the most efficient way to do this for the animation, so keep the input coming please.
  5. After posting this last night, I did some experiments with the smoke project. I got some nice animated rolling fog effects, but the render time per frame for just the fog was three minutes. I shudder to think what it would be with the ocean rig and the Nautilus in the scene. I know, I know, everyone is now saying what about rendering it separately and compositing it? Hmmm, maybe a combination of animated rotoscope and sprite effects... Chris, could you post an animated example of your volumetric fog for us please? Go ahead and post it here since it's relevant to this thread. Holmes, do you have a short clip of your technique with the fractal sum? I'll try and knock out an example of the rotoscope fog and post it.
  6. Cute character, tell us more about your game.
  7. I'd like to add some billowing fog to the scene. Since I can't do a 3 letter search, I'd like some suggestions for animated fog. The ocean, then a dense cloud of fog rolls in, out of which emerges the Nautilus. What's the best way to accomplish this?
  8. Awesome example Robert, thank you. Did someone say BUG??? Thank goodness I'm not that inept and you guys/gal were able to reproduce this
  9. "Set the enforcement before you pick a target" did that, still jumped. "Adjust the translation offsets, in the constraint, to reposition the camera" did that too. That worked until I tried to move the camera again, then it jumped right back to the bone. I really appreciate your guys help, but I'm taking way too much time trying to figure this out. I'll take Nancy's brute force suggestion and do it by hand and be done with it.
  10. Did everything you said, then, with compensate "on", as soon as I touch "Enforcement", the camera starts to move. At enforcement 100 the camera stays put, but as I move enforcement toward "0", the camera moves toward the bone. At "0" it sits atop of the water on top of the bone. "Compensate" is on during all of this. So I tried another avenue. I put in 10%enforcement and let the camera jump to it's new position near the "translate to" bone. The I went to "top" view and tried to drag the camera back to where it was at 100% enforcement - it won't let me. I select the camera, try to drag it backwards, it move a little bit and then springs back to it's new bone position. This really can't be this difficult, can it?
  11. I am still totally clueless what the "aim at" constraint does in regards to moving the camera in synch with the waves? I want to be able to point the camera anywhere in the chor, not just at one bone on the ocean mesh. Again, I know practically nothing of these matters...now ask me about mechanical modeling Robert: I thought of that also and tried to implement it, but couldn't get that to work either. The bones in the ocean mesh move up an down nicely, how do I make the camera bone move the same way, only at about 20%?
  12. Please bear with me in my quest to make the forum puke, but...the camera is aiming at the submarine, what will the "aim at" constraint to a bone in the ocean mesh do in terms of giving me the puke factor motion I so desperately need? Holmes: I always make sure the compensate button is on before I use constraints. It's still not working I just want the camera to move up and down in synch with the ocean mesch, just not to that degree, and be able to pan and view whatever.
  13. My bad, I did use "translate to", but when I change the enforcement from the default, the camera moves toward the "translate to" bone??
  14. Can someone give me an idea of how to tone down the "orient like" constraint? I constrained the camera to one of the wave bones for secondary motion, but it's a bit much. I just need to get about 20% of the motion that I am actually getting. I tried playing with "enforcement", but when I change that, the camera starts to rotate. I just want a bit of up and down movement to simulate being on the waves.
  15. Thank you for the comments everyone. Nancy, I really appreciate the breakdown of using AM for doing this. I did it a long time ago and forgot the steps. Thank you Chris - Since I also want to add sound, what compression or format do you recommend? Software for audio? Matt: the frames for this took about 9 minutes for the ocean before the Nautilus comes into the frames with no multipass. That seems a bit high compared to your times with 9x multi? Another strange thing, when the Nautilus is in full view, the render per frame jumps to about 13 minutes, then towards the end, when the ship leaves the view completely, I would have expected the time to come down again, but it didn't, at least not back to 9 minutes. I think the last frame also took about 12 minutes. Well, I'm gonna cut into that time a bit by doing something creative. I'll post the results when they're in. BTW, my system is an Intel duo core 6600 2.40Ghz with 2GB of ram and a GeForce 7950 GT video card. AM V.15.0i
  16. Reducing the images in PS did the trick. This is just very basic, no camera movement or other additions yet. More to come. Matt, if you read this, what settings did you use for your animation and how long did it take to render? Did you save to movie or jpg? If jpg, did you use AM to stitch it? Too many questions, too little time... Nautilus clip
  17. Geez, no wonder I don't do many animations...Last night I wanted to pan the camera in the Ocean chor and had to move the ocean rig in order to keep the distance equal. Well, I don't think the Ocean rig likes being moved. As soon as I started moving it, the rig did some really weird contortions. Refresh did not help and undo didn't fix the weirdness. I shut down AM, but when I opened it up again, every object in the chor lined up on the x/y axis facing the same direction. Really weird! All my actions, chor or otherwise were gone, as well as all keys and frames. It's like some OCD Thom went into the chor and cleaned house, lining everything up. Not all was lost, however, since I still had my original sequenced jpgs saved. It's not what I wanted to post, but I did promise to post something today. Now the last hurdle...the compiled animation is 9 seconds long at 640x240 and weights in at a whopping 21MB. I'll reduce the jpgs in PS and recompile. Be right back.
  18. Sorry guys, it will have to wait until tomorrow. I dug out my copy of Adobe Premiere and thought I could just whip out the movie, but...have to familiarize myself with the program all over again. It's been a long time since I used it. Also have to re-render about 20 frames since one of the lights drifted away from where it should be. I have to say, it looks pretty good though. I will have it done by tomorrow evening, promise Eric
  19. It just finished rendering. Now for the post work, music and sounds.
  20. Well, I'm getting some new found respect for feature length animations and what it takes to render them. My small Nautilus animation is at 92% and has been rendering all night - 15:21 hours so far. It's only 640x240 but the light reflections, water reflections, etc, are really taking a render toll. 7 seconds long = 18 hours render time on my computer Still need to run a wake and splash animation to composite it with the main track. I'm really happy with the way it looks so far though. Again, I can't say enough about Mark's fantastic work he's done with the ocean generator. I shudder to think how much extra processing time it would take to render this with displacement mapping for the waves!? I probably won't finish this until tomorrow due to the extra track I need to render and a bit of post work. It will be worth it though. Stay tuned. Eric Camden
  21. If the surgeon that took out your mole had half the skill in doctoring that you have in modeling, the excision would have been unnoticeable. And that's a fact.
  22. That flour sack can be quite a character. Good job
  23. Thanks gang. The rivets are giving me fits. The upper structure rivets are all modeled and the rivets below the water line are decals. The decals are all hand drawn using references from the movie prop. There are over three thousand on the ship. Got a ways to go
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