Gerry

I know I've seen this discussed here before, but what is the cause of the light leak in this render? It didn't happen in the still render above. The chor is exactly the same, just swapped out the models. At first I thought the model wasn't sitting right on the ground, but I've checked that and it's okay. [attachmentid=10130]

John - So these renders are in AM with the imported Maya models? Pretty nice! I'm also not sure I understand what you say about rendering. Did you mean the renders just take a minute? You must be working with a farm, right? Surely these stills aren't rendering in a minute on one cpu. Looking forward to additional posts. Gerry

Chris, that's an excellent question! It was way more complicated than it needed to be. Of course the AM part was easy. I've learned a ton about animated decals and that's how this was done. We started by shooting video of the actual game screens, setting up a video camera on a tripod and just playing the games. Because of the technology we use it's difficult to set up a game demo machine, or "fake" game play on a computer screen. We had to have the real game, in a real cabinet, etc etc. Don't ask me for details, I'm the lone artist in a small company made up mostly of engineers, programmers and salesmen! The unnecessarily complicated part was converting the video into a usable QuickTime movie, which I then used for the animated decal. I was doing this on a PC and though I'm a Mac guy at home I don't know if this would have been easier on a Mac. I've never had to do this sort of conversion before. The messy step was that I could export it as a .wmv, and though there's a pc app called (I think) Movie Maker, it does NOT work with Windows 2000, only Windows XP. Windows Media Player has no export or save as function like QT Pro. So I had to stumble through a series of conversion steps that, honestly, are a blur now. I assembled one long QT movie containing all the various games playing, then in the choreography I assigned the appropriate frame sequence for each machine. In theory this simplified the modeling tasks, as I had only one model for each machine design. However it was a fairly long movie and calculating exact frames involved a good bit of trial and error, since one thing that QT is not designed to do is count frames. I also had separate movies for the glass art (wher the logos and pay tables appear at the top and bottom of each machine) and these were static frames, so I just had to make sure the right frame on each machine stayed put for the duration of the whole animation. I'm currently using the models for a series of stills for our website. I'm able to spend a little more time on lighting and texturing, and I'm pretty happy with the way they're coming out. Here's one example. Gerry [attachmentid=10107]

Yves makes a good point, but this is still an awesome test, especially for a quickie.

Yes, and nice fix on the body proportions. Definitely consider a bit of detail in the feet. It will be cool to see this shaded and textured.

Heath - this is hilarious! I don't know why it's funny but it is. More!

Dan - that's a really awesome model! Only comment is the floor pattern and shadows are a little busy, and the similar tonality of the floor and piano seem to fight each other a little.

This is a nice little piece. Toon render looks great (that weird texture on top of his head even works somehow) and as a bonus, if you play it backwards it's a perfect sneeze!

I've renamed this file for consistency on my website, and added a link from my 3D page. It's now at http://www.mooneyart.com/three_d/movies/isdgames.mov And if you want to see some of my other 3D work it's at http://www.mooneyart.com/three_d/three_d.html

DC - I'm not sure about Mrs. White's body language. Hands on hips and feet apart make her look like a guy in drag. Something more ladylike but steely would be better, maybe standing at a slight angle to the camera, with head tilted and peering, narrow eyes. Think of Barbara Bush. She would never stand with hands on hips, but you also know you won't get away with any crap around her! You're starting with a pretty ambitious project! Let us see how it progresses.

Motion blur is an option when you're doing a final-quality render. I believe it's set for a default of 20% which should be sufficient. You don't want more; you may want a little less. Also keep in mind that once you turn on motion blur it affects the entire movie, even where you may not intend it!

yeah, a good looking character. Do you have plans for how you're going to animate the eyes? I look forward to the texturing etc. Also like the three-headed rotation!

Nice! I could see this really coming alive with some more work on the figure's moves. A little anticipation and bounce in the right places would make it pop.

Yeah, very cool! I can see a lot of possibilities for this idea. Show us more as it develops.

Dhar- I wrote up some of my compression experiments in the WIP thread at http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=17228 But for this smaller version I used Video compression at low quality, and for audio I used a setting called AMR Narrowband set for:Sample rate: 8.000 khz, Mono, and Bit rate 12 kbps. The audio settings I was just winging, that's why I think I could get it smaller. I don't yet know enough about it. I find that Video compression worked the best for sheer crunching of file size while keeping it not-horrible to look at!

This is the movie I needed render help on a couple weeks ago. Unfortunately it's still large, 13megs, but it's two minutes and has sound. I could probably get it smaller, maybe with better audio compression. There are a number of rough edges but considering the circumstances I'm pretty happy with it. I may tweak it a little and re-render it for the reel but for now this is it. However crits are welcome. ISD Games promo movie

I vote for running for the ice cream man! Dimos, your comments and crits are really valuable and helpful to read. It's great to see a WIP like this, the comments made, and the results put into use.

Pixar - nice work! I would crit this but you're miles ahead of me in character work. the side view shows great progress. Love the head bobbing. Maybe the tail bounce could be a tad more fluid, but overall really excellent.

David - nice work! I can appreciate your having to fill 55 seconds. Does the cab need to fill with water so quickly? Were the windows open? I also agree with Pixar's comments. Just a few devil's advocate questions. I think the sequence is clear and, having done litigation graphics myself, persuasive. Gerry

I've just returned from our trade show and the animation was very well received. Some compression info for those interested: I started out with the movie in three separate .mov segments, each about 250megs. David had rendered these with Sorensen 3 compression. I had earlier installed the Windows version of QuickTime 7 (just released days ago) because of some unrelated errors I was getting trying to export from Flash, and I have to say the Windows version still needs work. Both trying to consolidate the three sections either as a self-contained file or as a reference file choked QT, and trying to export with additional compression did the same. Version 7 just didn't seem up to handling such large files. I found and downloaded QT version 6 which worked way better. I was able to export the files using Video compression at medium quality, and got the 250meg files down to between 70 and 100 megs. Some loss of quality but not what you would expect given the file sizes. There was some sign of "pixel crunching" on the plasma screens (I'm sure there's a technical term for this effect where about every twenty lines or so there's a break in say, a diagonal line on screen where a pixel is interpolated out. I'm not explaining this very well, but it's like where a website image is forced into a space smaller than itself.) but it was the sort of thing that only I would notice. I was still tweaking the movie Sunday morning, and we flew out Sunday afternoon. David's help was invaluable and I highly recommend his services. I've also promised that next time I'll give him more than twenty minutes' notice.

Bryan- Very wild teddybear picture! Did you do the background figures and/or motion blur in Photoshop? Or is this strictly an AM job?

That's an interesting link, Pengy. but you're right, it doesn't really say much about audio. Will look at it a bit further. Also could use recommendations on the laptop that will be feeding this to the plasmas. Is speed strictly a question of raw processor speed? Any video gizmos that would make a difference?

Well David is doing a great job on the render. It should be done sometime tomorrow. I posted my desperate request about 10:30 Tuesday night before leaving the office. I got home within about 15 minutes, and David's email response was waiting for me! Hashers and the Hash Forums rock! The one thing I still need to do is add the soundtrack. I know QT can be a workhorse I'm just a little nervous that a file this size might choke it. One alternative I've considered would be to import the .mov file into a Flash movie and put the sound on a separate layer. Unfortunately we don't have the kind of software at work this kind of project requires. I am definitely open to suggestions. Gerry

Jandals - I tried that exact thing and when I assembled the finished mov it was about 14 seconds short! Don't ask me why.

Hi David- I just responded to your email. I can stretch the deadline till saturday if need be. This is a two-minute movie, 24fps. It will be shown on two 42" plasma screens, screen res of 852-480. For time savings I've been rendering half size, 452x240. If you're capable of rendering full size in this time frame that would just be gravy! Here's what's happened so far: I've tried rendering sections of the movie as .mov files in about 700 frame chunks. For that size I get an est. render time of, say, 8 hours. They chug along just great for six hours or so, then crap out. Apparently the app just quits. (This seems to happen when I stop watching the render, not that I'm superstitious!) Of course nothing's left of the .mov file. I did render a full set of targa's, then realized I had nothing powerful enough to compile them beyond QuickTime Pro, which is not really adequate. In any case I've tweaked the animation since, so the targa's are outdated. I also tried, just before I left the office this evening, to render an .avi file. About three frames in I got an error message that an .avi codec couldn't utilize a 24 bit image in one of my decals, then the app quit. I've been using the OpenGL driver. The last thing I tried before I left the office was to try a render using the Direct3D V8 driver, so that's running overnight. I'm attaching a still of the movie. It's basically a fly-around of a series of slot machines showing our games playing. thanks David!