My Trade Show movie

[Gerry]

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

[Dhar]

13 megs for a 2 minute is better than my 605 megs for a 3:30 minute

 

What were your render settings if you don't mind me asking?

[Gerry]

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!

[Gerry]

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

[ChrisThom]

I like it. How did you animate teh video screens?

[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]

[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]