Can't find A:M In Live Action CD-Rom

[robinsn]

I'm trying to learn how to mix animation with live action video and I'm having a hard time learning. I've seen a few tutorials but they aren't complete enough as I'm too inexperienced to pick up on how to do the directions.

 

This CD is referred to often, but it always points to pluginz.com and apparently they don't have it anymore.

 

Does anyone have any idea how I can get one, or the replacement if there is one?

 

Thanks.

[robcat2075]

I'm trying to learn how to mix animation with live action video and I'm having a hard time learning. I've seen a few tutorials but they aren't complete enough as I'm too inexperienced to pick up on how to do the directions.

 

This CD is referred to often, but it always points to pluginz.com and apparently they don't have it anymore.

 

Does anyone have any idea how I can get one, or the replacement if there is one?

 

Thanks.

 

I believe that was an Anzovin product but discontinued now. They have a note on their site to contact sales@anzovin.com if you have questions about their discontinued products so you might try that.

 

 

 

You might also try posting specific questions about problems you are having on this forum. A lot of people here may have answers.

[robinsn]

Thanks for the response. I will try to contact them. I didn't see that when I was running around their site, so thanks!

 

As far as asking questions here, I know we get good answers to questions here, but I know so little about it, I wouldn't even know the questions to ask hardly.

 

I used AM a while back, was getting somewhat proficient at it, and then upgraded to Tiger, and nothing worked anymore, so I stopped. I just now got the subscription and getting back into it, but it's almost as if I'm starting from scratch. I forgot how to do pretty much everything - or maybe everything changed? ;-)

[bighop]

I ordered mine from Creation Engine.

 

http://www.creationengine.com/

 

They may still have some. I liked the CD's, they were interesting. Is there something specific you're looking for?

[Gerry]

Hey Robin, a great place to start getting back up to speed is with the Wannabe Tutorials. there's a whole thread here, read through it and grab the pages Mark has created. Save em! Collect em! Trade 'em with your friends!

 

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=32646

[robinsn]

Thanks bighop. From what I can tell, they're out of it too. I'm not even sure it's worth finding, but what I'm looking for is just help getting some video integration done.

 

For instance, to try to get the basic concepts down, I used a photo as a rotoscope, created models for the 2 people in the photo, put a title behind them and had the title go up and over and in front of them and past the camera. Should be fairly simple. Probably is. But I've had nothing but trouble.

 

First, I couldn't make the models of the people accept the projection, block the title while they're behind the people, and not show up with shadows and mysterious black spots.

 

I finally got that all working through trial and error, but it just WILL NOT render correctly. It LOOKS like it's rendering correctly, but it's not.

 

Chore looks like this:

 

Render Preview shows this as it renders (which is correct) but the mov file it creates is all black:

 

The render to file shows and creates this:

 

I don't know why the preview would look right, but it won't render correctly. And it's been a struggle getting this far, so, I thought I needed to start from square one and learn from the CD - but alas, can't find it!

 

Any ideas on the rendering problems above? I should separate that into a new thread, I imagine, huh?

 

Randy

[robinsn]

Thanks, Gerry. Those wannabe tutorials look like they could be great (just looked at a couple so far). I'll check them out further when I'm back on my video tasks.

[Caroline]

Hi Robin - it looks like you may have alpha turned on in the render. This will make any camera rotoscope black (or transparent, depending on the format). If you are compositing with live action, alpha is wonderful, because you can compose a character, render with alpha=on, and then layer him on top of anything, and the surrounds will be transparent.

 

 

Try turning alpha OFF and see what you get.

 

Edit: actually what you have seems to be different from that alpha problem. I don't recognise what you have done.

 

Perhaps you could utilise the alpha=on feature and render out in separate layers, one for background, one for text, one for people, and then composite the rendered layers together in a final chor.

[robinsn]

Thanks for the ideas. I turned Alpha off and it made no difference. I tried playing with alpha on the objects and the chore and nothing made a difference.

 

RE: Rendering out in layers, etc, etc... Sounds good, but I don't have a clue how I would do that. (that's why I was looking for a good tutorial!)

 

To me it looks like the render is coming half from the camera and half from the prospective of the front view (2 key).

 

If I do the quick render, it renders perfectly also. I just can't get it to render to a file correctly.

 

Any other ideas?

 

Randy

[Caroline]

Rendering in Layers - quick tute - nla (Non-Linear Animation) - only for v15:

 

1. New Project

2. Right click Images > Import > Animation or Image Sequence.

3. Choose your movie or image sequence (just the first frame, all others will automatically follow) for the BACKGROUND layer

4. Import Thom

5. Create a choreography of just Thom, and animate him.

6. Delete the ground

7. Render to an image sequence (tga) with alpha=ON. This creates a sequence of images with black around the subject (the black will be transparent).

8. Right click Images > Import > Animation or Image Sequence.

9. Choose the first frame of Thom's animation.

10. Create a choreography of just your moving text animation

11. Repeat 6 to 9 for this render.

12. Create a new choreography.

13. Delete ground and all lighting.

14. Drag the Words image into the choreography. Choose Rotoscope not Layer for each of these.

15. Drag the Thom image into the choreography.

16. Drag the background image into the choreography.

17. In your timeline you will see this:

18. Click and drag each clip back so they start at 0:00.

19. Render as final, to new file with alpha=off

 

(note check that all your movies / renders have the same final render size - I stuffed up the first time)

Try to use image sequences rather than movs or avis, because A:M sometimes does not know the compression codec.

 

Another way of doing layers is here:

http://www.mossor.org/Desktop/Tutorials/Layers/layers.html

(To be able to read it you may have select all the text by pressing ctrl+A - it is a bad colour choice for my monitor)

 

pdf of NLA here:

http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=29222

 

Final composited Movie: (It's a mess, but it does illustrate! Apologies for lousy background movie clip.) And I just noticed that your name is Randy, not Robin - sorry!

tuteNLA.mov

[robinsn]

Wow, thanks for the great step by step. I will give those a try. There is sure a lot to learn!!

 

So when you're doing layers, such as in your example above, and you wanted Thom in front of the text, but the text moved to be in front of Thom in the same scene, then you couldn't use layers. Is that correct? I'm assuming that with the layers, layer one is always on top of layer two and 3 on top of 2, etc. So, if you have Thom walking through a room, anything behind him can be one layer, he can be a layer, and anything in front of him can be another. Right?

 

So is the main advantage that you can debug and render separately so it's faster to render?

 

BTW, somehow in messing around with alpha settings of different objects and perhaps other unknown settings, it started rendering correctly. Unfortunately I don't know what fixed it. OTOH, I have a model that works and I can compare to other models when they don't work and figure it out.

 

Thanks for everyone's help.

[Caroline]

Layers work too, as in that mossor.org tute. You can resize and reposition them - 2d flat panels in 3d space. Just make sure they are orientated towards the camera, and you can put them in front of or behind. If the layer is a .tga with transparency, then the transparency will also work in layers.

 

So is the main advantage that you can debug and render separately so it's faster to render?

 

Yes, and sometimes I have done it, because it is too hard to work out everything at one time in a chor, if you have particles etc happening.

 

Also, if you have a background that uses materials extensively, it makes sense to render it for one frame and layer it, rather than have every frame recalculate the materials.

 

It would be interesting to know what happened - maybe you restarted the computer, and that fixed it? (I should have suggested that )

[robinsn]

Also, if you have a background that uses materials extensively, it makes sense to render it for one frame and layer it, rather than have every frame recalculate the materials.

 

It would be interesting to know what happened - maybe you restarted the computer, and that fixed it? (I should have suggested that )

 

That makes sense to save on render time.

 

No, didn't restart my computer, but did restart AM. I bet it was a combination of turning ALPHA off (I found several places to do that) and reloading the project. Oh, there was also a mysterious "no name" object/property/whatever under one of the models which I deleted.