Vern's passing the ball...

[heyvern]

So this was one I thought fitting due to all the newton physics stuff I'm doing lately. This is a low res render without the cool sounds and tv scan lines... and glass refraction etc. All done with newton physics except of course the paddles. I'll let you bright people theorize how I hit the ball with the paddles... it wasn't easy.

 

pongscreenB.mov

 

 

-vern

[matt_stanford]

Amazing work Vern! I love it. I wouldn't even know where to start with that!!!

[phatso]

It would be funny of the Pong "ball" were replaced by a real, up to date, 3D, well lit and shaded ball. You'd get props for your fine sense of irony.

[NancyGormezano]

If you're really doing "pass the ball" - the ball is supposed to enter from left, exit right - to fit with the other clips.

 

Perhaps Thom (in a headless state) could chase back and forth across the screen, trying to retrieve his head (ball) as it gets "ponged" about.

[TheSpleen]

I gotta try that!

[heyvern]

Here's my plan for the final version:

 

In keeping with the "enter left exit right" theme I will start with a closer cropping to the left to follow the ball as it enters then zoom out for the back and forth. Then pan right and zoom to show the ball exiting on the right. The "tv" set won't "block" the exit this way.

 

I could do a bunch of fancy other stuff but that's just gilding the lily so to speak. Plus I plan to do another different idea and didn't want to waste a lot of time on this one. This is one that hit me the other day and as I was thinking about it I decided to go with an "old hand held video" look and focus on the realism. Imagine the kids in the late 70's early 80's got hold of the parents camcorder (the big one that sits on the shoulder) and were goofing off in front of the pong game. I have sound effects and everything. I timed the "pongs" to the video, then played it back on an old set of speakers and record that while bumping the microphone and and moving around. Works quite nice. Gives the perfect "distance" to the pongs without fiddling with audio software. The crappy old speakers playing the bleeps and bloops also add to the effect.

 

Also the final render looks VERY real. Refraction through the glass of the screen that "curves" the game graphics, reflections and specular highlights on the glass, a bit of a blue tint to the screen graphics and scan lines. All of it done ENTIRELY in AM. I used the "grid" plugin material for the scan lines. I was able to "cheat" that material and make it just very thin tight horizontal lines. With the bloom post effect it looks very much like a tv screen.

 

I used one of those camera shake actions that I found here or somewhere, years ago. Added it to the camera and then tweaked the motion and the focal length for the zoom effect. I have suddenly become very interested in that technique that has been showing up over the last few years. I think it started with Firefly and then the new battlestar galactica and most recently "Cloverfield" used it. You can have even "average" effects but you throw in some hand held camera tweaks and it looks ten times more real.

 

Whole thing only took a few hours.

 

p.s. I now know the ENTIRE history of Pong, the very first commercially successful video game. Amazing story. Did you know the first "video tennis" game was actually invented in the late 50's early 60's using an oscilloscope? That guy doesn't get as much credit as the founder of Atari.

 

-vern

[Dagooos]

Sweet! I was hoping someone would do some newton physics stuff.