John Bigboote Posted November 6, 2015 Posted November 6, 2015 A little show-n-tell... Last month, I got a chance to put A:M to a big test... needed to make a field of falling tangerines that would wipe the screen, and some various cloth effects at an obtusely hi-resolution... 12,000 px wide by 1280 tall. I used Newton Dynamics for the tangerines but they are simply shaped. My 1 minute opening video(Rife with Hash animations) showed before an audience of 5,000 at the US Foods convention in Orlando, I was lucky enough to attend as last minute changes happened. USFoods anim tangerines.mov Quote
Admin Rodney Posted November 6, 2015 Admin Posted November 6, 2015 Nicely done Matt! You should have posted that in the Showcase forum. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted November 8, 2015 Hash Fellow Posted November 8, 2015 The above were originally in another thread but I am moving them here so that more people may see them... Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 8, 2015 Author Posted November 8, 2015 Thank-you, and to Rodney for moving this to it's own thread... I will show some of the other cloth effects as well. The 'cool' thing about this was that I was working with another animator who uses maya/c4d and the task of creating the cloth effects fell on his plate. While a great designer and quite capable animator, he had never tried any cloth simulations so he went in cold on it... and there is- not a lot but a pretty deep pool of knowledge to learn in any app... I had worked with cloth on and off over the years and with a refresher tutorial compliments of Holmes Bryant on placing control CP's I was able to manhandle the effects in A:M quite handily... movies to come... Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted November 8, 2015 Hash Fellow Posted November 8, 2015 At the show, was that displayed with multiple projectors? Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 9, 2015 Author Posted November 9, 2015 At the show, was that displayed with multiple projectors? Oh yeah... about 9, 3 for each third and then redundantly doubled for ultra-bighness(making some 18 projectors). The reason I was there was because once they got the projectors all calibrated and registered, they would play the animation and find tiny nuances that were not visible on my monitor- among other things, Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted November 10, 2015 Hash Fellow Posted November 10, 2015 What were they noticing and how could you change it when it took so long to render? Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 10, 2015 Author Posted November 10, 2015 What were they noticing and how could you change it when it took so long to render? Well, mostly stuff that was comped in AE... since the job was 75% AE and 25% A:M. Aside from registration issues with the edges(don't want any overspill from screen to screen, and there were 9 screens.) I also did a lot of the daily programming videos too... there were 2 day with unique shows, TONS of powerpoint but my 'curtain transition' was a big hit, so they kept dreaming up new places to use it. Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 10, 2015 Author Posted November 10, 2015 Here are the curtain transitions... every time they wanted to use it in a scene I would have to rerender with switching-in the new still image. This was done by making a fine mesh grid (still coulda been finer) for each side, then- following Holmes Bryants tutorial on connecting CP's as control CP's for the cloth, I made 'hanger' CP's that would function to keep the cloth from falling to the ground. I attached those CP's (about 20 on each side) to bones and then animated the bones to follow a path with offsets. That tutorial is a KEEPER! Every time I go to use cloth I need to refresh myself of this info... Thanks Holmes Bryant! USFoods anim curtains.mov Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 10, 2015 Author Posted November 10, 2015 Because the video was mostly still images, they were looking for fancy transitions to get from one to the next. I came up with a 'rubics cube' 3D idea, and they asked for a different variation of it on each screen- which became a little bit exponential because each transition now was 9 separate transitions. Big job, went well, glad it's done. Thanks for the interest. Imagery property of USFoods. USFoods anim rubics.mov 1 Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted November 10, 2015 Hash Fellow Posted November 10, 2015 Those look great!What gets played? Do you give them one Quicktime file that gets played like a big desktop across 9 projectors or do you give them a file for each projector and they get synched on playback? Quote
Admin Rodney Posted November 10, 2015 Admin Posted November 10, 2015 I can see why they liked the curtain closing/opening transition... that looks great! Quote
John Bigboote Posted November 11, 2015 Author Posted November 11, 2015 E Those look great!What gets played? Do you give them one Quicktime file that gets played like a big desktop across 9 projectors or do you give them a file for each projector and they get synched on playback? Thanks! I hand over 1 big quicktime with HAP compression- which is optimized for GPU smooth playback. It is played as 1 big file on a Mac with special presentation software called Millumin. There is some 'play' available in the screens placement, as well as the projection software has a degree of 'warp' it can provide to help stretch or shrink edges to where they need to be. The preferred method tho, is to get the animators/artists to nudge their work and re-render. A funny thing happened while on the setup day and things were not quite lining up as far as the projected video to the screens. The guy with the machine that controls the projectors announced that he was as close as he could get and that our video's were all "off" and needed to be nudged(by how much?) and rerendered. All of the video providers follow the same template so everything (days worth of programming) would need to be re-conformed to a new template. This was not good news, because we didn't even know how to generate a new template using 'eyeballs'. While the various videos were playing and everyone was scratching their heads I noticed that the LIVE video cameras were over-shooting their marks as well, and we have NOTHING to do with that. I pointed it out to everyone which shifted the focus(blame) off of us and back onto the guy who's job it was to make sure everything was projecting right. He was not happy with ME, but with a few more hours of turning his knobs... had everything looking 99% right. When you are dealing with THAT BIG of a projection area, and a human element of screen placements, air conditioners blowing air that sways the screens, and a video signal going thru multiple switchers and machines... you will never get it perfect. Quote
Hash Fellow robcat2075 Posted November 11, 2015 Hash Fellow Posted November 11, 2015 I have been there... where they say it's all not their fault. Quote
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