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Thanks Oro for your info on landscapes and scales and your suggestions.
I use the Pinterest Boards for my Bryce renders and other things and they only allow png, jpg and gif file formats. When I have some really cool animations then I will migrate to YouTube. :)
Yes I meant using rollercoaster ‘align’ mode for the camera movement.
Thanks for sharing.
Art
I do a lot of animating using Photoshop too. I have a very old version of it and it works just fine on Windows 7. But 3D animation is a different cup of tea altogether. Lots of elements come into play when animating in a 3D program. IMHO it more fun animating in 3D than 2D, don’t take my word for it try it yourself. ;)
And the Cow jumps over the Moon…. I don’t use Daz 3D or Poser so I could not tuck the “freebie cow’s hind legs in……
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/504192120757167565/
Oro thanks for starting this thread. I wanted to try animating in Bryce for a very long time, but never really got round to trying it. I was inspired by this thread to give it a shot.
Bahahaha... But next time, do not use World mapping for textures on moving objects :) That's why your cow's patterning kept changing as it moved through space!
And you're welcome :) I would like to say two things: I'm wary of restricting info on any Bryce info to just one thread. This is a forum, and any one should feel free to just pose a question or post an image for consult with any title. Ages ago, Savage tried starting a "Show us your animations!' thread and it didn't get traction. There were a number of reasons for this: animations take a long time to do, there's not a lot of understanding around it, and once you get into animation you're introduced to the idea that Bryce can only do so much: you need other software and training to put together a show. For instance, a video editing application of some description, and possibly sound software. So,there's a lot more investment in turning stills into moving art, and that can turn people off (And then there's the shimmer problem. But that's another video). This is largely why animation died as a developmental arm with Bryce back around Bryce 4. At that time, it was too pricey to get all this extra stuff, shimmer is a problem, animation as a discipline doesn't really fit with the 'photo-surrealistic landscapes made simple' interface ethos Bryce had, and it takes quite a while to render even 2 seconds of 720p footage (in broadcast terms, that's rendering 60 frames at a doc size of 1280 x 720 pixels. So create a scene, render the first frame, and multiply the time it takes by 60).
Animations take a long time to complete. I kinda expect this thread to drop off the first page every so often. Rather than hunt for a thread a new person doesn't know is there, it's just as easy to start a new one. So I'm not too precious about this thread :) I have a collection of tutes that might help people get started with animation. I'm good with that :)
The second thing worth mentioning is that... In nature, EVERYTHING moves. Sometimes at extremely slow scales, but even rocks and continents move. And my next demo (not really a tutorial) will hopefully illustrate this.
Oro thanks for the tip on mapping modes. I did not think about that. I actually went back and watched your Shimmer video, to see if I could find a solution. I still have a lot to learn in Bryce.
Yes this thread will disappear after a while that is why I bookmarked it. :)
If time is money, as it is for most Bryce users than they will shy away from animation, unless a client requests it, like in Dave Savage’s case. I’ve read on the forum, some wait weeks for a still to render, if it’s an animation it would take months.
I use Bryce mainly has a hobby to save the few gray cells I still have, trying to prevent senility. ;)
Today thanks to David, Horo’s and tutorials by others I use Bryce to pass my time …and it’s a lot of fun just playing with the controls.
Till my next attempt….. :-)
How about asking chohole to make it a sticky? Animation is a part of Bryce and not very well understood by most.
Well I do have a little bit left in my glue gun but I will have to ask the whole forum team first. We never make unilateral decisions; we moderate by committee.
I don't have a vote in stickiness, but... I have to say, I'm kinda against it :)
I think a lot of people can share some interesting information with each other about animation without having to make it a sticky. Ultimately, people want help with specifics: I don't think a sticky thread that's more about an on-going conversation helps people here, and just uses up more space up top.
Just my initial thoughts. If anything I'd want to change the title of the thread, to make it easier to find. "Key-Flame"? "A.M.L."? What's that? :)
I have to admit I am not a fan of too many stickies, We have found in the past that non sticky threds actually often stay more visible by not being sticky.
What I have suggested in the past is a sticky post which contains the links to useful threads such as this one.
Edited to add Like this http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/47426/
I like what you've done, Pam. That's the better idea. Thank you.
I'm an Admin on another forum.
The way we did it was a sticky for 'Tips and Advice' which is locked and only Mods can post. Within that are posts for 'FAQs', 'Advice', Tips and Tricks', 'How Do I?' and a couple of others. The mods then add links in each to threads or posts that are relevant. This way there is only one sticky at the top of the forum page with all the information contained within it.
Great Idea Chohole, thanks
Anyway, back to the content.
Sometime back I suggested using matte composites to frame or add character to a render. They're easy-ish to do, and the technique has been used in movies for decades in the form of glass matte painting, and more recently, blue or greenscreening.
But you can also model a matte. This can create a more live action feel for the imagery.
The following is a poorly-textured, simple porthole model that I put in some stormy seas. It's not really a tutorial (I call it a 'study'), as it's mainly about animating what look like complex scenes by using loops to do the dirty work for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCP-2y7tsqM
Excellent, Ororboros...I puked ;)
It looks complex having to work out all the different parameters - sea, rocking, lighting.. etc. The main problem I have sometimes is in working out a scene reverse-wise, that in the end you then run the animation reverse again in the editing stage so that it looks like it's running forward (huh, confusiing, but you know what I mean).
Yeah, using the stone (I use an invisible sphere) and the camera-track is something I always use too, as it gives much more control over where the camera points to.
Jay
Not only do I know what you mean, I actually did that in the scene! There was a moment about 10 seconds into the original animation where a rogue wave was so high it 'wiped' its way through my ship - a bit of a deal-breaker :) But because the scene is pretty crazy in terms of movement already, I just copied the render, cut it at the rogue point, flipped it and pasted it together with a 'clunk' in the sound effects to make it look like it was part of the show :-D
AND I WOULD'VE GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT TOO IF IT WASN'T FOR YOU MEDDLING KIDS.
(Spot the cut-point: there's a slightly rough down-bounce between the two lightning strikes: that's when the entire render plays backwards [but some post-processed special effects are still in normal time].)
Complex scenes are actually less complex than you might think. Complex scenes tend to be a lot of simple things that you do one at a time.
I started with thinking about the ship. Well... the star attraction was going to be the porthole so I didn't need to model a whole ship to make the animation tell the claustrophobic story I wanted. A hollow cylinder – Tragically simple. Stick a hole in it – Trivial. Add window to taste. SHIP DONE.
Ordinarily, I only deal in 6-8 second bites of a scene. This study is completely unusual for me in that it run 4 times longer than I normally make animations. But I still treated it like a 6-second animation, by using looping to create subtle actions.
Once the ship was built, I positioned the camera inside it, and parented the camera to the hull. If you're going for a point-of-view action shot this is a good practice to get into, because you may need to reposition your entire model for some reason later down the line. Once you decide on your 'master control' object/group, you can just move that object around and your entire rig moves with it.
Once the camera was inside the hull, I thought... "Hmmm.... dark in here." I decided on the ground-breaking idea of adding a light – Genius. I parented the light to the hull, out of shot because... I'm lazy, and didn't want to model a light housing :P But just adding the light gave me two ideas: have it swinging to contribute dynamic character within the cabin, and really limit the range of its fall off to re-inforce a sense of old world confinement and limitation.
Because the hull is lined up along the Z-axis, making the light swing was pretty easy. Move the light origin up vertically, and set two keyframes for the left swing position and the right swing position along the X-axis.
===
Insight on the light: This light possibly teaches more about the flexibility of the AML than any other model part in this scene. In general, I usually use just two keyframes for most movement: start position and finish position (I screwed up and set a rogue third keyframe in the light's rotation parameter: mea culpa, ignore it). But in combination with the ACE, you can turn this concept on its head: I'm not really setting start and finish positions, I'm setting minimum and maximum tolerances.
I could start the pendulum swing at extreme left... Or, I could start it maybe at the halfway point between the two extremes, using the ACE. Or I could start it at the FINISH position :). Then I just use the ACE to locate the light at any point between the two extremes. It may never reach the final position. It may never start at the initial position. But the light will be located between these two extremes.
This concept can come in handy in terms of flexibility, as you develop a sequence. It means you can set extreme tolerances of a particular action, and as you refine the scene you alter the action without exceeding the tolerance values (as this may jeopardize some other action down the track).
===
Camera movement was very small repositions within the hull. A stone was added and hidden near the porthole, and the camera set to track it. That means the camera will never have to use a rotational keyframe to keep the porthole in sight, and rotational keyframes are not eased automatically by Bryce: in fact even using the AML to create easing in rotation is a real pain in the butt,and takes quite a bit of patience.... That I don't have. Tracking works best.
I think the camera and the stone each had about 5 keyframe positions set, and both were set to circular looping. However, the stone animation repeated over about 6 seconds, while the camera repeated over about 5 seconds. This guarantees the relative positions of view won't get in sync again until at least 30 seconds have passed. So for 6 seconds of looped animation, I get 30 seconds of non-repeating cabin movement. Good deal! (The light also has a loop period that isn't either 5 or 6 seconds, again to assist the 'randomness' of movement.)
These are all simple ideas for the hull. If I just did this and kicked off the animation, it would look very 'live'. And we haven't even got to the hull rolling (simple) and the sea terrain circling around in 3 keyframes.
----
As an aside: The footage was post-processed in a video application to add defocusing/blurring and really blow out the lightning flashes. Bryce is, of course, able to do blurring, but given that render times are what they are, there is no way I'm going to flush time down the toilet to try and recreate optical effects in software that's just not efficient at it :)
@Oroboros: That was a very informative video, even if it wasn't a tutorial.
Wow Oro Magnificent animation. I'm going to try another porthole one using the information above and from the video. ;)
Ah yes, Oroboros...your out-vid (my term - viewing the ani., from the mesh perspective) scenes explain more than what you just wrote above, as 'a picture paints a....etc'.
And that's another reason why animation isn't done more regularly, I think - it just takes too much time to set up, make mistakes in, correct again, set up again...and fingers crossed, it all works in the end: all for a 10/20-second animation.
And yet, we do them again and again ;)
Jay
Agreed: results take geometrically longer. However, I'm not so sure it takes that much longer to set up. You have to create a scene no matter if you're making a still or an animation. That's where most of your human time is spent.
I got a rogue wave in my porthole animation. I missed it earlier because I rushed the job. But because I have experience with Bryce animation, and that the whole point of this scene was to keep it crazy, I knew if something weird happened I could cut it out or do some video magic that covered the edit.
Ordinarily the process goes:
1. Start with a full screen view, animation resolution at about 12 frames a second.
2. Build scene
This is where the majority of time is spent.
3. Rig scene
Often building and rigging the scene for animation properties happens at the same time. Depending on the story you want to tell, this could be very complex, or very simple. I like simple and short. If the rig gets "too complex" or I have to think about multiple things at the same time, this is a warning bell for me that I should really change the angle of the camera and get a close-up or re-framed shot I can cut to.
4. Test scene
Shrink the view down to 50 or 75%.
a) Thumbnail view. It's a quick&dirty; way to measure flow or timing.
b) No textures. There's a button beside the Render button that disables textures. This gives a fast diffuse-color view of the scene in real-time. (You could use one of the many real-time alternative views Bryce offers, but these can often be slower than a rendered file, as Bryce has to render each frame on the fly.
c) Increase frame-rate to finished rate; re-do thumbnail render. Working at 12 frames a second is pretty good, but sometimes a rogue element is missed between this coarse frame rate. So ramp up the frame rate to normal and make sure nothing surprising appears.
5. M.O.P.
This stands for Material Optimization Pass. What you're looking for (or rather, NOT looking for) is a material causing grievous delays in rendering, when it barely plays any part in a scene. Often these are objects with transparency, reflections, refractions or volumetrics.
The MOP is about substituting materials for faster-rendering materials, but only if the objects with these materials are unimportant to the scene. Take this scene (that I keep trotting out time after time after time, I know, I'm sorry, but it covers a lot of what Bryce animation is about) and focus on the windows of the craft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqPnGeAK_dY
These windows are transparent, reflective and refractive. In close-ups, they stay that way. But in most of the flying shots, Refraction is taken out, and in many of the distant shots Transparency and Reflection is gone too, substituting Specularity for reflection.
In the Render Options... panel I also cut Maximum Ray Depth to 2 and Total Internal Reflection to 1. (I call this a 2/1 render). These are pretty ruthless settings, and sometimes I might creep it up to 3/2 if I can't see through some objects that should be transparent, or water looks too flat. But decreasing these numbers often results in faster render times without penalizing the story behind the action very much.
I try to avoid volumetric clouds or smoke. The craft's vertical jets in the above animation WERE made with visible spotlights, but I switched them out with simple vertical cones and a fuzzy rendering intent... after Bryce tried to spend 3 DAYS rendering ONE FRAME. They don't look as great, but they were close enough for the somewhat cartoonish look of the surrounding scenery.
6. Render Finished Sequence
The human time has ended. Now it's about computer power, material complexity and document size. Ignore Bryce's estimation of how long it will take the sequence to render - It's woefully wrong, and can underestimate durations by hours or days.
My finished scenes go to YouTube. YouTube's viewer is HD ratio-based, meaning it likes 720p (1280 x 720 pixels) or 1080p (1920 x 1080 pixels) document dimensions. YouTube will take pretty much any sized document, but will stick black bars either side or top and bottom to fill out the ratio.
I export to a lossless format. At 720p, this can result in a file that may be gigabytes in size, but I want pristine, uncompressed exports for masters. Once I have that master file, I run it through MPEG Streamclip to export it as a H.264 compressed MP4, and uploading to YouTube.
@Oroboros: The video in your last post was a fun ride. Thanks for including that video.
Laughed again at that one, Oroboros...so funny. Can see several camera tricks, too e.g. changes in cam-fov through canyons (1.02), shake of scene as craft comes into view (1.15)...etc., but the lens flare effect - hmmm, Bryce(?).
Jay
To address your points directly Jama:
The FOV was, as you say, a simple FOV change in the camera :) The camera shake and engine flare was provided by a couple of traditional effects in Final Cut: Earthquake and Flare. Earthquake is an easy effect: set the amount of shake, and tailor when it came in and when it went out. The flare was a pain, as Final Cut HD is a 2005-7 piece of simple software and doesn't have point tracking, so I had to manually keyframe every 2 or 3 keyframes for where the center of the flare would be, and make it vanish if the craft went behind a hill or other obstacle :)
===
Camera work in CG has been undergoing a retro-stylistic approach these days.
Back in the spaghetti western days of film making, crash zooms and whip pans were all the rage to create drama out of stationary scenes. Everything was shot on a tripod, but these techniques were done as a way to simulate how people take in a scene. Just as our eyes dart around an entire scene to get perspective and comprehension, so the camera tried to synthesize this approach with 'dynamic' movement.
Then camera rigs came into play, where cameras were mounted on jigs, dollies or cranes with counterbalances. Now the camera could move smoothly THROUGH the scene, as opposed to zooming the lens or panning the camera. This was a subtle shift in movie-making: now, the audience wasn't just watching the scene, they were IN the scene, witnessing events of the story from the characters' points of view.
When Computer Graphic Imagery was being integrated with live action, the camera went back on the tripod: it was hard to sync the computer graphics with live action, so matte imagery/ greenscreening became the compromise. But the computer imagery couldn't be adjusted to match a moving camera angle at the time. Star Wars (The Original, 1977) was on the cutting edge of this revolution.
The next big thing was morphing, and while there were a couple of earlier experiments in a 2D space with morphing, the film that really brought it to the masses was James Cameron's "Terminator 2". Robert Patrick's shape-changing T1000 villain became indelibly etched into movie history. But the hidden success of T2 was integrating moving cameras with live acting, rather than models of structures. Now split into two functions, Camera Mapping and Camera Tracking, both of these items became essential techniques lavishly applied in just about all of Sir Peter Jackson's movies.
Today, there's very little distinction between real and virtual camera technique. The emphasis is less about capturing the story, more about placing the audience within the story, and using those old techniques of the spaghetti westerns to present a live, organic feel of changing perspective. Fans of the remake of the Battlestar Galactica series and Firefly will be reminded of the camera's 'difficulty' in tracking spaceships, combining loose framing, crash zooms, focus pulls, hand-held camera shake, blurs, explosive shudders – Many effects that were shunned in real camera shooting because it drew attention away from the story and revealed the limitation of the camera – are now synthesized in virtual camera work to make the audience First Person Witnesses to the story being revealed on screen.
Cool video Oro - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqPnGeAK_dY
Thanks for all the additional info. :)
Took a day off from my animation project and instead spent the day doing a little freebie animation project instead.
Not polished at all, but just a bit of fun and it does have camera tracking, collision physics and the particle generator in it...
... And a Bryce generated lightening flash at the very end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuGdgVZuJac
Technically, Savage, I see you've put a lot of work in to this...simply excellent.
Please don't feel the following as too critical, however, timings between text is just tooooo long. Make [them] instant and 'connected-like' e.g. (combine several texts as one, perhaps). I know you want to make some kind of impact statement initilly, but the viewer (always the viewer) themselve, can be left 'waiting' for the next text-view to come along.
I'm currently producing an animation for my second 'lunar book' - using Bryce, but as to the editing stage, it's really all about transposing complex material into simple, short-time sequences. They say 'less is more', and I have to agree with that.
Again, great animation.
Jay
@Dave: Loved the animation, nice tongue in cheek with the credits.
Cool animation Dave
Thanks Jay, Guss and Mermaid.
Jay: Yes, I agree and it seems like a bit of an excuse, but I did have the timings a lot better than they ended up but iMovie crashed as I saved it and the file was corrupted. So when I restarted the app, instead of re-starting the thing from scratch, I just took the bits that iMovie had helpfully put in the bin (rendered in individual clips now) and stuck them back on the timeline.
It was only supposed to be a quick job and the few hours I spent originally making the credits had already made the job take longer than I had anticipated. :-)
Meanwhile: A while ago, I made a flickering candle, but the glow wasn't synced correctly with the flickering flame.
As this is an element for my real animation project, I used the rest of yesterday to fix the problem.
It turned out quite well and although I have a fixed camera in this (so i could loop the clip in iMovie to make it longer), It also works to a large extent with a moving camera too as the corona is set to track the camera and the syncing is now fine because the corona is parented to an invisible sphere that sits at the very top of the flame (the sphere itself is parented to the flame). So now everything moves correctly yay!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_pOYf-oBoc
Yeah, sigh...the editing process, I've found, can be so depressing...one puts in a whole lot of movie clips that in themselves took ages to render out, only to find out 'yuck' that clip needs tweeking and this other one needs something added, so back to the rendering again. It really can be very taxing....not only on the computer time, but the mental side, too.
Candle movie works great...all that's needed now is for it to blow out, left with a sinder glowing, if not the eyes in the skull, too - it is Halloween time after all ;)
Jay
Aww... All that candle heat and no melting wax? Disappointed :P
Sweet effort, Savage :) Love it when I see peeps taking advantage of looping to make computers do all the dirty work. While watching your candle (the flame looks great until those times it shears a little too much, but my main concern? Needs a blue fringe at the bottom where the oxygen is burning), I came up with an idea to make the flame gutter occasionally. I almost started doing it but... I have these other projects... Gotta stop getting sidetracked...
At least some of that looping is down to you and your advice on the AML Oro. Now I know how easy it is to set 'repeat' and use the squiggle line to alter the dynamics of the movement, I'm having loads of fun.
The drawback being that now I wish that the keyframes could be set individually for X Y and Z rotation.
Yes, that would be great.
This candle though is simply going to be placed on the desk in the study where book opens magically on it's own in my animation project.
I only realised a few weeks ago that when you copy and paste keyframed objects between documents, the keyframes go with it, so now this is set, all I should have to do is copy it, open the main document and copy matrix of the candle that's there already, then delete that candle and paste the new one in and paste the matrix and it'll be good to go... In theory! :cheese: