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Yes, it does Mermaid.... well spotted. :cheese:
It's a video editing software cheat though, not done in Bryce.
Further venturing into mechanical movement in Bryce.
In the second clip, everything is done by parenting and tracking. Again, the only keyframes are the rotation ones on the front wheel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=munoE4NUR6Y
Cool one Dave. The shadow of the ejected ball disappears. Small detail.
It's a bubble, it bursts :cheese:
@Dave: Those two new animations are neat.
Dave - the latest video is cool. :)
Sweet work Savage :) Once peeps get that Bryce can actually handle quite a bit of the thinking for you, the question goes from "How the heck can I animate this complex action???" to "How can I get Bryce to handle this complex animation???"
Complex animations aren't really about building complex rigs. They're about 'stacking' simple rigs. If a sphere needs to make a complex trajectory, you could handcraft that sphere into a complex trajectory, or you could parent the sphere to an invisible stone making a simple movement... then parent the stone to another invisible stone making a different, simple movement... then parent THAT stone to another invisible stone making a different, simple movement... And pretty soon you have a sphere making a complex trajectory, but one where the movement is done in governable steps, each of which is individually tweakable.
This is basically how the pros do it, even in organic CGI. Any CG animal you might remember from movies has a skeleton and animators 'parent/track' the skeleton bones together with movement tolerances. This allows animators to move a foot, knowing the rest of the leg, hip and torso will follow naturally (this is know as Inverse Kinematics, or IK movement).
Here is an animated version of my Bicycle Wheel . It's only 3 seconds long, though only the first 1 second contains the key frames. I tried following Dave's and Orboros"s instructions, but much have gone wrong somewhere for when I played back the animation nothing looked like it does in the video I uploaded to You Tube. As usual, all comments and suggestions are gladly welcomed. Especially in this particular area.
Neat video Guss, now to get the wheel rotating not only the spokes. Maybe you needed to parent the spokes to the rim and animated the rim only.
Guss, that looks excellent, really. The spokes rotating works a treat, but I think that it's the outer rim that while you may have rotated in keyframes (I'm not sure if you have) looks as if it isn't rotating as the reflection looks the same throughout the animation.
I would say that if there was some reference mark on the rim e.g. a brake smudge etc.,, or changing the mat to a more bumpy, reflective one, its rotation might show up that little bit better. But great work, and I would imagine movement of the camera sideways slowly would add more realism to the ani.,.
Jay
@mermaid: Thank you. Oh, the rim is rotating, it's just that the material used doesn't have any defects which appear at different places as the rim rotates. When the spokes are bridged to the individual spots on the rim, they become part of the rim.
@Jay: Thanks. I have thought of that, or something similar. It might not have to be material, though, thinking about it. Every rim has a hole for the valve stem of the inner tube. If a hole is created in the rim it will become part of the rim, and rotate as the rim is rotated. I'll have to think more on what can be done so the rim also looks like it's rotating.
Good work, Guss :)
Need to show the rim rotating? Stick a tyre with a tread on it :D
Also, You might want to think about slowing it down. As you've no doubt seen with car wheels in movies, often the wheels spin so fast that the strobing of the frame rate is insufficiently fast to capture the rotation of the forward progression of the wheel - as the wheel hits a critical point the wheel appears to stop turning.... then it starts turning backwards... and if it goes faster it starts turning forward again.
Bryce doesn't have motion blur. Motion blur is an effect that smears objects in motion. Not only is this a natural filmic effect, it helps the eye understand the motion in the scene. So if you were to accelerate your wheel very gradually, we would see your wheel spin forward... then strobe in a confusing way... then slow down and stop... then roll backward... then strobe in a confusing way... then slow down and stop... then roll forward... etc etc.
But because there's no motion blur, there is absolutely no way of telling when the wheel appears to stop if it has actually stopped, or if its rotational symmetry matches a multiple of the frame rate. To us, it just looks like the wheel is accelerating forward,decelerates, stops, accelerates backward decelerates, stops, accelerates forward, decelerates, stops, etc etc., with the only difference being that it takes longer to see the stop points.
I'm in a quandry when it comes to recommendations :) Mechanical motion synthesis is, by far, the fastest way to learn Bryce animation. It requires you to think a alot about movement, parenting, tracking, trajectories. BUT, Bryce is not very well equipped to show mechanical motion at relatively moderate speeds. Ideally, Bryce animation is geared toward non-collision animation - flying :) So by all means, I encourage people to chase machines in Bryce, but... you will hit a limit.
Since reading Dave’s explanation to Guss on rotating a wheel I gave it a try. I downloaded a bike object which arrived in Bryce dismantled, like most free objects do ;-)
I reassembled just one wheel and ended with this:-
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/504192120757657552/
Animation sure is difficult despite being fun to do. :-)
@Oroboros: Thank you. I did notice the spokes appeared to move backwards, even though I knew they weren't. I'd forgotten about the illusion of spokes moving backwards when rapidly spinning. I'm remaking the wheel due to problems making a valve stem hole in the existing rim, and I'll keep in mind to slow the wheel rotation. And think about adding a tire--another Wings learning experience.
@mermaid: That tire animation is really nice. I hate it when freebies come like model kits you buy from the store. At least those come with assembly instructions. My only question is where is the hub? Did one come with the freebie?
Thanks. I miss the hub too, but I couldn't find it in the array of parts, I tried to make them with a cylinder but no luck, I had problems aligning them.:roll: The problem with most freebies is that they are either one mesh and they can't be used for animation, and only one material can be applied to them or a whole lot of dismantled parts. It's awesome that you make your own models.
This was just an experiment to see if I could do an animation going by Dave's explanation. :)
@mermaid: I'm surprised the creator didn't include a hub, sure comes in handy to hold the wheel together. I don't know if you remember the church I used in a few past images, but it came into Bryce, and Wings, in pieces. It took some time to figure out what was what and what went where. The only picture I had to go on was the one at the site where I downloaded it. I'm in the process of trying a house completely from scratch, going by some pictures and rough floor plans. No telling when It will be done.
Here's another attempt at animating my bicycle wheel . This wheel has a hole for a valve stem, different material, and really looks like it needs a tuneup due to the wobble. Must have hit one too many bumps.
I increased the time because I thought my last attempt was too short for good viewing. As usual, comments and suggestions are gladly welcomed.
I'm sure the hub was there but I did not find it. ;-) I admire your zeal to model your own objects. :-)
The new animation is nice except a bit wobbly like you mentioned. Hopefully Oro or Dave will give us some new ideas. :)
Here you are Guss a wheel with the hub but something went wrong with this one the spikes are rotating backwards. lol
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/504192120757657577/
@mermaid: Thank you. Yeah, I didn't get the hub and rim centered together, so the slight wobble. I know how to align vertically in Hexagon but not horizontally. And that's the problem with the new wheel. Still, if I claim it hit too many bumps than the wobble is believable. Like the hub in your latest animation.
The illusion of the spokes moving in reverse is due to the speed of the wheel and the frame rate of the image. When they're close together each spoke is shot slightly earlier than the last spoke, which then gives the appearance of the spokes going backwards--I may not have explained this well enough. This was the problem I had with my first wheel, and was something I corrected in my second wheel. If you watch my first wheel animation you'll see the spokes going towards the right, when the wheel is spinning towards the left. Look at my second wheel and both rim and spokes spin in the same direction. Whether it was the correct method or not, I increased the number of frames for each key frame and this seemed to due away with the illusion of the spokes going backward.
You're doing well with wheel rolls, Guss and Mermaid :) We start getting into the realm of 'improvement' vs. 'artistic license' when it comes to suggestions...
My 2 cents: I actually like the mis-aligned wheel, Guss :) The more you dig into mechanical motion the more you get to appreciate that the real skill in 'selling' the illusion is in the finer details. In nature, nothing goes smoothly, even machines not from nature. If machines all operated perfectly we wouldn't need replacement parts!
As you suggested to Mermaid Guss, if the roll slowed down the spokes would appear to rotate the right way. However there's a weirdness with Bryce rotation occasionally that I'm able to reproduce, but not able to understand, and that involves rotating more than 180°. In the Object's properties, you can't rotate more than 180° (or -180°)... but under some conditions I won't go into you can rotate many, many times in just two keyframes with no looping involved at all. So you can make a 1440° rotational keyframe - that's 4 full turns. But if you looked into the Edit Attributes... of the object's rotational parameters... you won't see anything with an absolute value larger than 180°.
Here's a short video I used to illustrate the problem if you want to get into it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A-Qa7mLZo4
@Oroboros: Thank you, though I don't feel I'm doing all that well, still trying to come to grips with concepts.
Interesting enough, what you're talking about is something I experienced while working on my current wheel. I watched David's kaleidescope tutorial and in it he rotated the image four turns. As I'm still wet behind the ears in animation, I thought that might be neat to try, might save time. I rotated the wheel, played it back and nothing happened. No rotation appeared in attributes. Because I didn't understand why nothing had happened, I went back to the way I had been doing the sequence, entering number of degrees to be rotated. Again I was scratching my head because degrees entered greater than 180 was converted to negative numbers going backwards toward 0; for counterclockwise rotation. So if I entered 240 it ended up as -120 in attributes. And it works the other way if rotation is clockwise. Makes no sense to me why normal degree notation should be converted to either a negative or positive number when going past 180 degrees.
Thanks Guss. I was a bit surprised about the spikes seeming to rotate backwards because all the settings for the 2nd animation were the same except that I added the hub. It's interesting learning new things. Looking forward to more of your attempts.
Oro- thanks for the encouragement. I knew about the rotation, I'm a regular visitor to your YouTube channel.Looking forward to more video tutorials from you.
@mermaid: You're welcome. Glad you understood what I was explaining. The seeming backward spin happens often in movies and commercials, if you look for it.
This thread is amazingly full of good information - thanks to all.
Question: I'm trying to make a simple/straight (two point?) path, and I can add new control-points, but cannot find a method for deleting existing points. Even the S Kitchens bible (Real World Bryce - buy it!) doesn't have a method that I could find. I would guess that the end-points are 'sacred', but how about the various in-between points?
(and 'straight' needs to be on all three axis for my needs think: train tracks on a long desert plane...)
Any magicians out there know how? (a straight path is the goal, but the delete trick would be handy)
tia,
mindsong
Hi mindsong,
Terminology first: an indexable moment in time is called a 'keyframe'.
A 'path' is a specific type of object in Bryce: have you made a path, or are you just dealing with a trajectory (which is an 'informal' line of motion that hasn't yet been converted into a path object)?
A complete breakdown on the workings of paths, from how to make them to how to use them would be awesome information. I would benefit greatly from it.
Hey Rashad,
In my opinion, Paths was one of those 'good ideas at the time' that people came up with, but was clumsily implemented. I can find no practical, advantageous use to them. To be clear, they do have uses different to the use of plain ol' trajectories. But because it requires more effort to use them, and the different uses are very, VERY rarely used, there's not much point to them.
I'm sure people looking for a technical project that explores the path function will find amazing uses for them... and then that's it. Feature ignored.
Thanks for insuring the terminology consistency. For my purpose/question, I actually mean to use the term 'control-point' on a 'path'.
The default path that I get with an (win) has 4 control-points (two ends, and two others along the path) and is in a sinusoidal pattern (seen from the side, not top), as documented/expected. I read that new control-points can be added with (win), but I cannot find info on removing existing control-points, and none of the usual conventions that occur to me work., especially the select and 'delete', which deletes the whole path (makes sense...) rather than the currently selected or highlighted control-point(s).
My goal happens to be useful in a static context: to have a camera that's accurately tracking an object constrained to a fixed (straight in my case) path (ala Mr Brinnen & Mr. Wernli's great Tru-3D camera rig), and possibly using the same sort of 'rig' in an animation context over time.
I'm hoping there's a letter-key or some-such that I can press when working with points that will ultimately allow me to retain just two points.
oroboros, FWIW, thanks soo much for your brilliant videos and the humor that permeates them (bonk). A gold-mine of tips and clear wisdom for us all.
Regarding general path use, I can see a few uses of note - e.g. I believe you could get a realistic flock of flying birds out of a well-designed array of varying paths), but I'm not so sure the amount of work given the bryce-ian granularity of control might not make a bit of a chore to pull off... Certainly a special-case tool in my book as well.
cheers,
mindsong
Hi mindsong,
Please forgive the pedantic post earlier. People new to animation often confuse terms, and the difference between paths and trajectories is subtle. But the distinction is necessary. Here's why.
When a path is created from a trajectory, the trajectory remains, and the object is still governed by the trajectory, not the path. This is really confusing for most people new to paths. Fortunately, it sounds like you have some idea of the technology so we can get straight to business :)
First, the bad news: You can't delete control points. Get rid of that path.
Second, the good news, in two parts:
a) It's really easy to make your own path
b) For a straight line, you don't need a path. A simple trajectory will do fine.
Here's how:
1) Position an object (anything, including the camera if you like) in 3D space at the start location of where you want your path. Set a keyframe.
2) Move the time scrubber along to an appropriate amount of time to the end position.
3) Move the object to the end position in 3D space. Set your final keyframe.
Now... you could finish there! You don't need to turn your trajectory into a path for a 2-keyframe movement. For a two-keyframe movement making a path is overkill, but if you have your heart set on it (sigh)...
4) With the object selected, Alt/Opt-P.
5) Delete the keyframes for the object. If you're going to use the Path for movement, the object's trajectory has done its job.
===
To have a camera 'accurately' tracking an object doesn't require a rig: drag the camera's 'Track Object' button to the object you want the camera to follow. The camera will now track that object's origin point dead center of the frame.
===
Flying birds, flocks or otherwise, don't require paths either - trajectories will do what you need there too. Anything Paths can do, trajectories can do, and often in a more simple way. Paths do one thing that trajectories can't: strip out the embedded time dimension. For very specialized tasks this can be a boon. But the majority of animation tasks are between 3-to-8 seconds long and require less than 5 keyframes per object. If you're trying to create an animation longer than 10 seconds you may be boring your audience: at least render the same animation from a different angle for a little variety :)
Good luck with the paths thing! I've no idea what David and Horo are using for a Tru-3D camera rig but, like most things they do, I'm sure it works. Oh, and thx for the appreciation, happy to help :)