Anim8or Community

it's coming out a lot better than mine did

meh, i don't know what you're complaining about, tanzim.  you should see the jaguar s-type i made for an animatic video once - it was made of 2 cubes and 8 cylinders, and didn't look much like a jaguar at all.  then again, i guess it looked *beep* because i didn't try very hard...

anyway, back on topic - i was just thinking, maybe if you car-modellers actually finish off some of these machines of yours, then maybe someone could collect together all your .an8 files, and build a showroom to put all the cars in, and make a really awesome render of everyone's cgi wheels?  just a thought

- colclough

very nice!  could we see a static render, maybe higher-res?

- colclough

go to View > Preferences, then at the bottom of the dialogue box, select 'Other', and type '12' into the little text box next to it.  you probably also want to check that 'Limit Playback' is enabled.  hit OK, and voila!  your animation will run at half the speed. 

you don't want to drop the frame rate below 10 or 12, or it'll start looking rough and jerky, but 12 is fine.  i usually do my stopmotion material at 12.5 fps.  yes, i do other stuff besides anim8or - what a traitor i am!    or should that be tr8or? 

- colclough

yes, greenscreen works, and it saves a bit of hard disk space by only using one video, but you can sometimes get problems with it, e.g. if you do an antialiased render, then your characters (or whatever) can often come out with a slight green halo around them after compositing, depending on how good - or not - the greenscreen function is in your editor.  this happens because the antialiased pixels around the edges will be part model-coloured, and part green-background-coloured - green enough for the eye to notice "hey, there's green there!", but not green enough for the computer to say "oh, look, let's get rid of those pixels, they look green".

on the other hand, the alpha channel method has the disadvantage of taking up more HDD space - you need both the colour video, and another video file for the transparency data - but it has the advantage of producing much cleaner composites, especially right around the edges of your objects, and even more so if you render your objects with a background colour as close as possible to the general colour of your intended background image (if it has a "general colour", that is; if the background is all sorts of colours, then it's probably best to render your colour channel with a medium grey background).

the alpha-channel method also allows you to make your object as colourful as you want - there's an anecdote from ILM about the X-wing fighters in Star Wars: they were supposed to have blue markings, but this had to be changed to red (and the team name changed from "Blue Group" to "Red Group"), because if they'd tried to bluescreen a model with blue markings, then the blue bits of the fighters would have become seethrough - and looked really, really stupid!  but today, with CGI models and the alpha-channel compositing method, you can make your object any colour(s) you want.

anyways... hope that helps!

- colclough

rendering alpha channel videos is possible, i've done it several times for projects where i wanted to add anim8or/terranim8or vfx plates into a stopmotion video.  just go Render>Render Movie, and then pick the 'Alpha Channel' option instead of 'Image' in the lower half (i think it's the lower half...) of the video render settings dialogue 

- colclough

It is all made by hand.

...you used the lathe tool for that little round bit at the base, right?

anyways, your dedication to your modelling work is quite impressive, i'm sure i wouldn't have the patience to build something like that!

- colclough

*snip*  as far as the seperate video window you would use for motion matching, can't you do that very same thing with something like Windows Media Player or some kind of video editor?  *snip*

you can, that's what i did to match up the mouth movements in youtube.com/watch?v=i9y85zRtkgg[/youtube]]this movie (yes, i know it's a bit rough, but that's basically because i was lazy in building the mouths, and the youtube server has desynched all the audio anyway...  ); i was just thinking it'd be cool if anim8or had its own built-in video playback window, so that the reference video and the animated scene could be tied together, and moving forwards or backwards any number of frames in one, would also move the other, so you didn't have to keep worrying about whether or not you'd moved them the same number of frames each.

i've never experimented with putting reference marks on faces when doing it (partly cos it was my own face, and i didn't think black dots around the mouth would really suit me  ), but yes, that's entirely feasible - if your cast are willing to do it!   

- colclough

Rotoscoping/matchmoving is what you're thinking of...

i guess.  i thinking in terms of just having the reference video in a separate little window (like the graph editor one), rather than animating over the top of the video (i.e. rotoscoping per se), but now you mention it, that'd be cool too

- colclough