Anim8or Community

Hello there,
I've been venturing into area of procedural (scripted) animation recently. This time it's the idea that I've mentioned some time ago - audio visualization:


The procedure to extract frequency bands from the music is quite simple:

1. Get Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/ + LADSPA plugins pack http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/plugins , Wavosaur http://www.wavosaur.com/download.php , Notepad++ http://notepad-plus-plus.org/download/v6.4.5.html
2. Open your audio (preferably mono downmix or a single channel)
3. Filter -> GLAME Bandpass Filter with parameters: a, a/10, 10
where a = frequency of the required band (for example 2000, 200, 10)
3. Filter -> Amplify - sound should be as loud as possible but the best the value should be equal for all channels/passes
4. Filter -> Diode Processor filter with value 1
5. Filter -> Waveshaper (acts like an expander making quiter sounds more quiet and louder more loud and beats more 'visible') - 1.2-2.2 should be ok
6. Filter -> Comb Filter with: Band separation = 100-300 and high-ish feedback = 0.95-0.99 - this is the 'smoothnes' or 'slowness' of the curve following the beats
7. Save the file and open in Wavosaur
8. Process -> Resample - enter Frequency equal to FPS of your animation (better not to use fractional framerates), with Apply interpolation = linear or spline
9. File -> Export -> Text
10. Open in Notepad++
11. Record a macro for a single line where you add '"$arr.push(' at the start of line, ');"' at the and and move to the next line and beginning (use keyboard only)
12. Repeat until the end of the file
13. Copy to appropriate location in the *.an8 file
14. Repeat for other channels/frequencies bands to create more audio lists (if you wish/that's required) - it's better to repeat exactly all values entered and change only the ones from step 3.

A hint: 'The best frequencies lie at exponentical curve. i.e I've used 125, 250, 500, 1k, 2k, 4k, 8k (7,2k to be accurate as the filter didn't allow me to enter 8k)'
Have a look here for such frequency lists: http://sound.westhost.com/project63.htm

Currently I'm working on tool to automate the process of injecting the processed audio lists into appropriate morphs' locations in *.an8 file, so that you could just create the *.an8 template and audio lists and using graphical tool inject them automatically without need for manual text processing.

I started a little animated scene. I plan to make matte painted background (island) with some animated trees composited in the scene. So far I have raw background rendered in Bryce and environment map for the tree (used as temporary backdrop in the video, but not casting light on the palm yet) and a chopped into pieces model of the tree (got from here: http://www.gfx-3d-model.com/2008/12/palm-tree-model/ ) animated by me with expressions.

WiP animation of tree here :


Waiting for your critiques and comments

EDIT:
v2 with more natural movement:

I had some spare time today and I got inspired by Modeler_in_the_Myst's 'Lil' Spaceman Model' thread http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=4106.0

I've found a while ago 'World Machine' http://world-machine.com/download.php and decided to gave it a try today. This application's main purpose is to generate procedural heightmaps and textures for terrain. I wanted to know how can I easily make realistic Moon surface. I used this tutorial: http://www.world-machine.com/tutorials/craters/craters.html and example files and tweaked them to my liking. Then I exported (just like that http://world-machine.com/learn.php?page=workflow&workflow=wf3drender ) a mesh with 512x512 divisions and a heightmap that after my tweaks I used for giving a model slight bump texture (quite low resolution - definitely map in higher resolution or lower scale would give much better result).

I imported *.obj mesh to Anim8or, rotated it and uvmapped, then I set up a scene and rendered image and depth map. For composition I used only http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Milky_Way_1e_md.jpg for a background.

I'm doing environment and material test for jellyfish. So far I have 50:50 mix of transparent, self illumination with dielectric of IOR ~1.2, but I think I'll need something completely different because refraction with bumpmapping pass takes quite long to render. It looks really pretty and would be suitable for still image, but for animation rendering time is not acceptable. Model is just a deformed sphere.

I'm doing research on how such jellyfish may look like, but there are so many shapes and colours that's very hard to make decision.
First of all I need design, next model and then I can start making material.

Possible references:



http://www.jellyfishfacts.net/jellyfish-pictures.html - something like 200 photos
http://www.polygonblog.com/3d-underwater-scene/
http://vimeo.com/20556340
http://vimeo.com/14835141 - especially first scene

I'm making lately building in medieval style. It's for 'DIORAMA' challenge on Animanon forums. I just decided to make a bit more 'pretty' render than the previous ones. I hope you like it

More details on the progress and further plans in this topic: http://www.animanon.com/Forum3/index.php/topic,878.0.html
Any more ideas what can I improve before the deadline?

Hello!

I'm in progress of making visualization of this tiny bathroom. It's going very slow because it's only one of my many additional activities, but I'm hoping to push it forward. I'm after the stage of putting objects into the scene and at the stage of rendering NPRs with default scene light and default materials I'll be slowly building materials for the objects and different lighting conditions aiming for multilight setup with fake GI and each light on the separate layer in the final picture. Of course I could just fire up Kerky od Lux, but I want this time to push ART to its borders

Models of armature and door, as well as textures for door, walls and floor are not mine, but come from leading companies from my country or from architectural repositories. I used Blender as a converter and rescale tool for models provided as dxf/dwg. Crits and comts welcome! Look for non processed renders and material and lighting tests in this thread soon.

I've got lately interested in 2d and 3d cad architectural drawing. I've stumbled upon an interesting article about architectural modeling in Blender: http://yorik.uncreated.net/tutorials/precisionmodelling-blender.html I thought that following this way would be very easy in Anim8tor with exception of the last step where you have to do cross sections and/or facades. As I don't know ASL at all and wasn't even sure if it's possible to implement such functionality there, I wrote tiny C++ command line tool to export free edges from *.an8 file. This way still requires some workarounds, but I'm sure a lot would be possible if someone with better programming abilities than me would like to pick and help with developing this project.

Program lacks proper *.an8 file parser that would read required data by itself, conversion options are at this time set to top view plane only (other planes, custom angled planes, perspective views are not yet available), SVG support is very basic and fixed.


How does it work?
02.an8 - create your model, keep mesh tidy and regular, keep copy of this file in safe place
03_section.an8 - remove ALL faces, unnecessary points, keep only edges you want to export (for more difficult models when you might not want to choose edges by yourself slice your model using booleans), save
03_section_prep.txt - I isolated useful parts from *.an8 file and removed all round brackets with 'find and replace'
ani2svg.bat - use this script file because depending on your settings you may have problem with pasting when you run *.exe directly
console.txt - that's how my console looked like
test.svg - output, import to drawing app
test.png - after joining all these short lines i filled main shape with hatch, added details on window and door, and that's how the final drawing may look like

Hello!

As I promised I'm posting tutorial about compositing my glasses image.

First when I read topic subject I told myself that anything I post won't be valuable until I solve shadows issue. First I came out with typical 3 light setup. I chosed coloured lights behind because I think that coloured light give impression of natural lighting, and impression of realism. If you have textured or bumpmapped object coloured light greatly reveals its structure, so it's worth to use. Statement two - all shadows have to be soft (like in real world is) no matter how long it will take to render it. Three - avoid use of saturated colours, especially with pure diffuse shader.

As you can see I rendered image four times:
1. normal render (lenses, rims, shadow)
2. rims with shadow
3. background
4. render of lenses and rims without shadows

I created two masks that will be useful in making shadows transparent:
5.  1 + 2 with difference merging mode
explaination: brighter parts indicates places where image 1 differs from image 2 (parts where lenses with their shadows are)
6.  2 + 3 with difference merging mode
explaination: brighter parts indicates places where image 2 differs from image 3 (place where rims and rims' shadows are)

How can 5 and 6 be helpful?
7.  1 + (4 with 5 as alpha channel)
explaination: in places where 5 has brighter parts 4 will cover 1 (we're replacing parts where shadows, refracted shadows and reflected shadows are with image which does not have shadows in those places)
8.  1 + (4 with INVERTED 6 as alpha channel)
explaination: in places where 6 has darker parts 4 will cover 1 (we're replacing everything except rims, rims' shadows and reflections of shadows in rims)

I noticed lack of reflections so I had to add additional layer with reflections (in additive blending mode)
9. Layer contains reflections only, so set all your non reflective and non refractive (diffuse) objects to pure black (no diffuse, no ambient). Throw out all of your lights from the scene. Add objects that became reflected (material set to white diffuse > 1, emitter > 1). Put on background some colour (grayscale can be too) or image in PANORAMA mode (preferably stretched). Hit render.

10. I don't know which method (7 or 8 ) is more physically correct, so I mixed both images (7 and 8 ) in normal blending mode to achieve appealing effect. I put 9 - reflection over it with blending mode set to additive.

11. I overlayed (horizontally or diagonally) some colour and greyscale gradients (with different blending modes and rather low opacity) as well as texture (real photos are never that soft as renders).

12. I faked depth of field. To do it create duplicate of your image, blur it with one of available in your app blur or smoothing filters, if you don't wan't to make another rendering (of scene depth) you can use as a mask for your layer simple gradient. Then I added a little amount of noise (actually texture could be added at this point not in 11). Last step was contrast and colour correction (I used levels, but any tool seems to work here).

I have to explain more things here. I didn't tell at which point I merged layers, changed contrast and colours, what exact blending modes I used in some steps. I think this part requires a lot of experimentation, so I leave it to you


EDIT: Some mistakes fixed