Goodoh Ray,
I'll fix that up on the morrow. Let me have your graphics and I'll stick it on the helmets and load it up as HD on vimeo.
There was supposed to be a flash of light at the beginning of the explosion but I will have to look into that.
The helmets are made in anim8or. I did the renders in a program called carrara, not because it is better, but it's because it's what I am working in at the moment as I can't get anim8or to run on my VISTA laptop. Oh I hate Vista ....
But I can point you in the direction of how to go about it.
Hmm.....
It depends how much you know. The first thing to do is do the animation part of the bird tutorial you will find on the front page here.
http://www.anim8or.com/tutorials/simplewalk/index3.htmlAbove is the page you need. Don't worry about the w alk cycle, just the part where the bird moves across the screen. Just adapt that to the helmet falling from the sky. Make sure it bounces a bit when it hits the floor. The floor is a simple plane with a 'grass texture" applied.
Do you know how to apply a texture?
To make the explosion you will have to substitute the helmets with lots of polygons. The thing would be to subdivide the faces of the replacement helmets into a lot of faces, (select the faces of the helmet mesh and use edit>subdivide faces) then click on the faces individually and use the edit>detach faces command. Don't do this on the original mesh though. You will have to copy the mesh and paste it into a new 'object'.
That way your helmets will be a lot of little polygons instead of one big mesh. Having a lot of little polygons will slow down your render time so that is why you only swap to the subdivided faces helmets at the last moment.
To explode them the best thing to do is to use a morph. You go to the subdivided mesh object you just made and use build>morph targets>new. Then re arrange the verticies so that they look like they have gone in all directions. You could use the scale tool as well in this gto make the object suddenly look bigger.
There is a noise modifier around somewhere that could help you here but I am not sure.
http://www.biederman.net/leslie/terranim8or/terranim8or.htmIts avaialble with this proggy made by the excellent gentlemen Leslie. You need to read the destructions though.
Remember to save your work often, and maybe in more than one file.
Towards the end of the animation make sure you drop the lights to zero, but you can probably do this in windows movie maker (fade to black) and it will save you the trouble.
Simple? I'm sorry but it is not.
But if you take the time to work through this you will be a good anim8or.
good luck.
By the way, someone esle could probably suggest a better way to explode them. EG Rudy Svchneider seems to have good brains (he is a bit ascerbic though
)
PM me your email and I'll send you the meshes.
