Anim8or Community
Artwork => Finished Works and Works in Progress => Topic started by: itsstillthinking on March 11, 2018, 12:05:24 am
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Hello all! Thought id make it its own topic but im in the process of making a real-time sinking animation of the Lusitania. This will be as accurate as i can make it and while im making a master timeline, this is being helped through lots o experts in the field to make sure its done right. Down below is a very early rough draft of the final plunge, the model is not done and it still need to be worked on plus better Sky ect.
I originally hoped to have animated water and smoke to go along with this but i think this project is already pushing Anim8or to the limits as having any of those effects for longer than 3 minuets causes it to crash
Maybe i can Frankenstein some wakes through the power of editing but i doubt it
Any help to increase production value is appreciated!
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Your project is looking great :)
I use a Pinnacle studio video editor and I found that it's not that stable :), it crashes, a lot. This means I can loose work or end up with corrupt work. (to be fair, I have v15, I heard the later versions are better). Apart from the stability, if I have a long scene - say 10 minutes, if a make a small change near the beginning, it can affect the relative timing of the tracks later in the scene - so if I've synchronised video to image overlays and to music I can get in a complete mess, particularly if I've spent ages getting the bit at the end right and then muck it up with a change near the beginning.
To a lesser extent, I found the same thing can happen in anim8or, a change at the beginning of the scene can have unexpected affects later - because of smooth keys or by moving the initial position of objects, etc.
For me the solution is don't have long scenes. Break everything up into lots of short scenes and then compile them in a master project. It takes more planning but that is a good thing. If I have a 5 minute video it may have 1 master project that compiles the results of maybe 20 studio projects in a hierarchy. Each of these sub projects may have 1 or more anim8or scenes (for me they are often chroma keyed overlays).
The other advantage is that if you are unhappy with a small scene it's much easier to bin it and redo from start.
Your animated scene looks like one scene, you could break it up so that for each of your captions you switch to looking at what it describes. Your voice overlay commentaries could be linked to individual scenes.
Also you can experiment with different sequences using more than one master project, each one a different version of your production but drawing on the same assets.
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Great Ideas! Thanks :)
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Great to see Anim8or being used for a serious project, nice work! There are a few things you can do to improve the quality of the animation, bearing in mind that some will affect render times:
1) In some places it looks almost as if parts of the ship's superstructure are lit from below rather than above. If you have an overhead light modeling the sun then you may want to check your normals are correct.
2) The lighting appears flat as if some surfaces are emissive rather than illuminated. Consider having a single overhead shadow-casting distant light as the sun with a bright-ish ambient light level, and ensure the ship model is set to both cast and receive shadows. This will increase render times but will improve the realism of the scene greatly.
3) Animated water is going to be very tricky no matter how you do it. Rather than attempting to animate actual waves I would try using bump and trans maps to simulate the effect of waves. I have had a bit of a quick go at this in the videos below (excuse the very rough ship model, it was a quick job for demo purposes only).
There are three large, square planes in the scene at the water level, as follows:
Planes 1 and 2: material uses bump and trans maps with a wave-like texture, each at a different UV scale and rotation for 'randomness'. They are on the exact same level (Y dimension) in the scene and are animated to each slide slowly in different directions (+X and -X respectively).
Plane 3 uses a partially-transparent deep-aqua colour to simulate depth, visible through the transparant parts of planes 1 and 2 as defined by their trans maps. The slight transparency allows the ship to be dimly visible beneath the water.
The an8 file and associated textures are attached, feel free to download and fiddle with the settings, particularly for the water materials. A lower Roughness figure may improve the wave-top highlights but this will also be very dependent on the 'sun' light's angle relative to the camera. You might also be able to find a better water bump-map online.
I would also suggest perhaps using bigger, circular planes rather than squares to give a better horizon line, and perhaps they could be rotating against each other rather than sliding (though this would create a centre point that might look odd).
This was rendered with Scanline so shadows could be less than 100% without the need to add more 'fill' lights, using the ART renderer would allow the surface of the water to be reflective which could add to the realism significantly but at the expense of render speed. Experimentation is the key here :)
Regarding the 'great wake' left behind, this would be really tricky in Anim8or. Without animatable material parameters (eg. transparency or alpha) it would be difficult to simulate this effectively. Something to ponder on...
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@ENSONIQ5 I really like that effect - we should have a "techniques" / "tips and tricks" / tutorials, etc. section on the forum.
Often when I'm trying to do something I remember a post about it but can't find it.
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Here's a version using ART but be warned, this took about 5 hours for two i7 quaddies to render 75 frames each. Some tweaking of the material parameters would be required to make it look a bit less Caribbean or South Pacific and a bit more North Sea.
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Mind sending me the full file? does not seem to be working for me :D
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1) In some places it looks almost as if parts of the ship's superstructure are lit from below rather than above. If you have an overhead light modeling the sun then you may want to check your normals are correct.
2) The lighting appears flat as if some surfaces are emissive rather than illuminated. Consider having a single overhead shadow-casting distant light as the sun with a bright-ish ambient light level, and ensure the ship model is set to both cast and receive shadows. This will increase render times but will improve the realism of the scene greatly.
I gave up on the lighting as i could never get it working without making the model like its super bright or super dark. Could never get it to a satisfactory level outside of the default lighting
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Very nice "water effect trick"
years ago i make water waves using "Terranim8or'
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Iv made several of those, there alot of fun ;D
Shame one cant do long scenes with them with out it crashing Anim8or
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hey @ENSONIQ5 ! the water looks realistic! :) is the water moving or is it just an illusion from the reflection?
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itsstillthinking: No problem, the updated Anim8or file (with ART attributes) is attached. It uses the same textures as on the previous post. (Note: Project created using V1.00)
Regarding the lighting, most often this sort of thing is caused by the normals being flipped. My only suggestion would be to make sure your normals are front-facing and remove all lights other than one overhead 'Sun' light and see what happens. To check normals, in node-edit mode with 'Front' selected and 'Back' deselected, click on a face. From 'outside' the mesh the face should highlight yellow (front) and from the inside it should appear blue (back). If they are reversed you can use the 'Flip normals' and 'Fix normals' commands in Edit to sort them out.
Also, some of the meshes could be malformed with concurrent front and back faces in the same location. If you're not sure, consider posting the project so we can check the mesh.
fefe01: The water makes use of bump and transmaps on separate flat planes that are moving in different directions giving the illusion of waves, nothing is actually moving up and down. The ART reflective property is sensitive to bump maps so the surface appears wavy, so yes, it's an illusion. In reality, waves always propagate outwards from a source, as is obvious when making ripples in a smooth pond. At sea, there are many, many wave sources heading in many different directions resulting in 'noise'. In this experiment there are only two planes but more could be added moving in more directions, which should provide a noisier, more realistic effect, but at the expense of render speed. Feel free to download the file and experiment with the settings.
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thank you very much @ENSONIQ5 ! i will check it out!
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itsstillthinking: No problem, the updated Anim8or file (with ART attributes) is attached. It uses the same textures as on the previous post. (Note: Project created using V1.00)
Regarding the lighting, most often this sort of thing is caused by the normals being flipped. My only suggestion would be to make sure your normals are front-facing and remove all lights other than one overhead 'Sun' light and see what happens. To check normals, in node-edit mode with 'Front' selected and 'Back' deselected, click on a face. From 'outside' the mesh the face should highlight yellow (front) and from the inside it should appear blue (back). If they are reversed you can use the 'Flip normals' and 'Fix normals' commands in Edit to sort them out.
Also, some of the meshes could be malformed with concurrent front and back faces in the same location. If you're not sure, consider posting the project so we can check the mesh.
fefe01: The water makes use of bump and transmaps on separate flat planes that are moving in different directions giving the illusion of waves, nothing is actually moving up and down. The ART reflective property is sensitive to bump maps so the surface appears wavy, so yes, it's an illusion. In reality, waves always propagate outwards from a source, as is obvious when making ripples in a smooth pond. At sea, there are many, many wave sources heading in many different directions resulting in 'noise'. In this experiment there are only two planes but more could be added moving in more directions, which should provide a noisier, more realistic effect, but at the expense of render speed. Feel free to download the file and experiment with the settings.
Hmmm regardless of what version i try it still seems to fail to show anything than light blue water
On the model il post it here once im done it as im still working on it
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After 4 more hours and a cramped hand the model is nearly done, mostly just need to finish the windows on the port side, fix the interiors and make modifications to make this the 1915 Lusitania and where good to go!
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Can you post a still render of any frame, rendered in ART? Not sure why it wouldn't be working for you but a render may help to narrow it down.
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Got it working, forgot to have it in art mode :P sadly my model is too complex for art as even in a new plain scene it causes it to crash right away, so its either scanline or open gl :'(
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On a side note is there a big difference in quality between OpenGl render and Scanline render options?
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A render ray test, shame it does not turn out on my model :'(
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This was rendered with Scanline so shadows could be less than 100% without the need to add more 'fill' lights, using the ART renderer would allow the surface of the water to be reflective which could add to the realism significantly but at the expense of render speed. Experimentation is the key here :)
Could i ask you on how to get this water effect without reflections? I love this water effect and would like to use it. But i dont need the reflections as i would prefer to have speed over that feature but the only way i can get the water working is through enabling art render. Any help would be much appreciated
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Just rendering it with Scanline should give the same effect as the earlier post, so long as you have a single overhead 'Sun' light (distant) which will illuminate the tops of the waves due to the water material's high specular value. Basically the wave texture is loaded in the Bump channel and the reverse (negative) version is loaded in the transparency channel. This makes the 'troughs' more transparent than the 'peaks', so the under-lying 'deep water' object/material is more visible there.
I posted the .an8 file in the original post, were you not able to load it? It was created and saved in V1.00 though it should work in any version back to probably .97 as it doesn't use anything new.
Also, under View>Preferences, make sure all available checkboxes in the 'File output' section are checked (Textures, Shadows and Transparency in particular).
Re OpenGL vs Scanline, yes, there's a huge difference. Though I don't often use it, I believe OpenGL rendering is roughly equivalent to what you see on screen, whereas Scanline is far more accurate. For reflective, refractive and ambient occlusion properties the ART renderer should be used, noting that it does not respect shadow density settings as Scanline does (if engaged, shadows are 100%).
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Re: OpenGL Rendering. Yes, this is done using the GPU in a similar manner to how the screen is drawn. There are a few minor differences, i.e. GPU rendering doesn't support anti aliasing yet.
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Thanks everyone! Btw does anyone know if there is a limit to rendering in scanlines? iv tried all sorts of settings (as seen by the test below) but it always seems to crash after rendering 100 frames or so. Any ideas on ways to fix this? tried to keep the z near to 10 and the z far to 10000
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Ohhhhhh i think i figured it out, like a moron i set the z near to 10, so its trying to render close to the camera where i dont care about that so i should have set it to a larger number :-*
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Another test
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It's looking really good :)
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Part of my wreck model, shots are based of Ken's Paintings
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Template for the four scenes that will make up the animation are now done
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Pre vis of the first 31 seconds, already fixed the lifeboats
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Little sneak peak, while a scene was rendering iv been working on the post productions, keep in mind the audio is not final and there will be plenty of text boxes to say whats going on at any giving time
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Done rendering and will be uploaded on May 6th, here is a preview screen rendered with ART
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For you guys you can see it a day early, the animated portions are in total about 21 min of footage. Hope you guys enjoy it and thanks again for all the help, would not have been possible without your help. Will be made publicly available on the 6th