Forest animated WIP

Started by Hannes, September 12, 2016, 04:10:24 AM

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Hannes

As I announced in my Forest thread, I'm trying to do a little animation of the scene.
Here is a first preview in lousy quality and with horrible GI flickering.

archonforest

Looks cool!  8)
I would do the fly through way slower so we can enjoy the beauty of your forest and at the end pull up the cam above the trees and cut.  :)
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DocCharly65

Great start and interesting and beautiful environment for an animation.

Just an idea (I don't know where your plans are leading to):
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?
Means: no camera benching. Just an up and down and slighly rotate left and right as if you're holding the cam and walk. similar to the chase in my Alien sequence but just slowly, calm and nice :)

archonforest

Quote from: DocCharly65 on September 12, 2016, 05:03:06 AM
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?

Hey that is also a good idea!
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Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

Hannes

Quote from: DocCharly65 on September 12, 2016, 05:03:06 AM
Great start and interesting and beautiful environment for an animation.

Just an idea (I don't know where your plans are leading to):
What if you try to animate a "real walk"?
Means: no camera benching. Just an up and down and slighly rotate left and right as if you're holding the cam and walk. similar to the chase in my Alien sequence but just slowly, calm and nice :)

Indeed cool idea!! I had something like that in my mind and it sounds really interesting. But this is going to be a challenge, since animating a camera like that in TG isn't quite easy.

At the moment I'm testing the animation of the leaves, and it looks quite promising. I did that before, so this shouldn't be too difficult.

DocCharly65

The "walking cam" isn't that difficult, I think.
But you'll need several tests to find out the best timing and curve for the up-down movement and the left-right rotation. Perhaps you get good results if you can test the movement filming a real walk. If you use that as a base and find a way to reproduce that movement smoother (like steadycam movement) you have it. My alien chase is a quite rudimentary run and was easy to make (except turning around corners ;)  )

After 2020 I will perhaps come back to learn about animating plants movement.  :)

Dune

Good idea, Hannes. I like your animations, so this will be a stunner too. I agree about the movement, a slow subtle movement would suit this forest more I think. Even if you just kind of look around you and have some tree/leaf movement it would be cool.


Hannes

Indeed. Atm I'm rendering a test animation with a "walking" camera and animated leaves. Will take some time...

ajcgi

The walking cam, or indeed hand-held cam looks best in reality. After many attempts over the years, the best solution I've found to this is to take a camera, film the view in front of you as you walk down a path/road somewhere with minimal moving objects, track that and import to TG... possibly via Maya. Time consuming, but could be worth it. Plus if you've never tracked your own footage, you can learn a new skill. ;)
The environment shows a lot of promise so this effect seems worth it to me.

TheBadger

Cool Hannes! I liked the images too.

I can't tell you how much I would like to see that T rex in a tweed jacket say, in a very Harvard accent, something clever to the human figure, ending with an invite to dinner. But this fly through is rather enjoyable also.
It has been eaten.

Hannes

Here is another test. Like before lousy quality, noisy and horribly flickering. But at least you can get an impression.
I handanimated some sort of walking camera and used the same lighting/cloud settings like in my last Forest-image.
Using real footage to get this handheld camera look would be great, but it would be quite difficult to make the camera following my path. So I gave it a try to animate it in TG.

archonforest

Wow feel like a 3rd person shooter game!  :)
Imho the steps a a bit too long.
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Kadri

#13

Looks good Hannes.
I think if you want more of a walking type look then you have, maybe a little more or faster left right look might help.

There are  many ways you know you can do this.

Terragen works in meters already. Put one or more stones-landmarks somewhere in the scene.
Repeat the same thing in real life just crudely. Walk and shoot.
Import it on a plane or similar as a front projection and keyframe the Terragen camera to that real landmark.

Kadri


There was a much easier way with Lightwave. Can't find it now.
But the principle is easy and should be the same in Max (you use that i think Hannes?).

Make a basic animation in Max. Then go to the beginning.
With auto keyframe active as you play the scene make the up and down, left, right moves (or make them separately).
Then import this animation as a chan or fbx file to the camera.