Dogs of War *Finished*!

[Mr_Lamppost]

Well, to be honest, I tried to turn that off, but the boundingboxes started to disappear again...

[Edit:]After trying again, I feel ashamed to admit it does work when the Density Shader isn't inverted. However, it's good you take a look at the files, because while I fixed the doubles I got with Object spacing of 2.4 by changing to 3, I still have some empty spots. How do I increase the coverage?

But it does work, so you may slap me in the face for frustrating you unneededly!
You made a great set of nodes we should all keep close by! [/Edit]

I am pleased you got it to work; even with some dot not covered.  This is mostly because I can't load your project.  I did fix all the file links so I am guessing that I am running out of memory. 

Even with the stand in pegs I was not getting all the dots covered.  Because the distribution of instances in a population is very random, with the object spacing being a general guide only getting dots covered is always going to be a hit and miss affair.  At least being able to use different seeds for each population without having to worry that any dots being be used twice lets you try different seed values until an optimal combination of distributions is found.

[Mohawk20]

Ohw well, at least you now have a knight figure to play with...

I'll try to optimize the seed for max coverage. In the mean time, I just rendered frame 39 of the animation.
It has 1920 frames, but the army isn't visible in the first half, so I have enough time to change the army.

[Mohawk20]

By changing the settings of the Masks 'colour adjust shaders', I managed to get the whole pop area filled, more or less. A few doubles, but it looks pretty good.

Here's the tgd to look at, and a screenshot of the preview window...

[Edit:]And a nice li'll render is here: http://www.ashundar.com/gallery/displayimage.php?pos=-5203[/Edit]

[Mohawk20]

As promised, the first small bit of video.
It turns out it's not how the final will look, because I made some midway modifications.
I'm actually still editing the camera path a few hundred frames ahead...

Not rendered at full quality anyways so not really final anyhow.
This clip is avery raw cut with no fade-ins or -outs, and it just cuts off.
It's only an impression.
http://mikel.hbyte.net/files/Dogs%20of%20War%20Pre-test.avi 13 Mb, encoded with the XVid codec.

Here's also the next frame in the animation, to point out the differences.

[RedSquare]

Short but sweet, tho' tis on the dark side and quite a fast camera.  But I wish you all the best.   

[Mohawk20]

Thanks, but it's gonna take a while longer... The current memory leak makes it not fun to let the pc go on on it's own. Every 20 frames the renderbucket is full, and the 5 frames before that are only half rendered!

Patiently waiting for the fix...

[RedSquare]

The current memory leak makes it not fun to let the pc go on on it's own. Every 20 frames the renderbucket is full, and the 5 frames before that are only half rendered!

Really, I haven't touched to my shame TG for over a year so I'm somewhat out of touch.  But that must be sooooo  frustrating  my heart bleeds for you.

[Mohawk20]

Hmmm, it's been quiet on this topic for a long time...

HOWEVER... I got some frames rendered!
(Actually, the one pc that's been rendering for the last 2 weeks has gone from frame 721 to 1211!)

And having 1200 odd frames I decided to put the video and audio together I got so far, and see what happens.
I know there are some artifacts in the animation, like black spots, but those are faulty renders (bucket issues) that just have to be re-rendered in the latest build (in which the latest have been done).

No matter, here is the link to the 82 Mb XVid avi: http://mikel.hbyte.net/files/Dogs of War Pre-test 2.avi

(Edit: Fixed the url codes around the link, should work fine now...)

[cyphyr]

sweet

Richard

[Seth]

nice !
i would like to see more animations with TG2...
damn i wish to have a biiiig computer so i could try it

[Mohawk20]

And finally it's finished!!
There are some bugs in the objects in a few frames, but let's not dwell on that.

The anim is 138 Mb in .wmv format.
You can download it here: Dogs of War.wmv
(Put it on full screen, it looks pretty good actually.)

Or you could look it up on youtube, but it's low quality and very dark... http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3n_ixJZEXds

[Mohawk20]

I got some comments on a ashundar that it was to dark, so here are the light versions:
Dogs of War Light.wmv. It's 124 Mb, a bit smaller than the previous version because I downgraded the audio from 48KHz to 44KHz, but nobody will hear the difference anyway.

This is the youtube link to the lighter version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF95mTzVtxs.
You can select the High quality version in a small link beneath the video, but it's still darker...

[dandelO]

I think it's really nice, everything seems smooth in the camera transition. The surfacing is good enough, the only crit' I have is what you've already pointed out, there seems to be some flickering and 'doubled' models in there.

Lovely animation, nice atmo. Now, animate the battle!

* Maybe your guys can go up against Hannes' guys...? http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4812.0

[Mohawk20]

Lovely animation, nice atmo. Now, animate the battle!

* Maybe your guys can go up against Hannes' guys...? http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=4812.0

Nah, his guys are low poly. My guys would win even if outnumbered 1000 to 1! 

Animating a battle would require software like Massive, and if I could use a free version (which I can't legally), then I still would need another app to render in, namely Maya. That's a lot of extra software... to buy ánd to learn!