A small portion of my second animated TG project, only about a 30s long video:
http://sites.google.com/site/dandeloanimations
This is just a small part of a much bigger thing that I'll eventually sew together, or rather, stack together...
Cheers for looking/visiting! :)
dandelOphet.
Some nice stuff there. I'll let you into a little trick I discovered not so long ago. Use a 'Get Frame' node to drive a 'displacement' node to 'warp' a PF. It's saved me crap loads of headaches trying to rebuild PFs with noise functions, especially if you're using 'get altitudes' or 'get positions'.
Also means that you won't get ease in or outs on your keyframes.
Oh btw. The only decent AVI codec outside of hardware specific drivers I've found is the Cineform codec, but that's kind of expensive, and why I tend to stick with Quicktime Animation/Photo-Jpeg for source renders, then transcode to .wmv or .f4v formats. Got to say I hate h.264, or at least the apps I have to transcode in that. Looks crap IMO.
looks really promising/interesting/cool!
Thanks, guys!
And, cheers for the hints, Hetzen, any shortcuts and tips are appreciated, it does feel like a juggling act when using TG for animating sometimes.
Is there any(this will have been asked before, no doubt) way to move keyframed content to a different set of keyframes, without actually having to manually transfer keyframed parameters? For instance, I'll often start something, get 200 frames in then, realize that something actually needs to happen before frame 1.(I know you can invert the sequence stepping, that's not what I mean, though, and it brings its own problems when working in a both negative and positive timeline), can I simply, for example, 'cut/copy keyframed animation' then, 'Paste before/into/after selected frame', effectually just moving things back/forward in time?
If it is possible, it isn't obviously clear how to do it, I've resigned myself to duplicating the animated nodes that need bumped along, hitting 'stay open', and then deleting the entire animated parameter in the node I am working with, to copy inputs by hand over a different time and obviously needing to flick between those separate frames to see the keyframed item values.
I'm not moaning, by the way, that kind of sounds a bit gripey up there. ^^ WAHHH! Why can't I do these extremely simple things?. I know that the animation functions are very basic for now, just wondering if I'm missing something that's right in front of me. I usually do.
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And, here's a tip that I've found, too, while I'm here: I've noticed that you(or, I) can't really animate cloud layer quality settings via the 'quality' slider. You must animate 'samples', otherwise, as soon as a cloud layer's properties change, even when the quality slider is keyframed, the 'sample' field does not update accordingly and you can end up with insanely long render times for less clouds than you've begun with because, when the samples do update, sometimes seemingly randomly, but always, I've noticed, if you touch the 'quality' parameter again at all, then you might end up with a quality value of 15.xxxx because the 'samples' won't auto-refresh between keyframes.
You have to always type the 'quality' you want to keep between frames but, never keyframe it. Instead, keyframe the newly updated 'cloud samples' that will refresh instantly from your input in the other field.
That kind of sounds like the opposite of the advice I think I'd like to give, or hear, about TG cloud quality, I'd like to tell TG to stay at quality='1' for xx amount of frames and have the samples react to that value. You just can't be certain that on the way back down from high sample quality clouds, to less demanding clouds, that it will correctly refresh the .tgd.
Anyway, this is really what I always liked about TG2, you just get a grey window full of words and numbers and work it out yourself, like a Rubik's Cube!
Either that or, you think you've got it worked out and then realise that you've left that one bloody green square on the red face... :D
The simple answer is no. The more complicated answer is yes. What you can do is use a 'get frame' node to drive your animations, and by that I mean, you use the 'get frame' value to drive your offsets, through multiply and adds to what ever you are moving. ie have a play with the warp shader via displacement.
You can use conditional nodes to check what frame has passed before setting off new animations. Your keyframes here will be constant scalers that you set up. You can also set up ease in/outs via smooth step scalers, but it's a head full of math to work out.
What the localised keyframing does is ease out then into, which is great for camera moves, but not so great for animating movement that was there before the viewer sees it, ie bubbling clouds, water, snow, etc.
As for the quality values, the problem you'll always find with these sorts of parameters, is the stepping involved as you add more octaves. And it is stepping. A bit like adjusting the moziac function in photoshop.
Your snow effect would be better suited to disolving the effect via it's opacity, rather than it's quality. Or in a perfect world, a particle system, where you control particles/second.
their all wrong, this is how the Pyramids were really made.
:D ;D
Nice. I had to look at the snowfall anim again also. :)
Just a couple of updates on this for now.
Firstly, I've replaced the original poorly compressed video with a better quality one.
Secondly, beneath that video, I've added an unedited five seconds of frames as a retake of the first Pyramid section. More as it's done, I have some funky glass to stone transitions coming up and a third person's pov of the flying craft in progress...
http://sites.google.com/site/dandeloanimations
Hetzen: Thanks for the tips there. If I knew exactly what you were talking about, I'd be sorted! :D ;)
I'm experimenting now, cheers!