Ok Croc Hunter Take Your Best Shot !!

[paulselhi]

In an earlier thread i was discussing compression of avi's to gifs with croc hunter and that gave me an excuse ( if i needed one) to do some 3-d modelling, i came up with this :

Quick animation (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/giftest/index.html)

this got a 25 Mb avi down to a 300 Kb animated gif

well Croc has been working with a program called blender, for those who don't know it it is a very capable 3d modelling program however it has one of the most obscure and difficult interfaces i know. It is a real challange to get anything done in this program, it is however free :D

That is why i was very much impressed with his particle work :

fire power (http://www.streetsie.com/webmasters/Rocket%20particles200hx43fx192kb.gif)

Now i have always been a fan of bryce however it does have limits to it's modelling abilities and also the use of particle effects. So i have been trying my hand at the major 3d progs out there ( lightwave , maya etc) and have found them heavy going.

Then i came across cybermotion, and it is a breath of fresh air, excellent interface, very powerful , does most things well, splines, lathing , extrusion, nurbs, particles etc etc as well as landscapes

The best thing about it is it's very very user friendly.

To give an example , following on from Croc's missile i decided to get into some intergalactic warfare and this is what i came up with in just one evening ( about 4 hours to render and fix up)

Now the ship models are from the net, i just tweaked them a bit and gave them the textures, this program can easily create these models however i wasn't willing to put the time in just yet, i wanted to see how far i could get with this program without reading the manual, and wow is it user friendly !!!

Ok this was a 230 MB avi and i have compressed it in several ways :

wmv 320 x 240 705 kb (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/320.wmv)

DivX 640 x 480 down to 1.08 MB this is the best quality !! (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/divx.avi)

If you haven't got the Div X codecs yet then check out:

http://www.divx.com/

Divx makes veyr small movies at exceptional quality, CHECK IT OUT AT FULL SCREEN - the quality is excellent for a 230 MB to 1 MB compression !!

intel indeo 320 x 480 1.4 MB (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/intdeosmall.avi)
Mpeg 640 x 480 2.2 MB (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/640.mpg)


Let the battle begin !!!!

[MinDBenNdER]

hi paul,

nice crane, very realistic movement.

you guys should check out "Sorenson Squeeze".
you can take any 3D rendered (or any video file, doesn't have to be 3D) and turn it into a super compressed Quick Time, or Flash video. very easy to use.

i took a huge 26 MB 3D animation, and compressed it into a 513 KB quicktime. the Flash format was even smaller.

it's not free, i was able to borrow a copy from a friend. from what i hear, it's what the pros use over in Hollywood to get toughs movie trailers small enough to stream online. so it might be a pretty penny.

it's worth trying to get a trial version, or a copy from a friend.
ill post some examples later when i get the chance.

[MinDBenNdER]

oh yeah, the animation i compressed was 59.8 MB at 650 X 480, and 25 seconds long. it got it at 513 KB. im sorry, i got it mixed up with another one i did.
compression gave little or no quality loss.

[paulselhi]

i'll have a look at that squeeze but don't forget i got a 230 MB avi down to 700 Kb at 320 x 240 and a full sized 640 x 480 divx at 1 MB

I would be interested to see if the squeeze can do as well or better that the divx

[paulselhi]

Originally posted by MinDBenNdER
oh yeah, the animation i compressed was 59.8 MB at 650 X 480, and 25 seconds long. it got it at 513 KB. im sorry, i got it mixed up with another one i did.
compression gave little or no quality loss.

this has me intrigued, 25 secs for a 640 x 480 was 69.8 MB ?

I have the original space movie at about 10 secs and 230 MB, that is full framed uncompressed, was your original 69.8 MB uncompresses full frame ?

[MinDBenNdER]

i rendered it with MAX with a animation Filter. so im guessing no, it was not uncompressed when it came out of MAX. my slow PC couldn't handle that.

ill have to show you an example of the squeeze, so you can see the quality.
what i like about it most, is that you can turn these avi files into swf (flash) files, and integrate them with your Flash presentations, without having to go with a video file. but video files can be streamed fairly well, even for a dial up connection.

Flash on the other hand almost always has to be preloaded.

ill post what i did, give me a few days.

[paulselhi]

methinks i found your 513 KB animation, yes i voted for it !!! but tell me how you got such a long animation down to 59 MB ? was it lower quality ? i see some distortion in the colors, what 3d prog did you use ? the explosion looks good - maya ? lightwave ?

[MinDBenNdER]

shhhhhhhh. lol. thanks for the vote.
you reply fast. :D

i rendered it in 3DS MAX. yeah, i didn't render it uncompressed, my computer would DIE if i did. it just wouldn't be able to handle it.

but yeah, the distortion comes in the explotion. i'm sure if i had rendered it at full definition, it would have spit out a 500 MB + file.

ill give you more info on how i did the animation later.

how did you figure that i did that??

[paulselhi]

just seemed that way, what with the space and missile talk :p

ok this is my problem the animation of the space ships ( which i hope you have seen :o ) is just a test run to see how this proggy handles things

So i set the output to 640 x 480 uncompressed at 25 fps now there are some 240 frames and it drops in at about 10 secs at 230 MB

You have seen my compression results are all play smoothly

To try to get to your compresion i re rendered the animation at 15 fps and 320 x 240 and the effect was better, a slower animation more spacy at about 16 secs and comes in at 53 MB and is nice and smooth

However when i try to compress this with any form of compression including sorenson 3 for quicktime i get a very jerky animation, this i suppose has something to do with the 15 fps but yet it plays perfectly in the uncompressed version

FPS, key frames and compression really confuse me, i never seem to get the right blend !!

[Croc Hunter]

That's x for 4hrs Paul. Will d/l the shareware.

I think some compression apps combine like frames into one which can make it jumpy. If you don't have a compression filter try a slight blur or onionskin effect on all frames. You know I shelled out big bucks for Rhino and while it is very user friendly for creating models and nurbs it has no particle generator or animation output. Very dissapointed. When free programs can do this and more. :( Looks like I'll be pulling my hair out with blender for a while longer.

Saving as a .swf now that could be very handy...

[paulselhi]

saving as swf is cool, i do it with camtasia but the files are still not that small

i have done some more work on my space scene i thought it was a bit to cartoony so i made some changes, mainly the atmosphere, now i know it looks like there are clouds in space but i had to turn of some of the effects to get render time down

I also changed the way the second ship enters the scene, i think it is a lot slicker

Now the strange thing, i changed the size to 320 x 240 and lowered the frame rate to 20 fps, great i got a movie out at about 55 Mb, but when i try to compress this the results are larger than the 230 MB files compressions !!! I really am getting very confused with all this compression stuff.

any way here are some results :

wmv at 838 kb (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/near1.wmv)

quictime mov at 1275 kb (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/firstoart.mov)

divx at 1606 kb (http://www.wanbridge.net/stuff/near1idivx.avi)

ok i made a bit of a hash with the cutting and you can see the jump but i wil clear that out later when i do a full atmosohere render

next stage is to do some internal pre attack scenes, maybe using poser ?

[Croc Hunter]

How big would your .3ds file be ?

In Cybermotion took 6hrs to make a spinning mag wheel with smoke cloud particles swirling as the wheel speeds up forming a realy neat burnout. Cool I thought, even if the render engine is slow in this program the controls are straight forward when combined with the help guide it's a very user friendly program. Didn't have time to get the m/s (meters per second) right for the particle animation. Thought, no worries, Paulselhi and the gang at powweb can play with it - only this stupid "shareware" won't let me share/export/save anything. 6hrs wasted.

What is the best cross platform file to swap with ? vrml .raw .3ds (file size in mind)
Blender saves many but will only open .blend it's good for free but..
Think I'll need to pull serious overtime and get maya ?
Is it cross platform ? It does particles, what about animation ?.
What about above with 3d studio max ?

[MinDBenNdER]

from what i know, 3DS files export the animation, and materials
i'm not sure if they export the particle gizmos, or any gizmos at that.

a regular 3DS Max file i had was 174kb. as a 3DS file, it was 34 kb.

[paulselhi]

i am just starting to play with the particles in cybermotion and am not getting on very well, Croc have you got... no you can't save !!, could you put a few screen shots together so i can see how you did the smoke. I can do smoke quite well in cinema 4d but i want to see how far i can push cybermotion, i also want to produce some sort of rocket exhaust in cybermotion


Can you help ?

[Croc Hunter]

Hey Paulselhi,

I couldn't save - the burnout went up in smoke when closed cybermotion. Do you have cybermotion v8 ? I made a .tga file to use with the programs explode particle .cmo file

From http:\\www.streetsie.com\webmasters
Save this 'SOLFLAR2.tga' file in C:\Program Files\CyberMotion 3D-Designer V8.0\BITMAP folder. And if needed the 'EXPLODE.cmo' to C:\Program Files\CyberMotion 3D-Designer V8.0\Projects\PARTICLE\EXPLODE folder.

Fire up CM and open explode.cmo preview animation. Ohhh pretty fireworks. Now click 'Particle Systems' (the raindrops icon) under Genesis tab change 'Angle of deviation' to 35 and preview. Under Genesis tab tick 'Place along movement vector' change Movement Vector to +X preview. Changing .tga colour will change particle colour. The 'Whirlwind' effect is good for smoke. Now we're getting close to some rocket engine effects. I'll let you play with the rest.

[paulselhi]

yes i have v8, i will give your suggestion a shot but right now i am rendering an animation with a particle effect, i think i am closer to getting the rocket effect i wanted.

I have yet to do smoke - man and i cannnot see a way to morph textures over time which you can do in bryce.

i am planning to create a swirling, electric cloud effect that the 2nd space ship emerges from, this is fairly straight forward in bryce but cybermotion has yet to yield it's secrets

also any idea how to get the camera to pan track an object ? there is a track option but it seems to make the camera follow the path of another object, i mean it actuayl mirrors the displacement, what i want is the camera to stay in position and just rotate to keep an object in view. I am doing this manually at the moment but there must be a way to automate this via some sort of linking

[paulselhi]

well i sussed out the particle creator in CM and have an acceptable result. Now the actual "rocket" effect is much better than you see as i scaled it down because i wanted more of a "ion engine" look, it could be allowed to grow again to give a cool missile trail

also in the clip you will notice that the flame is slightly off skew, that is to do with the fact that the particles leave in the oppsoite direction of the emiitors travel and i think the ship is "sliding" away at a small angle

versions :

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/mpg.mpg 562 KB

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/divx.avi 419 Kb

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/real.rm 306 KB

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/quicktime.mov 731 Kb

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/wmv.wmv 769 KB

let me know what format you all prefer for posting in the future

another thing, i have set the spave to be animated, this makes stars stream towards you, whichevr way the camera faces, i suppose the way around this is to, for the second part, have the ship backing up towards the camera and then re record the movie backwards

if you want the paticle file i will oblige

next to look at the example you gave me croc

watch this space, i have some "awesome" clips to show you !!! ok maybe just some neat ones- i tend to get carried away !!