Watch your sixes Mr Spielberg....

[paulselhi]

I have been learning a bit more about cinema 4d and have realised that i was spending too much time trying to get things like scenery right when terragen can produce astounding results. So i tried importing terragen images as backdrops then realised that i could add entire movies as backdrops !! and they have a psuedo wrap around effect !!!

So here is a first result, now thw timings are a bit off, the tracers are too slow, i will adjust that and their size, but i was very happy with the explosion - two particle emiitters, slighty off skew

The problems, or issues, with the background movie are that i have not yet worked out scripting so i cannot add shadows from the aircraft, and also i have not yet worked out how to link the camera in cinema to terragen ( though this is possible, so if we were to use the full movie, which flys through the canyon twisting as it goes, i should somehow bw able to synch the roll of the aircraft to match

also the movie is 360 degrees so i cannot change the camera angle, to do so means cutting the scene and adding a new background, no big deal but you cannot have the camera pan.

oops here is the quicktime movie :

www.wanbridge.net/stuff/dogter.mov sorry it's 886 kb but i think you'll enjoy it :D

[MinDBenNdER]

the best piece i seen come from you yet paul. just great animation, very realistic.

so your using cinema 4D now? i'v seen what it can do. is it hard program to learn?
did you model the airplanes?

[paulselhi]

yes i am very much like toad in toad of toad hall. i get one toy and rant on about it then see another and am absorbed in that - for a while !!

well i have tried them all, lightwave, maya, rhino, 3ds and so far cinema is by far the easiest to learn. The UI is very clean and i get things done a lot easily than in the other s/w though i have yet to put much effort into Max which has a larger user base and therefore more plugins and tutorials

Saying that if you want great landscapes terragen is the best, if you want models as well the vue and bryce are both very good, vue has better vegetaion and it's Mover animation is simpler to setup than bryce but bryce has more advanced animation manipulation. neither can do SPX of the complexity of sya Cinema 4D

However i have not yet done any advanced stuff with C4D and have looked at the COFFEE expressions and though it is nice and Visual Basic in style still seems very complex to get something simple done, saying that the "thinking particle" interactions and the MOCCA dynamics ( flowing cloth etc) look very interesting though i think MAX does this with Reactor

Right now for that scene i used a terragen movie as a backdrop material, i have just got a plugin that will inport and export scripts to and from terragen so i should have some better work to show

the idea of using movies for materials intrigues me and i am looking now for something like a vide of the sun close up to play with as a material

Also i want to try to get the creeping explosion effect that you got in star wars, i can make an explosion quite easily but how to get it to follow the shape of an object ?

no i am too lazy to model the planes got them from here but it has a good tut on how to do the models :

http://www.amalthea3d.com/

[paulselhi]

oh no !! i just found out that you can match a sound to an object
That means you can use it to create professional 3D animations and when you attach a sound file to an object in the scene the motion of that sound will match the motion of the object!

Now that WOULD be cool !!

[MinDBenNdER]

The explosion effect in the starwars flick I made was done by animating the material gizmos. The shockwave and earth fire matrials mapping gizmo is pulled off the sphere; as the bomb hits, the mapping gizmos move into the sphere causing the shockwave and fire blast. That causes the rap around explosion effect. the idea of using movies for materials intrigues me

Wow, that's something new to me. You mean you just make a plain and tag a Video file to it, and it acts like a projector? that's way cool.

no i am too lazy to model the planes
Yeah I hear ya. I'm working on a car, and it took me two weeks of my free time just to get the body done. I guess you get better over time.
though I have yet to put much effort into Max which has a larger user base and therefore more plugins and tutorials
Yeah there is a huge amount of stuff for Max online. I use it because that's the 3D app they taught at my school.