New Thread--animation and what to buy

[Gary David Bouton]

In response to Bob's request to not let the ZBrush/trueSpace/Waring Blender thread turn into a mass of branches, I'm starting a new thread here. Let's talk animation. There's a lot of programs that do bot modeling and still images out to GIF, Mac MooVs. and AVI. trueSpace has animations features, as does the late, great Extreme 3D. To answer the questions Bob posed in a little more detail, Bob...I really did render the little guy by hand. I used Painter's onion skin feature, painted the frames (I admit I copped the sun background from Four Seasons (now part of KPT 6), and then just used a cheap animation compiler (it's by PIXAR and I think it's about 350K) to make the pictures move.

Truth be known, I was a grad in 1975, and spent the summer of 1975 working with other animation students to create a large cartoon (5 minutes...wow!). So I learned a lot about tweening, and how an Oxbury stand and multi-planing work. A lot of the effects you get with 3D programs have their equivalent in stuff that's half a centurty old!

The attahed is an animation done in PIXAR Typestry.

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Gary David Bouton]

In response to Bob's request to not let the ZBrush/trueSpace/Waring Blender thread turn into a mass of branches, I'm starting a new thread here. Let's talk animation. There's a lot of programs that do bot modeling and still images out to GIF, Mac MooVs. and AVI. trueSpace has animations features, as does the late, great Extreme 3D. To answer the questions Bob posed in a little more detail, Bob...I really did render the little guy by hand. I used Painter's onion skin feature, painted the frames (I admit I copped the sun background from Four Seasons (now part of KPT 6), and then just used a cheap animation compiler (it's by PIXAR and I think it's about 350K) to make the pictures move.

Truth be known, I was a grad in 1975, and spent the summer of 1975 working with other animation students to create a large cartoon (5 minutes...wow!). So I learned a lot about tweening, and how an Oxbury stand and multi-planing work. A lot of the effects you get with 3D programs have their equivalent in stuff that's half a centurty old!

The attahed is an animation done in PIXAR Typestry.

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Gary David Bouton]

Hey, Bob---

Attached are two scenes that were originally done in Dimensions and then goosed a little in XARA.
Yeah, the stuff is plasticy, but the shapes are pretty much in line with what a modeling program can do...at least a basic modeling program.

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Gary,

The “stop� anim is very nice and plays fairly smoothly as well, I noticed you have it set to 0 sec per frame and it is about a 65KB file. I guess 3D stuff gets big very quickly.

I have used Corel’s PhotoPaint to make animation’s then take them into ULead’s GIF animator (5) to set them up and optimize them etc.

I remade an animation originally done in PhotoPaint with Xara and posted in the XaraGallery called Web Construction. It took about 60-80 hrs in PhotoPaint and about 5-6 hrs in Xara and it only plays for a few secs. (I was brand new to both programs) A 5 min. animation is HUGE and I don’t even know what “Oxbury stand and multi-planing“ are! Is that the stand where cells are photographed?

Your posted images from Dimensions are much better then the Adobe examples. They look pretty nice.

So what I need to consider is:
Dimensions cost ~$150 US and TrueSpace and ZBrush cost about $300 US. Will I be “past� Dimensions in six months and then be looking another 3D program (may it never be Maya) ;-) or go through the steep learning curve pain now and be “happy� for a few years?

Any more thoughts?

Bob C.

[Earl]

Bob,
Fortunately there's a very easy solution for you. Download a demo! Caligari trueSpace has a demo for download. Good for 30 days. RealSoft 3D has a demo as well that you can try. You can even try out Adobe Dimensions with their demo. If you're not sure how you'll do with the software, whether or not you're going to be wanting more power, or whether or not the interface works well with you, using the demos is a free and near full-proof way to make a decision. You can't go wrong. =)

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi Bob--

Yes, 3D animation gets big very quickly, and that animation I consider to be small. As a GIF, it's the size that it is. As an AVI, it would have been over a MB. And I optimized colors and everything.

I'm not sure what you learn in Dimensions would help you learn trueSpace. The construction of objects in trueSpace is quirky, while the construction of objects in Dimesninos is straightforward, and it actually *teaches* you to think in 3D, 'cause you are forced to be inventive as you create. Notice that the burger and the cameras are only extrusions and lathing.

There is no reason on earth, though, that you have to create and then render in the same program. Hollywood doesn't. "The Matrix" CG was done mostly in Maya, but it wasn't *rendered* in Maya. The animations were passed through PIXAR Renderman for Maya, a $4,000 package.

Before I start sounding like Latka, let me first say that I'm real cheesed off that the CG community doesn't have a common interchange format. Word processors have *.txt, we have WMF for vector stuff as well as ai, and eps, and bitmaps go anywhere in the TIFF format.

DXF is certainly the lowest common denominator, but 3D metafile seems to have no roots in the CG community because no two engineers describe 3D space in the 3DMF format the same way. In theory, Dimensions should export to 3DMF (it says so in the docs, Adobe, you listening????) but it doesn't.

Imagine this: shop for your modeling program first, and then shop for your rendering mechanism...in this scenario, I'd use trueSpace 5's rendering capabilities...they are awesome and easy to access. Another way of thinking about it is what is more important as a description of a scene: the geometry of the scene, or the texture? It's the texture, so you could, in fact, get away with primitives in your modeling program, dress them up in trueSpace with lighting, materials, displacement, reflections, and so on.

That's exactly what I did with the illustration attached.

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Earl:
Thanks for the reply, I resist loading and unloading programs in Windows 9x and the resulting “debris� scatterd on the hard drive. So I try and a good idea of the software I’m considering before I load it. I’m an old Amiga guy and I loath the Widows crashing sequence, nice software for the PC though! Sigh!

Gary:
Standards are always hard and I’m surprised to see the DXF “lowest common denominator� I believe AutoDesk (AutoCad) invented it for Cad drawing exchange!

Your last post has some of the best looking water I have **Ever** seen. the wavelets, reflections and the swells are remarkable! Really well done! So you used TrueSpace and..........to make this image?

I was leaning toward TrueSpace until I saw ZBrush, but your not mentioning it now any reason?

Bob C.

[Gary David Bouton]

Hi Bob--

In order, I think:

•I'm not dissing or dismissing ZBrush. It's a phenomenally new technology, and I'm not in a position to compare it to trueSpace because I'm adept at trueSpace, and I'm a totally lost beginner with Zbrush. Danny Huff turned me onto it, and as happens with most people, you simply "take" to a product once in every great while...it clicks and makes sense to you. XARA was that way for me...zero learning required.

•The DXF format sucks because it is limited to polygons--sline curves cannot be preserved, as they are with the 3DMF format. Textures and texture orientation do not transport, nor do lights or even scale. You call this a "standard"? To be honest, though, I don't know where I'd be without it, 'cause 99% of my work goes from E3D totrueSpace via DXF.

•Most of the reality of the water in the scene was lighting. I used a metaball structure, sort of like a bed of water, added a surface texture of a caustic (the Watts brothers have a good Addison-Weseley book on caustics), a transparency map that was out of synch with the texture map, and then finally a bump map. Hey, fer three atoms, water can be a hump to recreate.
I'm attaching the maps I created and used. Feel free to screen cap them or whatever and experiment.

Kindest Regards,

Gary David Bouton
www.boutons.com
Gary@GaryWorld.com
Visit a really large gallery at www.GaryWorld.com!

[Bob C.]

Gary,

Thank you very much for sharing your time explaining these issues and those images. Gonna sit back and consider the options and return to lurk mode for a while.

Wish you the best,

Bob Centamore

[This message was edited by Bob C. on June 07, 2001 at 09:04.]