I added a bit to the disney blender file. I redid the arc so it was more round and not jaggy. Also added the white arc to blue arc fade.
I would post a sample but I guess you have to have 3 posts before you can add a link. So 2 more posts to go.

Cool, jrl. it will be nice to see.

Adam

I will post the link asap. I need to post a couple more times before it will let me post a url.

I think this link will work now
http://www.fileden.com/files/17638/lakedisney.wmv
I'll upload the blend file tomorrow when I have a chance.

I used windows movie maker to add the sound clip and I used the
"Disney (Edited).wav" file as the sound.
What I did can be seen in the attached picture below.
I add the render then added it again at the begining and end and trimmed it. It seems like this makes everything match perfect with a 337 frame render.
The blend file is here.
http://www.fileden.com/files/17638/WaltDisney3Dnewarc.zip
Any questions and I will try to help where I can.

jrl that's a really cool render. You made the arc quite a bit smoother than I was able to. I did have to play with mine quite a bit to even get it as good as I got it, but yours is definately an improvement. Any chance you could explain in a sentence or two what the secret was? :D

This is exactly the type of stuff that I like to see and the reason why I enjoyed sharing my .blend files in the first place. I'm glad to see you're also giving yours back to the community so people can continue to improve and customize on the ideas.

Congratulations and thanks!

jrl, Great job. I have been trying to change the colour of the letters but have not succeeded. In Magius' version I can. Can you help? Is there a difference in making the change in yours?

Magius if I remember right you used cylinder and must have extruded it? I simply used torus for the arc.

loma you can change the color of mine the same as with Magius's because they are really the same file with a couple changes. Choose the text then press f5 to goto the shading/material screen. Now you will see 3 rectangles with white in them; Col, Spe, and Mir, simply change the Col to what you want. It should work.

loma you can change the color of mine the same as with Magius's because they are really the same file with a couple changes. Choose the text then press f5 to goto the shading/material screen. Now you will see 3 rectangles with white in them; Col, Spe, and Mir, simply change the Col to what you want. It should work.[/QUOTE]


That's what I did but the colour returns to the original when I render. It does not retain the new colour.

jrl it's been so long I don't even remember what I did, but yes I think it was a very long cylinder that I just bent with ctrl+w or whatever key combo it is that you use to bend stuff like the "Universal" text in the Universal Intro.

My Blender skills are pathetic so the majority of my stuff was just "how well can I fake this with only cubes, cylinders, and cones?". I'm still pretty amazed that I managed to fake a decent looking 3D castle with only those 3 shapes at my disposal :D.

A torus sounds like a much more logical shape to use for that arc, but I guess I didn't see that option. Thanks for the tip!

hi guys i have a little problem with (3d walt disney new arc)
i don't know how to show a flame wich draw the arc like this img
http://i30.tinypic.com/2zrkwo1.jpg
many have posted what they rendered and they got it and i can't
please can any one help?
thanks alot

Same issue here on both the 2D and 3D files, even when rendered in HD. Is there something else we should have installed?

Are you guys saying that when you render the file you don't get the Tinkerbell fairy dust or "sparks" effect at all? I can't answer your question if that's the case, because you said you're using the "new arc" version which is the one jrl modified from my original and I wouldn't know what might have been accidentally changed.

All I could suggest would be to render my original version (even just a few frames) to see if you have the same problem. If mine works, you'll have to see if jrl can fix it in his or live with mine where the arch is not as smooth.

By the way, the "fairy dust" is simply an invisible object with a particle generation effect to make it throw sparks that I manually moved frame by frame to wherever the tip of the arch was. A Google search for particle generation effects and you mgiht even be bale to make a neat project out of redoing the effect yourself. I never was completely happy with the way I had mine act going behind the center tower. There's a bit of a delay where the sparks fall off and I was too lazy to fix it before releasing the file :D

Just to show that flame use blender 2.37a instade of 2.46 you wil get it work
here it is
http://rapidshare.com/files/125822493/blender-2.37a-windows.rar

Wow so the latest Blender broke the effect somehow huh? I wonder what it was exactly that broke? I don't really know anything about Blender or animation in general I've just been faking my way through stuff. Otherwise I'd see if I could fix the effect...

Has there been any progress on the Pixar or Dreamworks blender files?
I noticed they were being worked on in Jan., but haven't seen any posts on progress.

Pixar was something I was working on before I did the Disney intros but I gave up on it. I believe that I posted the blend files in their half-done state but I haven't seen anyone take them and run with it. It really was painstaking moving each of the 13 or 16 or whatever parts made up my little Lampy toon individually and setting keys for their positions every 2nd frame. One little mistake and you had to go back and redo all frames forward of the mistake to fix it...

Dreamworks was another story altogether. A few people seemed like they were trying to play with it, but nobody made any progress as far as I know. Personally I never even managed to get the opening water shot to work out, so I couldn't get anywhere.

Unfortunately, I haven't opened Blender since the Disney intros were posted (it's not even installed at the moment) and with my work schedule for the past year or so I haven't had time for such things anyway.

Oh well, I'm sure there will be a second coming of this activity in the future. Someone will stumble onto these threads like I stumbled onto the Fox thread and hopefully become inspired to revitalize the Blender intros.

Thanks Magius! If I had more Blender experience I would try to give it a shot (even maybe a New Line intro). But like you I am pressed for time. Time..what a bastard...

Hey guys,

Been a long time since I visited and was just reading over the thread yesterday and remembered how you all were talking about the Dreamworks and Lionsgate intros. I'm not sure if I can get a Dreamworks version done, but I took a crack at the Lionsgate intro.

About 8 or 9 months ago, I jumped into a 3D software program and started making gears and stuff. It took a very long time to align it and the results was lackluster so I gave up. Recently I have been doing some editing in Premiere for some side projects for family members and when I came across thid thread again yesterday, decided to give that Lionsgate intro another shot, this time in a video editing program rather than a 3D program.

Here's the link to the first rendering. It is the clean Lionsgate intro, not the grungy one. Maybe I will takle that one later on... I really would like to touch it up, but I'm afraid my skills have been pushed beyond their reach with just this little 30 second video... HA!

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=LionsgateHTIntro.flv

Let me know what you guys think and maybe we get this thread jumpstarted again.

Magius, and all you guys, thanks for the inspiration and motivation to try some of this on my own and also for the previous work you guys have done on the intros.

Thanks,

Steve

Hey guys,

Been a long time since I visited and was just reading over the thread yesterday and remembered how you all were talking about the Dreamworks and Lionsgate intros. I'm not sure if I can get a Dreamworks version done, but I took a crack at the Lionsgate intro.

About 8 or 9 months ago, I jumped into a 3D software program and started making gears and stuff. It took a very long time to align it and the results was lackluster so I gave up. Recently I have been doing some editing in Premiere for some side projects for family members and when I came across thid thread again yesterday, decided to give that Lionsgate intro another shot, this time in a video editing program rather than a 3D program.

Here's the link to the first rendering. It is the clean Lionsgate intro, not the grungy one. Maybe I will takle that one later on... I really would like to touch it up, but I'm afraid my skills have been pushed beyond their reach with just this little 30 second video... HA!

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=LionsgateHTIntro.flv

Let me know what you guys think and maybe we get this thread jumpstarted again.

Magius, and all you guys, thanks for the inspiration and motivation to try some of this on my own and also for the previous work you guys have done on the intros.

Thanks,

Steve


That looks good. That is exactly whay I was looking for when I mentioned the Lion's Gate intro back in the thread.

I can host the premiere project file for you. I can add it to the projects page that I have all the blender files on. Send me a PM. If you have not seen my projects page look in my signature.

--w84no1

sa91899 that video is fantastic. I've never used premiere before but it did come up in earlier discussions about making the Lionsgate intro. Is it difficult to use premiere for this particular application? Is there any chance that you could post instructions on how to do such an edit? They'd have to be pretty detailed for guys like me that have never even run the program, but I'd love to make myself a Lionsgate intro if only I knew how.

Either way thanks for sharing the clip!

w84no1,

Thanks. We must figure out what it is we need to upload, because the process actually included 4 programs. And for example, on the premiere file, the video portions are not saved IN the file but tell the computer where to look for the file. In this case, if we were to upload the premiere file, everyone would have to have their video file saved in th elocation it is on my pc AND be named the same name as well. This is just one of the logistical challenges that face us with this intro. Too bad it isn't just a 1 file download thing like the other intros are, but the way it was created will not allow for that type of recreation. Let's put our thinking caps on and see what we can come up with...

Magius,

Thank you. Premiere isn't really hard to use to create this intro. I have only a infants understanding and was able to make it. Took me some time and thinking of how it would be possible to get it done, but the whole process took from thought to uploading to photobucket took about 6 hours. How does that compare with the amount of hours it took to create the fox and universal intro from scratch? My guess is considerably less amount of time for the Lionsgate intro...

Yes, I could and would love to post instructions so that everyone could make their own. I encourage you to join in on the thinking process for how we can make the intro easily duplicatable for all. It may not be as easy as one might think at first.(See above comment to w84no1) But I am sure we can come up with something. Until we come up with a better solution, I will be working on step by step instrcutions on how to make this. I'm afraid that making the instructions may take longer than the actual intro took to make... The other hinderance is the fact that you need 4 programs to create this effect. Now I hope that others can find free programs out there that do the same thing, then this will be available to literally everyone. As for now, it is only available to those that have all 4 programs. and the programs themselves can be quite expensive. They are:

Photoshop
Bryce (I used 6.0)
DVD Decryptor
Premiere Pro (I used PP 2.0)

So, maybe we can find free programs that can do the same thing. If not, maybe by the time that you have been able to get all 4 programs I will have the instructions done.

Keep in touch,

Steve

Steve,

If I'm reading your postings correctly, you didn't recreate the intro from Lionsgate, you actually ripped it from a DVD and then used that clip in Premiere along with some other home made clips to get the custom effect. Is that correct? If so, your method is very different than the other creations in this thread, which were all made from scratch to reverse engineer the same result as the original. Neither is better or worse, just very different.

Mark,

You are correct that I used the original Lionsgate intro and customized it in Premiere. Thought my earlier posts were clear on that. I stated that I had started working in a 3D porgram to create the gears and align them but after several hours of work had not come to anywhere near what I had wanted and gave up. That was about 8 or 9 months ago and as I was reading this thread last week I thought I would have a look at the Lionsgate intro again. What I realized when I was watching that is that all one would have to do to create a custom studio themed intro (which is one of the categories of this thread) would be to "replace" what was behind the door. (What's behind door no.1?!?!?!?) So that's what I did. Using 4 different programs as I said in a previous post. We could recreate the whole intro within a 3D world, but that would be much harder than anything that has been atempted so far. If anyone would like to colaborate on it, I would be game, but do not feel that I could contribute enough of my time to do the whole project on my own. Until such a time, I will submit my HT intro and instructions on how to create it for yourself as the only viable intro for Lionsgate.

Hope that helps clear up any mis-conceptions.

I didn't really see any problem with posting this here since this is where the idea came from and this thread is not only about blender but about customized studio themed intros as well. This Lionsgate intro would fall into the second category...

I didn't mean to discourage you, I was just trying to clarify for myself (and possibly others). I'm trying to think of a way for you to share your creative work with others...I'm not sure sharing the ripped segment online is allowed by AVS rules, but sharing the custom masks and segments/templates would certainly be okay. From what you are describing, I can't come up with a way to do this with "freeware" programs that I know of.

Anyhow, you did a beautiful job with it. Well done!

I'm not sure sharing the ripped segment online is allowed by AVS rules, but sharing the custom masks and segments/templates would certainly be okay.

I was thinking the same thing... However, who here doesn't own a Lionsgate DVD?

For example, on this project I used the clean trailer. To get that, I pulled out my DVD of "3:10 To Yuma" found that the trailer was on track 14 and then used DVD Decryptor to extract it.

For the grungy one, I will most likely pull out a Saw DVD and do the same process...

This information will be included in my step by step guide.

Let's see...

I'm sure we can use Gimp for a Photoshop alternative...
DVD Decryptor is free
Blender will work for an alternative to Bryce...
So all we really need to come up with is a free alternative to Premiere...

Anyone have any suggestions???

I have DVD Decryptor of course, and I can get access to Photoshop and Premiere, but I had no idea what Bryce was. It sounds like you think Blender can substitute for Bryce? Right on!

Unfortunately I don't know what Gimp is either and I don't know what Premiere does having never used it so I'll be no help in suggesting a free alternative for it.

One idea might be for you to work on instructions using the commercial tools first, and then let other people help you with instructions for other substitute programs. For example if you described well enough what you did in Bryce I might be able to make up instructions for doing the same thing in Blender. No guarantees, but I have managed to fake my way through a good number of complicated Blender tasks before :D

Other people could add to your instructions with their programs of choice and eventually we'd have many options of how to get from a Lionsgate DVD to a custom intro.

Magius,

Yes, I think Blender can be used in place of Bryce, however, IMHO, Bryce is the superior software as it gives much more photorealistic materials and environment interactions with the 3D objects. Again, just MHO...

Gimp is a free photoeditor with ALMOST the same power as Photoshop. For the simple task of what we need it for, Gimp would work fine.

Premiere is a video editing software used in the pro/semi pro world for editing your filmed sequences. I'm sure there are free ones out there, but not sure where we can get them...

On the same subject... One may think we could just use Windows Movie Maker, which comes with every copy of XP or Vista OS, however, it WILL NOT do the things that we need to do so will not be an adequate alternative.

One idea might be for you to work on instructions using the commercial tools first, and then let other people help you with instructions for other substitute programs.

That is my thinking as well. This would give us a solid "jumping off" point at the very least. So, let me get to work on these instructions and then we will go from there.

P.S...

I am probably signing off for today, but if my guesses are correct, I may come back tomorrow with a little "surprise".. :)

Later,

Steve

As promised...

Still need to add the sparkles, but you get the idea...

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=Disney.flv

Check back in later today

As promised...

Still need to add the sparkles, but you get the idea...

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=Disney.flv

Check back in later today

Nice, I like that. I was thinking about trying to do that myself with Premiere. Is that the only software you used?

w84no1

Is that the only software you used?

No, I used:

Photoshop for the text.

DVD Decryptor to extract the trailer

Premiere to do the editing & rendering

I will also use After Effects to add the sparkles (Unless someone else knows how to do it in Premiere without a plugin)

Also one thing that I have not mentioned is that for the final result to use in my HT, I do the following...

Adobe Audition is used to take the stereo file and create the surround sound track.

The DVD Archetect to assemble the VOB which I use for all my homemade HT video productions. IE.. Custom theater intros, pre-movie triva, cellphone & PDA silence messeges, DD Intros, and finally, the actual movie files that we are watching. (I very seldom watch a movie from DVD anymore. I store them all on HD and then use my Xbox as a media PC)

I will begin today on the step by step instructions.

Once they are done, how does everyone think about how to distribute them?

Word doc zipped, text file, HTML file, webpage on a hosted site? which way would be easiest for everyone?

There will be a mix of text and images...

Let me know,

Steve

No, I used:

Photoshop for the text.

DVD Decryptor to extract the trailer

Premiere to do the editing & rendering

I will also use After Effects to add the sparkles (Unless someone else knows how to do it in Premiere without a plugin)

Also one thing that I have not mentioned is that for the final result to use in my HT, I do the following...

Adobe Audition is used to take the stereo file and create the surround sound track.

The DVD Archetect to assemble the VOB which I use for all my homemade HT video productions. IE.. Custom theater intros, pre-movie triva, cellphone & PDA silence messeges, DD Intros, and finally, the actual movie files that we are watching. (I very seldom watch a movie from DVD anymore. I store them all on HD and then use my Xbox as a media PC)

I will begin today on the step by step instructions.

Once they are done, how does everyone think about how to distribute them?

Word doc zipped, text file, HTML file, webpage on a hosted site? which way would be easiest for everyone?

There will be a mix of text and images...

Let me know,

Steve

Word Doc or html is my vote.

Word or .PDF

been ages since i was last on here, you guys have been doing amazing jobs. sa91899 you are a genius, i love how you use the original trailer and then just edit the text at the end, what would take months to plan, design, test and render you did in hours, thats awesome, i know it kinda breaks the rules etc but still is amazing, well done.

keep up the great work guys

Cheesestringer,

Thanks for the complements, I appreciate tham.

You are right in that to do this in a 100% 3D world, would take months upon months to complete. I still say that I am open for colaberation on doing so though....

Wow... didn't know I was a rule breaker... Kinda makes me feel like a rebel! :)

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let everyone know that I have the word Doc/PDF done and have sent a PM to w84no1 to find out how & when he wants to post it.

There will no doubt need to be some revisions to the process due to the fact that I'm not a great person at teaching. Basically, I just fiddle around until it looks right, but I have tried to put something together.

Hope to have it available soon.

Thanks,

Steve

Hey guys,

Just wanted to let everyone know that I have the word Doc/PDF done and have sent a PM to w84no1 to find out how & when he wants to post it.

There will no doubt need to be some revisions to the process due to the fact that I'm not a great person at teaching. Basically, I just fiddle around until it looks right, but I have tried to put something together.

Hope to have it available soon.

Thanks,

Steve

I just sent you a PM.

w84no1,

Just sent you the file and a PM.

Thanks :)

Have fun everyone!!! Thanks Steve!!

http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp

Ugh...

I just downloaded the zip to make sure it unzips correctly and noticed that the help file in the zip was not the most current...

I have sent a new zip file with the updated help file to w84no1 so maybe he can make sure everyone is able to download the most current one.

Sorry guys...

w84no1, is that a problem?

Ugh...

I just downloaded the zip to make sure it unzips correctly and noticed that the help file in the zip was not the most current...

I have sent a new zip file with the updated help file to w84no1 so maybe he can make sure everyone is able to download the most current one.

Sorry guys...

w84no1, is that a problem?


It has been updated.

thanks again for your work.

As promised...

Still need to add the sparkles, but you get the idea...

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=Disney.flv

Check back in later today


That is great!!!! Keep up the good work! Hopefully you will share.......

w84no1,

Sure no problem.

Just really wanted to be able to pay back to the community for giving me so much. I have really enjoyed the custom intros and they have added great benefit for our HT. Everyone comments on them, so I am happy that I could provide a couple for everyone else. I know that they aren't blender projects and that they aren't all in the 3D world, but until we can get to that point, I offer these as an alternative until we can get the 100% 3D versions done.

dhageremtp,

You bet I will and it is very easy to do with 3 programs. DVD Shrink, Photoshop & Premiere.

I have just finished the tutorial on the Lionsgate one and want to take about a week to make any changes that people come up with (mistakes I made when giving instructions) on that and once we have it pretty well right, I will start to work on the disney one. Maybe by that time, I will have the sparkles done and can add that in to the disney tutorial

Anyone tried the Blender Mechanical Gears script on http://www.selleri.org/Blender/scripts/text.html? It would be a start on the gears anyway.

No, but I have downloaded the script. I may have to reinstall blender to play with this. Or I might just pick up my Bryce gears and see what I can do.

Hey guys,

I just saw this thread and figured I'd post to offer any help you guys might need.

I do this stuff for a living so I can probably answer any questions you have... for that matter I could make intros for you guys... although what fun would that be :)

Here's a link to my latest demo reel to give you an idea of the stuff I do:

http://www.samjam.com/HTML/2007Reel.html

So let me know if you guys have any questions. I have not used Blender, but all the 3d apps are fairly similar.

Awesome demo reel!!

Imatk,

Freakin awesome!

Man, have you come to the right place! We need your help like crazy.

We have been doing the custom intro thing for a while now but til now haven't really had the help of somone in the CGI industry.

Whatever help you can give us and pointers along th eway would be great.

I'm sure that you use higher end software than we do, but I am willing to learn what we need to do what we want.

Currently, we are discussing making a 100% 3D version of the Lionsgate intro as well as a Dreamworks custom intro, and finally (I hope not) the newer Disney castle intro.

I am totally pumped after seeing what you have worked on.

Which Terminator movie is that? Salvation? As I have seen every T movie and I didn't recognize any of those scenes...

Anyway, welcome to the group and awesome work!

Steve

Thanks guys :)

Yeah if you have any questions just let me know.

I use Lightwave primarily. But I also have a lot of experience with XSI and Maya. I haven't used Blender, but I would imagine it's not too terribly different since they all are fairly similar, so I'm sure I could help out if need be.

The Terminator shots are from the Sarah Connor Chronicles, it's a television show based on the movies.

Ah, right... I have seen it advertised.

Ok, Lightwave. I used to have a really old version around here somewhere. I'm sure it is out of date.

I have never used XSI, but also had an old version of Maya as well. At least 6 or 7 years ago. So it is probably gone/outdated as well.

What is your primary focus, modeling, animation, etc? Or do you do it all?

If you can, or have, take a look at the Lionsgate intro. The one with all the gears, lights & door. Maybe you could start us off with a little idea about how you would go about prepping the scene for this. Some pitfalls to avoid, shortcuts, anything that would help us from an animators viewpoint of the scene we are trying to recreate.

To be honest, I haven't used Blender except to make the few intros that the other guys have set up. I am most comfortable with Bryce and the old 3DMax program. So if we stick with Blender, there will be a learning curve for me, but the other guys have been using it for some time now.

The scene seems pretty straightforward to me. A camera move, that passes objects set in a given spot rotating. These are the only moviing parts in the scene. The rest are stationary. Except for the door, which does swing open.

Anyway, thanks for your offer to help out.

Steve

Oh yeah,

I'm not sure what the other guys are thinking but for me, a Terminator custom intro would be freaking AWESOME!!

Agree - Freakin awesome reel!

I too would love an intro based around The Terminator

Oh yeah,

I'm not sure what the other guys are thinking but for me, a Terminator custom intro would be freaking AWESOME!!

I second that!!!

What is your primary focus, modeling, animation, etc? Or do you do it all?


I do it all :)



If you can, or have, take a look at the Lionsgate intro. The one with all the gears, lights & door. Maybe you could start us off with a little idea about how you would go about prepping the scene for this. Some pitfalls to avoid, shortcuts, anything that would help us from an animators viewpoint of the
scene we are trying to recreate.



Honestly I think unless you are interested in doing a different camera move to the one that is already there, then I would just do it the way you did it, comp in your theater name at the end when the doors open..

If you wanted to do a different camera move, then the animation of the gears etc isn't too tough. Just make a couple gears and make sure their "pivot point" is centered and spin them.

Set the animation to a linear out... not quite sure how to do it in Blender but I'm sure there is an equivalent. Basically you want two key frames. One at the start point "0" and one about 24 frames (that's a second for film speed) out set to maybe 1500 degrees either forward or backward.

After you do that just set your last key frame to "Linear" and then it will continue to spin forever. Then just duplicate those gears and that's all you need to do.

Have fun :)

As promised...

Still need to add the sparkles, but you get the idea...

http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=Disney.flv

Check back in later today

Hey sorry I've been gone for so long. I've been traveling a lot for work. With that said HOLY CRAP! Someone needs to teach me how to use Premiere and fast. If it's not that complicated to do this seems like it would open a whole new world of custom intros being possible. I may finally someday even get my Dreamworks intro!

Granted, this method is blatant copyright violation as opposed to recreating the things ourselves in Blender, but really that was always a fine gray line :rolleyes:. I figure if nobody is selling the intros and we're all using them only in our own homes there's really no harm done...

Imatk, welcome to the thread. I watched your demo reel and that was awesome. Personally I just tinker around in Blender trying to reverse engineer stuff and "fake" my way through simple 2D or "quasi-3D" animation, but we've never had a real pro here before.

sa91899, I'm going to download your instructions for the Lion's Gate into and see if I can do anything with them. Since I don't have Bryce I'll see if I can use Blender as a substitute and if so I'll augment your instructions for that path. Unfortunately my work schedule has been ~55hrs. a week for the last 6+ months, so I can't promise getting around to this anytime soon. :(

Thanks again for sharing your creativity!

Dang, I'm in a hurry and can't talk long...

There are a couple questions I have Imatk...

Magius, Thanks. I appreciate your comment.

One point of clarification. As it is right now, when you buy a DVD, you have what is a fair use right to use that footage any way you want for PERSONAL USE. You can take the intro and use it in your own home for whatever you want. Hence one of the reasons I didn't include the intro in the zip file. As long as you have the intro on one of your discs, you can do what I did leagally.

Have fun with trying it out, and we are here if you need any help.

Imatk, I understand what you mean. Why do something someone has already done? Let's do something different. I think you will find that most of the people here were wanting to recreate as close to the original as they could just to say they did it.

While I understand that as well, I tend to lean toward your way of thinking and with your help, maybe we can do far greater things than anyone has thought possible for custom intros and rival the quality of what some on the boards are selling, but rather ours let people make their own at home.

I'll be back later to ask a few questions sorry that I have to run for now..

Steve

One point of clarification. As it is right now, when you buy a DVD, you have what is a fair use right to use that footage any way you want for PERSONAL USE. You can take the intro and use it in your own home for whatever you want. Hence one of the reasons I didn't include the intro in the zip file. As long as you have the intro on one of your discs, you can do what I did leagally.

I agree with you 100% which is why I made the same comment that as long as we're using these personally and not selling them, sharing them, etc. I don't think any harm is being done. I'm a strong advocate of fair use, and we did buy these DVDs after all. You are right not to share the original video trailer, which was mostly the thrust of my first post.

Basically, I was only making the remark that we're treading on thinner ice now because we're using actual footage which is copyrighted and owned by someone else, as opposed to a clever animated mockery of said footage. Admittedly the difference is gray at best, but I didn't want anyone to get in trouble by posting copyrighted source material. The way you're doing it now seems perfectly alright with me, then again I'm not a Hollywood lawyer :D

Sorry for the double post but I thought I'd post a shot of what a couple hours work has given me so far. I went out tonight and watched the X-Files movie, but in about an hour before and an hour after I managed to put most of the project together. Unfortunately as it would turn out I don't own very many Lions Gate DVDs, and those I have all pre-date the gears logo except for the Saw series which has an updated darker/scarier "red sky" gears logo. Because I used the Saw II intro just to test your instructions out it doesn't actually render a useable intro, but I was able to capture a screenshot of one frame before it all falls apart.

For the record, I created all of my text in Blender (using your .ttf files of course) skipping the first use of Photoshop and completely cutting Bryce from the equation. I also used Virtual Dub (the MPEG2 version) instead of your Xilisoft Video Converter. That was mostly just because I already had VDub and didn't feel like using something new, but also because I don't think Xilisoft is free while Vdub is.

Once I rendered a .jpg in Blender I just opened it with Photoshop to remove the gray background and re-save it. It's a shame that there's no free/easy replacement for that simple function of making the background transparent. Or if there is I don't know of it, but I had access to Photoshop anyway.

In any case, I think I'm going to go out and buy a Lions Gate DVD this weekend so that I can polish this off. Thank you again for the instructions and inspiration, Everything other then Blender was a cakewalk. I'll see about writing up some steps for Blender the way I did it but a lot of it is trial and error, not necessarily an exact science. Your Bryce method looked fairly long as well though so I guess there's no getting around some level of complexity in any of the 3D tools.

One final thing since this is getting a bit long. Do you think you could make me a "background.bmp" file of the red sky background from the SAW version of this logo? Or else give me a hint how to do it myself? I think that if I substituted that in for the background that you provided my intro would work normally, plus that way I could make two different versions. Thanks!

Wow, Magius that looks really good!

Because I used the Saw II intro just to test your instructions out it doesn't actually render a useable intro

Are the intros that different? I thought they were the same just different texture and then a different sky..

For the record, I created all of my text in Blender (using your .ttf files of course) skipping the first use of Photoshop and completely cutting Bryce from the equation.

Looks like Blender works just as well. The letters look great.

but also because I don't think Xilisoft is free while Vdub is.


Well, Xilisoft is trialware but after the trial is up, you can still use it for anything less than 5 mins, so I just use that. Of course, VDUB is the more standard software anyway. To be honest, I hadn't even thought about ti or I would have used VDUB myself. Thanks for the suggestion!

Once I rendered a .jpg in Blender I just opened it with Photoshop to remove the gray background and re-save it. It's a shame that there's no free/easy replacement for that simple function of making the background transparent. Or if there is I don't know of it, but I had access to Photoshop anyway.

Actually, after finishing the tutorial, I came across something that I did not know about when I created it. You can use what's called a solid matte or color matte in Premiere. What you can do with this matte is filter out a certain color. So, in your (and my) examples you can set it to make the grey transparant. This will work much better than photoshop and cuts out a step. If you look at the words "Feature Presentation" in the picture in your post, you will see some halo effect from the photoshop step not getting everything that was grey. Doing the color matte instead of Photoshoping the 3D text jpeg will fix this.

I think I'm going to go out and buy a Lions Gate DVD this weekend so that I can polish this off.

HA! Man how many times have I done the same thing with other projects? Great minds think alike I guess... :)

I guess there's no getting around some level of complexity in any of the 3D tools.

Unless you're Imatk.. ;)

The background... Yes, I can't remember exactly how I made that. I know I used the matte and then used the background on top of itself but slid it down some.... Yes, I think that if you replaced the brown background with the red it should just fix itself perfectly. Is this what you meant by

but I was able to capture a screenshot of one frame before it all falls apart.

Let me see what I can do on the background. Unfortunately I am behind schedule on a video project I need to finish. I will be working on it the rest of tonight and all day tomorrow to get it finished. Tomorrow is the deadline. Guess I have been playing with custom intros too much lately..

HA! :eek:

Are the intros that different? I thought they were the same just different texture and then a different sky..
Well, because I don't know anything about Premiere all I can say is that your project didn't work with the "red" intro as the source movie.

Right up until the doors open of course it is good, but then things start looking a little strange. See example shots #1 and #2 for what happens as they open. Both sets of text are visible somehow. I'm at a complete loss to explain why this part would be any different than with the original intro.

Then when the doors are completely open there is a fraction of a second (just a couple frames, if that) where it looks perfect, and I took the screenshot from my post above. Instantly after that it reverts to what you see in example #3 here. At least with example #3 I can see why it's doing it: The red strip that you're using to cover up "LIONSGATE" doesn't quite line up with the letters (it's a bit low). Also, because of the "inverse" nature of the coloring the strip is clearly visible in the red intro against the black background. I never even saw the strip in your regular intro until seeing this glitch and going back to look for it.

BTW, I certainly hope you're not taking any of this as criticism. I obviously didn't follow your examples and am just trying to share what happens when you go "offroading" if you will.

Looks like Blender works just as well. The letters look great.
Thank you. Blender is much more difficult than Photoshop to get the initial letters in place (especially notching out the E's), but in my estimation using Blender from start to finish is easier than going from Photoshop to Bryce. I've never used Bryce and I'm obviously biased towards what I know, but that looked like a lot of steps in your instructions to get Bryce to do it's thing ;)


Well, Xilisoft is trialware but after the trial is up, you can still use it for anything less than 5 mins, so I just use that.
The trial versions I saw would convert no more than 5 minutes, and only half of any file under 5 minutes. On top of that there was no full functionality period (ie: 30 days) before it degrades to this mode. I'd recommend holding onto the installer for the trial version you're currently using. :rolleyes:

Unfortunately I am behind schedule on a video project I need to finish. I will be working on it the rest of tonight and all day tomorrow to get it finished. Tomorrow is the deadline. Guess I have been playing with custom intros too much lately..
Ha! Definitely take care of real life first. We all appreciate what you're contributing around here. I'm going to have to go look for some Premiere tutorials because I'd like to make some other intros of my own with this technique. I think this could apply nicely to the Dreamworks logo that I've always wanted for example, but since I don't have a clue how you made your Premiere project file.... Good luck!

Magius,

Yes, basically you are finding out what I pretty much knew. The Premiere project I put up is a one shot deal. I didn't think it would work with the other intro. I'ts a one shot deal made to work with this one intro.

The only thing I can think of why the letters would be showing up inside the door as in example #2 would be that the original is coming thru because the matte will need to be different for this intro, or you still have the original lionsgate intro playing while you play the grungy one. However, the only reason you are using the grungy intro is because you didn't have the clean one in the first place so the second thought can't be true...

I'm not taking any of this as critisicm. Just like I said before, this is basically a way to customise one intro and can't be modified to work multiple ones. No offense taken.

I don't have a clue how you made your Premiere project file....

As you said earlier... A whole lot of trial and error!

Imatk,

I'm satisfied with my home spun custom intros for Lionsgate, and Disney. I just have to get the sparkles into the Disney one and then I'll be happy.

Now, how about that Terminator intro...???

What componants if any could we use from your demo reel?

My thought was to have some of the flames in the background with the skull coming out of that, but after thinking about it, I think that might be in the beginning of T2.. HA! must have been why I thought it was such a good idea. ;)

Hey, another neat idea would be a cross between two movies.

Terminator is visible but as the intro goes on, he begins to break apart and those parts transform into the lettering of whatever it is we want to it to say.

I know it would be a daunting task, especially since each person would want, say, their personalized name or theater name displayed.

I have just been throwing around some, "what if" type thoughts. I know that some if not all of this may be too time consuming for you. So if I tend to cross the line a little it's just out of sheer excitement to have you in our little group here.

I'm satisfied with my home spun custom intros for Lionsgate, and Disney.
Speaking of your Disney intro, is there a corresponding premiere project for that one that you wouldn't mind sharing? I obviously know how to make my own Disney text, so if all I had to do was render a Photoshop file with text and a transparent background it seems like I should be able to render a Disney intro based on your Lionsgate instructions... or is it more complicated than that?

Of course I also don't own any new enough Disney movies to get that video file from... and I'm not going out to buy Bridge to Terabithia :rolleyes:

Magius,

Yes, there is a premiere file and I will be sharing it. The text is not just a straightforward text if you look really close, it is a clear gel like texture and bubbled. I tried to get it as close as possible to the original but maybe not.

I was going to put together a tutorial on how to make the text and then supply the premiere file, however it will be a few days because of other commitments. (I just now finalized the DVD I was talking about last night and am off now to video another event.) This side hobby is getting to be a full time job... :)

Well, I wouldn't go out to buy Bridge to Terabithia either... But I got the intro off of Pirates of the Carribean: At Worlds End

The trick here though is that it is not a seperate file like the Lionsgate but is just the 1st 40 seconds of the movie. So, with this intro you will need to use DVD Shrink to reauthor and only grab the intro from the first VOB file. Other than that, it's pretty much straight forward.

Good luck and let us know how you do...

I am probably off here until tomorrow afternoon as my schedule is pretty tight this weekend.

Will check back in when I can.

Guys,

I have just returned from leave and can't believe how this thread has come back to life!!!

I have used premier pro in a similar way for a while to modify the mgm intro, the 'meet the robinsons' - heard it through the grapevine and to create a loony tunes intro (see post #12 of this thread.

I good place I found for premier pro tutorials was here
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/tut_premierepro.htm

under the premier 6.xtab shows how to do a star wars style intro and in premier v 1.x a matrix theme.

I also use a couple of other very simple tools including a WYSWYG 3D tool called cool 3d production studio which I then take in 3dS models and I can do some limited simple manipulation very simply including adding and animating words. There is also a universal style intro and fox intro (inspired by this forum - not done by me) available for cool 3d.

More recently I have been using Sony vegas pro 8 it is was cheaper than upgrading my premier pro and allows me to use 5.1 surround sound and HD. I have also been trying out particle illusions.

I have started creating my own intros mock adverts etc using these tools and I am more than happy to contribute material if I can be of help however when I do HD stuff the files tend top be a little large.

I will look and see what I have.

steve

I posted a few of the intros and 'adverts' here
http://s47.photobucket.com/albums/f164/theendisnye/intros%20and%20adverts/
some are incomplete in that I was thinking about creating 'standard' background videos that I could add words / voice over based upon the AVS voice over thread.

Theendisnye,

Some nice looking 3D intros there.

I can tell you've spent some time putting them together.

Keep up the good work!

Should have the Disney premiere file and instructions up by this weekend...

Wow, no more word from Imatk? I was really getting psyc'd about the Terminator intros....

:(

Hey guys,

Sorry I wouldn't be able to do Terminator intros for you. I'd get in mucho trouble for using those assets as I was working for FOX at the time.

But I can certainly help with anything else.

Sorry about that :(

That's ok Imatk,

I understand completely.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, as they say. We'll just have to put the Terminatior intro on the back burner for a while. That's ok

Appreciate the offer to help on anything else though.

When I get the time, I'll just have to do a search for a skeleton mesh. I'm sure that could be converted over to do a fair facimile of a terminator...

Working on the sparkles for the Disney intro. Once that is complete, I'll post the premiere file and instructions

any news on a dreamworks one yet or lionsgate

Here is a sample of what it can do and let me say it is pretty quickly done also.
I based this off of what you are working on in blender.
It is just a 2 color (b&w) image imported into cool3d and then added effects to it.
15 minutes work tops.
3d Ticket (http://s46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/jrl2222/?action=view&current=a.flv)
The skipping you may see doesn't happen in the actually avi file.

Magius we were talking about cool3d.
Here is a sample of what it can do and let me say it is pretty quickly done also.
I based this off of what you are working on in blender.
It is just a 2 color (b&w) image imported into cool3d and then added effects to it.
15 minutes work tops.
3d Ticket (http://s46.photobucket.com/albums/f119/jrl2222/?action=view&current=a.flv)
The skipping you may see doesn't happen in the actually avi file.

Wow! That's neat.

Never heard of the app before though...

-t

that's really neat jrl. I knew we were discussing Cool3D, but I was asking if Blender had a way to do what Theendisnye was doing in Cool3D, ie: taking a high contrast B&W logo and creating a 3D mesh in just a couple minutes.

In any case, it seems like a week's worth of posts are now missing? That really stinks! Good thing I grabbed the Cool3D logos before hand, but I guess some of us are going to have to re-up some attachments.

I missed that post I guess I'm not sure if Blender can do that or not. I think cool3d has a trial version though. And it is basically the same thing I am doing in Bryce for the gears just that Bryce uses shades of grey to apply different heights to different areas.
I'll have to do some research and see if it's possible in blender.

Edit- I looked through all of the Blender objects and nothing jumps out at me as being able to do this type of thing.

While, my latest post are gone, I'm still around. I've been working on a pre movie show, things like please no talking, etc. In this case, This projected was for please dim laptop displays, yeah, thats one of my ideas that are issues for me. This was a combination of Serentiy from Firefly and Ken Burns.

So.

http://www.vimeo.com/1513726

Adam

I have just re-uploaded the cinema 3ds models in the attached zip file. Cool3d can make these models in a matter of minutes by extruding a high contrast black and white picture. So if anyone has a specifc need to have a model created and can provide a good resolution picture I am more than happy to give it a go and create a 3DS model - may save some time for someone.

Some one was looking for a terminator mesh and there is one here http://www.btinternet.com/~tobor/meshes.htm which I found last night. So I did a very quick intro in cool3D and vegas - well more of an extro last night which is HD and I have uploaded a copy if anyone wants to have a look. http://rapidshare.com/files/136699787/terminator.m2ts.html

What I was really after when I stumbled on the terminator model was a 3ds model of the tardis so does anyone knows how to simply convert the one at the bottom of the page (above) with all the materials from 3ds max to 3ds?

The Cool3D free trial is available here plus some info on it
http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1208530086431#tabview=tab0

A couple of things to to note the Production studio version allows you to import, and export 3ds models and create from picture, other versions dont. Cool3D also has not been maintained for a while and only works on XP.

steve

Steve - what program is the 'm2ts' file extenstion for?

M2TS is a Blu-ray BDAV MPEG-2 Transport Stream - according to google!! They can be played on a playstation 3 or blu-ray player and can be high Definition. Media Player Classic will also play them on a PC.

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=170561&abmode=1

Steve

I managed to upload all the various Blender projects, I've been working on.

He's a summary

Projection Logo - http://www.vimeo.com/1460985
Serentiy Please Dim Laptop Displays - http://www.vimeo.com/1513726
Space Shuttle Silence Cell Phones - http://www.vimeo.com/1516027
Enterprise D Remember Refreshmens - http://www.vimeo.com/1516193
Enterprise A Popcorn in Kitchen - http://www.vimeo.com/1516280

I'd like to hear feedback, and some other messages.

I'm thinking of a battlestar galatica where two raptors pull a coke bottle into galatica. With the message please dispose of trash, or something like that.

Adam

I have been playing around with the Terminator idea today...

Here are some quick test renders I have done:

The first is the one I like the best as far as shape and form, however it has 2 serious drawbacks. It can NOT be animated, and it has no really good texture to it. I will play around with it some more but will probably not be the one I will use.

Test #1

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/Intros/SketchupTerminator.jpg

It uses the program by google called Sketchup. I can animate the camera around the model but I can not get the model arms, legs, head , jaw, etc to move. It's meant as a stationary object. Again, I can make the camera move, but that is less than perfect (like most everything I do...)

Test #2

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/Intros/T8003dsmodel.jpg

This model CAN be animated in many ways. It is not my favorite in shape and form but the texture makes up for any other drawbacks. I think I will try working some more with the second model and see what I can do.

Let me know what you guys think.

P.S. I know, why am I working on another intro when I haven't finished the Disney one?? Well, I am almost finished with it and the Terminator was just a nice little side diversion. All in all, I'm happy with how the Terminator looks and hope it will be a good model for an intro.

If you guys can think of any cool Terminator intros, throw out some ideas and maybe one of them will work...

Couple more renders...

Close up side view
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/Intros/t8003dsmodel3.jpg


Torso
http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/Intros/t8003dsmodel2.jpg


Full body

http://i40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/Intros/t8003dsmodel1.jpg

Well I've made some progress with the 3D ticket "boot screen" that I've been working on. The logos at the bottom of the screen are done, but unfortunately I wasn't able to use Theendisnye's DTS logo export from .3ds. I can import it just fine, but manipulating it leads to all kinds of crazy behavior. Hopefully my fake one is a close enough approximation, because I'm not going to trace the real thing with a curve just to get it perfect. :rolleyes: Personally, I think the 3D logos are a drastic improvement over pasting in a 2D .bmp of the original logos, even to the point that not being a perfect replica is excusable.

Since all my previous screenshots were lost in the crash I'm uploading 3 new examples plus the old ones in a .zip. The first new example is of the intended HTPC use, but this time with a Linux flair instead of the old Windows based example. As I've said in the past, it is remarkably easy to change both the logo and the "htpc" text to suit your whims.

The second two new examples are just further proof of what 5 minutes tweaking might get you, based on Atagert's suggestion for a projector warm-up screen. I chose two common brands representative of two technology types, but again you could make just about anything you wanted.

I'm probably just about done tweaking the basic design, unless someone can think of a really good addition for me to play with. One thing I would like to try is importing Theendisnye's Blu-Ray logo and seeing if I can get it in where the THX logo is currently as another option, or if it will misbehave like the DTS logo did. Let me know what you guys think so far. Thanks!

sa91899 your terminator models look great. I can't imagine the pain of actually animating the thing though. On my Pixar intro I made my own little "Lampy" character and he was made of something like 16 parts. Animating him amounted to stepping through every other frame and moving all 16 parts to where I wanted them to be and setting keyframes... A screwup can mean repeating the process for 50 or 100 frames, and eventually I got tired and gave up on the whole project.

Best of luck to you though in making an intro out of that model. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

I am not sure but I think their is a way to add joint connections. So say you pulled on Luxo's lamp the whole lamp would bend correctly. I think blender has this feature.

Yeah, they are called bones or bipeds. This Endoskeleton has a biped skeleton, so I hope he is easy to animate, but so far, it's a steep learning curve.

Test animation of the T-800...

Little baby steps but I like what I see so far. I still haven't come up with a storyline for the Terminator intro but some ideas are forming....

Let me know what you guys think.

T-800 Test Animation (http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=t800testanimation.flv)

yeah jrl I know what you're talking about. I used an armature bone for my universal logo actually. The text was connected to a bone that pivoted around the earth like a shoulder joint :D

If I knew more about Blender I could have created a skeleton for Lampy and tried to learn how to animate him with inverse kinematics but you have to remember I don't know jack about this so I just fake my way through.

In a couple weekends I had that Pixar animation halfway done the "hard" way, as opposed to trying to learn a new trick. I do wish that I knew more about how to use these kinds of tools, I just don't have the time to commit to learning them.

In any case, it looks like sa91899's model has a nice skeleton built in and he's already accomplished a walk cycle, so he should be able to make something nice out of that.

sa91899, could you point us to where you got that model from, or else post it for download? I'd like to take a look at it in Blender and try something. Thanks.

Magius would you mind posting the pixar blender file? Maybe someone else on here would be willing to continue your work.

jrl,
I'd posted it before for just that reason, but I guess nobody was interested in working on it. I've considered going back and trying it again (even starting from scratch) now that I know a bit more about Blender, but I've just never worked up to actually doing it.

Part of me just wants to use it as an excuse to learn more about armatures (bones/joints/etc) and motion, but in any case I've attached the old file as a .zip in case you want to tinker with it. Some screenshots are attached too just for kicks.

In case you're wondering, the little cylinders on the ground were just distance markers to help me in the frame by frame animation, and they would of course be deleted before a final render. The environment and colors (ground, sky, etc.) are also just an artistic interpretation of the original, and not at all representative of what they should be.

Sure, it's http://www.terminatorfiles.com/

Look under the fan section...

No promises or implications intended by the attached screenshots, but I thought I'd post some neat teaser shots. Right now it's just a lifeless bunch of cylinders, cubes, etc, but it sure looks better than my old model.

Hopefully I'll figure out how to use armatures and then we'll see what comes of this, but my time is pretty short nowadays so this may go nowhere, or may go veeery slowly. :rolleyes:

Let me know what you think.

Much better teaser shots than the 3 above. I spent the 1-2 hours creating a floor and playing with the lighting and then posed these shots. Still no armatures in the lamp model, just a bunch of meshes.

By lighting I mean:
1.) The light that comes out of the lamp's head (made by 3 spotlights)
2.) The light that illuminates the inside of the lamp's head (another spotlight)
3.) The light that creates shadows behind the letters and lamp. (another spotlight set to shadows only)
4.) Tweaking the brightness of the world and floor so that you can't see a seam where they meet.

Regarding #4, if you look close enough at the pictures you should be able to detect a horizontal seam just above the tops of the letters. This is because the floor and sky aren't "exactly" the same color/brightness. If you just set the two to the same values then the floor will look brighter due to reflected light, so I had to tweak this manually making the floor darker than the sky so that the reflections balance it out. I think I've gotten it close enough now that the seam shouldn't be noticeable in a video, but I might revisit it again some other time.

Unfortunately I have to stop with this for a while as I have to get some real work done. It'll probably be next weekend before I'm able to work on it again unless I squeeze in an hour tonight. Please let me know what you guys think so far!

Magius,

Wow! Looks good! Keep up the good work...

As for the world and the ground, Does Blender have the ability to bend a plane?

For example in 3D MAX, I can create a plane but then I can bend it to say 90 degrees and make the bend to be smooth. This creates a floor and background the same color with no seams or breaks in it. You can then scale it to whatever size you need to cover the viewable area, create your animation, etc in front of the plane. This would fix the issue with your seam if Blender can do this...

Magius, it is looking really good. steve

Test animation of the T-800...

Little baby steps but I like what I see so far. I still haven't come up with a storyline for the Terminator intro but some ideas are forming....

Let me know what you guys think.

T-800 Test Animation (http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=t800testanimation.flv)

Would make a great 'Please silence your cell phones' trailer.

Magius, the PIXAR looks like its coming together nicely. Glad you decide to give it another go.

Magius you could also make a BIG cube room that this whole thing is inside of. Make the edges rounded if need be so that it blends from horizontal to vertical. I think that will work in blender

A large cube does sound like it would work, and even a bent plane if I had any idea how to do such a thing. I may give the cube a try but it will probably frustrate me to have to work on everything inside of the cube, like it would always be in the way.

Probably the best thing to do is keep everything how it is for now, and once I'm finished (again, I never promised to animate this, as I have to learn IKA and armatures first) then replace my floor with a cube to see if it still works.

Thanks for the feedback and the ideas. I can't wait to really dig into this and see what I can do with it.

Well tropical storm Fay seems to be behind us and thanks to a half-day off from work yesterday I was able to tinker with the Pixar file a little bit. So far I'm having no luck at all with armatures for the lamp body. I understand how to make them, how to parent my mesh to them, and how to move them around, but I can't figure out how to get the mechanics that I want for my lamp model.

The idea should be that each "bolt" in the lamp is a fixed hinge on which the cylinders and metal plates can rotate. However, I can't figure out how to make this work using a bone skeleton. The bones have a fixed end and a mobile end, and I've been able to join fixed to fixed (think multiple finger bones fusing together at the wrist) fixed to mobile (think the progressively smaller bones in the fingers from palm to tip) but I can't join mobile to mobile (think making a circle with your thumb and another finger. You can still move them around but the tips have to stay fixed together.)

Because my lamp's structure splits off and then comes back together in a couple places this example of fusing two mobile bone ends together seems like what I need to do but I haven't yet figured out how to do it. I'm just starting to play with "constraints" to see if that will help in any way, but so far the going is slow.

On the bright side I have a fully functional armature for controlling the lamp's head and neck. A single bone in the head allows him to look up and down and side to side while all of the head pieces and associated lights move with it. The bone is constrained to always point at an "empty" object that I can move around, so it is trivially easy to make him look anywhere I want by simply moving the empty to that location. The head bone is set to "hinge" and assigned as a child to a neck bone. This allows me to move the neck back and forth, keeping the head attached and in sync with it, but the head's gaze will stay focused on the empty object. Reading that again it probably makes little sense, but hey, it's some progress :D

If anyone has experience rigging a model with armatures and wants to make some suggestions about how to rig my lamp properly I'd greatly appreciate it. Otherwise I'll be back at it this weekend when I have some free time.

Hi dude,

I've done a few studio spoof intros using C4D, Blender, ProAnimator and AE: but be warned I've had a few removed for copyright reasons.
LMK if I can help you with anything.

Cheers!

It appears I can't post link till I've had 3 posts so please excuse the spam :(

Only one more....soz

Finally here it is....

http://www.youtube.com/user/EubanksDVDs

That's a neat collection you've got there Eubank. I'm surprised we've never heard form you before since a couple of those originated here at AVSForum. I instantly recognized the Walt Disney one in particular for obvious reasons :D I like the lens flare that you added on that intro too; it's cool seeing different takes on the original idea.

I think it's awesome that you've made a few that nobody else here has been able to pull off yet, particularly Dreamworks. Your Star Wars and "Bullet" Intro's are well done and original too. Did you make all of these yourself or did some come from another forum? Are any of your projects customizable? Can you share any of the source materials with tips on how we could make our own?

Glad to have you here, and thanks for sharing the collection.

Yes, welcome and thanks for sharing your work!

We look forward to you joining our group here.

I recognize some Videocopilot stuff there... Good to see some of that stuff put to use for HT intros already. Gives us other HT intro guys hope!

I would type out more but Magius already asked all my questions...

Yeah, if any of those are customizable I will host the project files and instructions @ http://woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp

Hi guys,

Yeh, the disney was nicked from you with a simple leanse flare added in AE...you did a great job so didn't see much point in trying to better it :)

The Star Wars one was originally removed because THX had a problem with it, so i added in some new scenes and re-created a couple of the originals, then brought them all together in Vegas for the music/sound line-up. No problems from THX thus far!

I did the bullet one after buying the Videocopilot.net DVD. It gives you the basic Blender/C4D/3DS files for the bullet then I played about with shatter and lighting effects.
Can't recommend the web site highly enough. Andrew Kramer, the guy that runs it, is fantastic with his tutorials and he also provides project files to get you started...the only draw back is that it's primarily an After Effects site but he's recently got into Blender.

The Fox, Universal, Disney & Touchstone ones have all been downloaded from somewhere then changed, all the others have been made from scratch.

I've unashamedly nicked, begged & stolen files from loads of places but always try to improve upon what the original authors create.

I'll happily share any of my files with you guys, let me know what you want and if i've still got the project files I'll mail them to ya.

Cheers

Forgot to mention; about 18months ago I was playing about with Blender (found it too hard tbh:)) and AE and stumbled across this web site along with a Blender web forum; I nicked a couple of the project files....that was my mistake - from there on I've been hooked - your fault!!

Anything your willing to share could be left as a link here for others to download. I'm sure everyone would be greatful.
Here is something I did in Cool3d the other day.

Popcorn Enjoy some snacks (http://webpages.charter.net/jrl2222/myspace/popcorn.html)

Nice!
Where do I upload the files to?

Nice!
Where do I upload the files to?

PM sent.

I have a loony tunes intro somewhere which was created in premier and photoshop if anyone is interested / has hosting space I will zip up the folder and upload somewhere. Steve

w84no1 - I'm in the process of mailing you a few project files, textures and sound clips.

Theendisnye - I did mine all in After Effects if you want to AE file?

Eubanks projects are now available. You will need Cinema 4D for most of them.

http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp

W84no1,

I've mailed you the Blender tutorial for the 'Bullet' files I sent.

Sorry about the low rez but the original file was 100mb's so had to cut it down. Once you've completed that lmk and I'll send you the compositing tutorial.
Cheers

This is great! Thank you Eubank for sharing your projects.

I certainly hope I didn't come across as accusatory earlier by hinting that I'd made the Disney intro. The whole reason I release my projects here is to see other people make use of them, whether they prefer the direct lift approach, or whether they modify and improve upon the original. As I stated before I like the lens flare that you added, and it's always nice to see someone else making use of the work in whatever form pleases them. There should be no guilt involved for using that which was intentionally made available. :D

One question about your zip file that I downloaded from w84no1. It appeared at first glance that you had 4-5 project files in there, but then you have music files for Dreamworks, Touchstone and Pearl&Dean with no associated project file for those? Unless I'm mistaken your Touchstone intro was also originally mine (and is hosted by W84no1) so that's covered, but I know I'm not the only one who wants to play with your Dreamworks project. That one you mentioned was made in After Effects as well which means I don't have to download and learn C4D ;) I'd love to get my hands on it.

Thanks again for sharing all of this. I may have to look into C4D and see if I can do anything with a few of your projects, but right now time is so hard to find...

:D I was thinking about doing the disney intro and found myself looking at what others had done, then had the great idea of nicking yours and playing with it :).

Like you said, time is the greatest killer of these projects and I started the Dreamworks one in AE messing about - after a few hours work I'd past the point of no return so finished it many many hours later. Ideally, I'd like to start it from scratch and do it properly using C4D and AE. AE does the smoke/clouds and water really well but the text looks a but rubbish and could do with being created in C4D.

I've done a lot of 'gamers' intros for Metal Gear/CSS/Quake, they're the greatest protaginists for intros for their Clans videos or websites, so It's gotten to the point now when I have an idea and it's almost impossible to create what I want in one program. Hence the reason nearly all are created in C4D and finished of in AE.

If it's just 3d text you're after Zaxwerks ProAnimator is easy to use and effective and intergrates into AE with great effect. I'm sure you could pick up a copy somewhere ;)
C4D isn't that tough to learn, LOTS easier than Blender :)...believe me. Blender isn't intuative like 3DS or C4D but considering it's free you can't complain.

I'm stuck in two minds whether to start from scratch the Pixar intro or the Dreamworks one...??? Help!!

Soz for going on but the answer to your original question is: I've got dozens of project files, 100's of music clips and 1000's of sound effects clips on my PC so chucked a few in the zip file; they have no relevance to the project files :)

I'll have a search for the Dreamworks AE file and mail w84no1 it when I find it, from memory I think I used the Trapcode pluggin for the watter ripple effect but couldn't swear on it...easily get you that though.

Eubank,

Hows that tutorial coming? And the Dreamworks project file as well...

Any updates on the 3D Disney intro? Having issues with the flare/flame/sparkle/etc continuing through the entire arc and not sure if anyone has come up with a fix.

Also, the Universal Studios (Feature Presentation) files, anyone know how to adjust the arc-text that says "Feature Presentation"? The normal method (right-click and then hit TAB) isn't working for me. Thank you all for your time and assistance in these projects. They ROCK!!!

sa91899 > I sent the Dreamworks file to w84no1 for hosting but I can email you in directly if you prefer?? It's in two parts; the first part is the watter/ripple effect...the.ae file is will have a couple of images missing but you'll get the drift. The second part is the top half of the animation (clouds/text etc) and is complete with the exception of the stars back ground which I'm sure you'll replace and add a vignette.

DevilDog > Import your fished project into After Effetcs (if you have it) and add the flare effect there. If you have the 'knoll light factory' plugin for AE the sparkle is also easily added. 30mins work and finishes it off great!
Come to think of it 'Trapcode Particular' would also give you a great looking sparkle.

I have added the Dreamworks files to the Eubanks.zip file on my site.

Any updates on the 3D Disney intro? Having issues with the flare/flame/sparkle/etc continuing through the entire arc and not sure if anyone has come up with a fix.

DevilDog, If you are talking about the Disney intro that I did, the reason the arc pauses at the end there is because that is the very spot that the Walt Disney text starts to fade in. If I let the arc finish, we would see most of the Walt Disney before we had a chance to input our custom text...

If you aren't talking about mine, then I have no clue (which is the case most of the time...) :)

Well... After thinking about this for a second.. it can't be mine since I haven't uploaded the project yet.... HA! But my arc does pause at the very end as well...

A post just so I can get my three so I can post a link.

sa91899, I'm actually talking about the Disney intro that you can download from here (http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp). Its the very first one.

Here's what my output (http://s441.photobucket.com/albums/qq135/EHPDesigns/?action=view&current=EHPDesigns-WaltDisneyIntro.flv) looks like (the sparkle stops following the arc around).

Just curious if anyone knows of the fix for this as I'm having a hard time selecting the object to edit its path (if that is, in fact, the issue).

sa91899, I'm actually talking about the Disney intro that you can download from here (http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp). Its the very first one.

Here's what my output (http://s441.photobucket.com/albums/qq135/EHPDesigns/?action=view&current=EHPDesigns-WaltDisneyIntro.flv) looks like (the sparkle stops following the arc around).

Just curious if anyone knows of the fix for this as I'm having a hard time selecting the object to edit its path (if that is, in fact, the issue).

Not sure how to fix, but when I render mine I don't have that problem.

Not sure how to fix, but when I render mine I don't have that problem.

What version of Blender are you using? I'm currently running 2.46

UPDATE: I downgraded my version of Blender to 2.37a and it appears to have corrected that issue.

DevilDog1980,
I'm sorry that it took me a while to find your post, but you beat me to posting the solution. I made that Disney intro in Blender 2.42a and it renders fine there and in (some?) previous versions. Atagert was able to determine for the last person who asked that newer versions of Blender don't render the sparkle properly. His post was deleted with the database loss, and none of us know why newer versions don't render it right. The sparkle is created by a particle generator so I guess the Blender crew changed something about how the generator works in later versions...?

Also, the Universal text that comes around the sphere as an arc is not "text" thus is can't be edited like text. It's actually a mesh that has to be totally replaced. I uploaded instructions with my original version of the Universal logo (something like page 2-3 of the Universal thread) that describe how to create your own text, convert to a mesh, warp it to the arc shape, and animate it to come around the earth. In my version there was an armature bone that did the rotation for you, so you just had to parent your finished text to the bone if I recall correctly. Atagert, MikeFalz, and others then made their own versions of the Universal logo, some based on mine and other started from scratch. The instructions are probably pretty applicable no matter whose version of the intro you're using, but you'd have to figure out what may be different in your version. I think Atagert's version also had instructions with it, so I would recommend playing with his or mine until you're comfortable, then trying to apply the knowledge gained to the newer cooler version that you're currently trying to render.

Hope that helps! :D

Hate to ask the same question if it's been beat to death already, but here goes....

I had a hard drive crash and had to upgrade to a new machine with, yes, VISTA. It IS a quad core though, so rendering SHOULD be much faster. So I'm going to have to re-do all my intros from scratch.

Has anyone tried Blender with VISTA and/or a quad core? Which version will eliminate the stuttering in the FOX intro and the sparkle in the Disney and STILL work with VISTA?

Hate to ask the same question if it's been beat to death already, but here goes....

I had a hard drive crash and had to upgrade to a new machine with, yes, VISTA. It IS a quad core though, so rendering SHOULD be much faster. So I'm going to have to re-do all my intros from scratch.

Has anyone tried Blender with VISTA and/or a quad core? Which version will eliminate the stuttering in the FOX intro and the sparkle in the Disney and STILL work with VISTA?

I just downgraded to v2.37a on an HP Vista laptop (running duel core and 128MB dedicated video memory, but have 1300MB shared video memory setup as well). Not sure how fast you're wanting it to render the Fox intro (that one took me about 27hrs on v2.46, have to do two more next month so I'll see how slow it really goes on v2.37a). But it does work with the Disney sparkle (rendered two of those intros without issue and they look great).

DevilDog -

Thanks. I originally renederd the FOX using 2.37a on a single core Win2000 machine and recall it taking about 27 hours. I figured on a quad core with 5 gig ram it should be faster. I don't really NEED it faster, but it would be nice. I was just curious if there is a blender version compiled to take advantage of multi-core processors and that fixes the issues. It sounds like the render speed has more to do with the Blender version than the actual hardware.

I believe the fox logo stuttering or flickering is more a problem with the file not being setup right. I can't remember what you have to change but I think it is setting the pieces that flicker to smooth? I know the answer is here and it works perfect afterwards but it has been a few months since I set mine up.

jrl -

Now that you mention it, I DO recall something about that, but as I recall it took DAYS to render.

There are a few things you can try to improve your render times. In Blender 2.42 which is what I use there is a button labeled "threads" that you want to enable if you have 2 or more cores. This button in on the "output" tab in the "scene" (F10) menu, which is also where the big Render and Anim buttons are. You shouldn't be able to miss it on the left side of the screen. Enabling the button forces Blender to render in 2 (and unfortunately *only* 2) threads.

If you have a newer version of Blender, this threads enable/disable button was replaced with a field that you can input a number of threads from 1 to 8 and force Blender to render in that many threads. In prior experiments I found no improvement setting this to 4 on a dual-core machine, so just set it to however many processors you have for best results.

Finally, check out optimized Blender builds at www.graphicall.org. I take no credit for that find, I believe it was Atagert who discovered it, but regardless those builds were shaving 20-30% off most people's render times back when we were doing the Universal and Disney intros. I cant stand editing my project files in those builds, but I always pop one open before clicking the final Anim button :D.

I previously posted a bunch of trials that I had run comparing stock Blender to an optimized build, as well as comparing threads on/off and set to different values, as well as comparing my machine at stock speeds and overclocked. I don't recall the exact results but I do remember that overclocking led to an almost exactly linear decrease in render time, and when you compounded that with the reductions for optimized builds and multi-threading render times could be unbelievably fast as compared to stock Blender. Definitely play around with some or all of the above.

I decided to search for my old posts on making Blender render faster and apparently my memory was slightly off. Overclocking did not produce a linear decrease in render times, but it did help. Also I forgot to mention that setting Xparts and Yparts properly for the scene you're rendering can make a big difference.

Here is the first post where I hadn't yet discovered the threads button and was asking for help, but had run some timing experiments:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=11106351#post11106351

About 6 posts down from there you'll find my second post after DenW kindly pointed me to the threads button and I re-ran some of the tests. Personally I think there's quite a bit of valuable information there, as even neglecting overclocking I was able to reduce my render times to half, and with a little overclock got them down under a third. That really makes a difference over a 20+ hour span :D

And here goes 3 posts in a row... ;)

I actually had to rerender my own FOX intro and I'd been putting it off but because of the last few posts I decided to go ahead and do it and run a few tests before I kicked off the render for the night.

All the numbers I will provide below are for rendering frame 461 of the FOX intro in 1920x1080 resolution on my 1.8GHz C2D in WinXP Pro.

Vanilla Blender 2.42a (my standard version) took 2:12.10 with Xparts & Yparts set 4. Setting them both to 2 worsened the render times by 5-6% in all tests so I'll just post results of the 4x4 tests below.

An SSE2 optimized build of Blender 2.46 that I use for my final renders took 1:34.32. That's a 28.6% reduction in render time. I should note as well that there is a render error in the lower right spotlight caused by the newer version of Blender, but I know how to fix that when I render it for real :rolleyes:.

I then decided to try overclocking again, so I bumped my CPU to 2.4GHz, but left the memory at the same 800MHz via divider. This time the vanilla Blender took 1:38.84, so the 33.3% overclock gave me a ~25% decrease in render time. The optimized build this time only took 1:11.81, which is also little less than a 24% decrease compared to before the overclock. At least they're pretty consistent.

So in conclusion, when comparing the overclocked optimized build at 1:11.81 to the vanilla build at stock speeds at 2:12.10 it totaled over 45% reduction in render time, which is not too shabby. I'm kicking off the whole 690 frame animation now so assuming those times are a representative average for all the frames in the animation, I'm expecting it to take 13h46m instead of the 25h20m it would have otherwise taken. :eek:

I could pump the CPU up higher but either way we're talking about an overnight render, and my only concern was to have it finish before I get home from work tomorrow instead of taking 24 hours or more.

Magius -

GREAT posts! Thanks for all your work in this thread.

to have it finish before I get home from work tomorrow instead of taking 24 hours or more.

That's about all I was trying to accomplish. It would be nice to kick it off overnight and have it ready the next morning.

Looks to me like this thread is getting to the point of needing an index to all these little tips and tricks. There are SO many pages to read through now. AND we wouldn't want to lose anything good in another site crash.

Hey magius!

How is it going with the pixar animation?
Really looks forwad to seing it!

Thanks Tom. I appreciate the positive feedback. I agree an index to the thread would be nice, maybe someday I'll think about that.

Unfortunately my Fox intro rendered as a 3.99GB .avi and now nothing knows what to do with it. If I had to guess I'm thinking that 4GB is some file size limit in Blender (I know it's not in Windows w/ NTFS) and once it hit that it stopped adding to the file, though Blender threw no errors at all.

I managed to get the file to "play" in some encoder software, and it gets about 2/3 the way through then just stops. Vdub does the same thing opening the file fine, but 2/3 through says something about file I/O error.

I'm thinking I have to split the intro into sections and render it again. I'll probably do 4 chunks of ~175 frames each to keep each one at a reasonable size. Then I can encode each chunk to H.264 or whatever, and then virtual dub should be able to do a direct stream copy of the 4 videos, append them together, and lay the audio down on top of them... Yikes that sounds like too much could go wrong, maybe I should stick to a 720p render :D

Has anyone else rendered any of these intros (Fox, Universal, Disney, whatever) in 1080p? I'm wondering if anyone else is running into problems?

snofz,
I hadn't been able to figure out how to rig the guy with bones so I hadn't been working on the animation. "Some day" (famous last words) I really do intend to finish a Pixar intro, but as I stated when I posted the teaser shots it would likely be a while and I couldn't make any promises.

I'll gladly upload the new .blend file though if anyone else wants to screw around with it. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing the rigging shouldn't be that hard. This is my latest file with some further tweaking done to the spotlights to get rid of a few earlier glitches.

Right now I've got two bones making up the head, but only the neck bone is movable. The other head bone will move with the neck bone automatically to keep the head in place with respect to the new neck position, while always pointing the lamp at an empty object called "lamp focus". In other words, do not try to move the head, or the head bone, or you might screw up this relationship. Just move the empty object and it will automatically look around for you.

If anyone is able to rig up a workable skeleton definitely let me know, otherwise I'll tinker with it among my many other projects as time allows.

Thanks,
Marc

Magius, the issue you described is familiar Has anyone else rendered any of these intros (Fox, Universal, Disney, whatever) in 1080p? I'm wondering if anyone else is running into problems? I did a render of the Universal intro and hit an issue. So I rendered to a jpg series and used adobe premier pro to stitch it together. I never got as far as associating it with a file size issue.

Steve

Well at least I'm not alone anyways. My idea was to render the Fox intro in 4-5 parts then use Premiere and/or Vdub to handle stitching them back together with audio. Plus another tool of course to encode to a more manageable final file size with H.264 or xvid or something. I ran frames 1-150 this morning and just started 151-300, so hopefully it will work out in the end.

I always just render with xvid codec but have never done a 1080p file. Is there a reason to not let blender encode the file? Does blender make the file first then re-encode to a smaller size?

I don't know the answer to your question jrl, but on my machine the codecs aren't installed right or something, so Blender can't render to anything useful. I think it's because FFDShow does all of my decoding so I don't have the right encoding codecs registered. I guess I could install a few and see what Blender does with them, but I also like the idea of being able to fine tune the encode after the render.

As it is, Blender is spitting out HUGE raw files, but I can try various ways to encode it after the fact without having to re-render the original.

Well my Fox logo turned out fantastic in 1080p. I was able to stitch all the rendered pieces back together in Premiere, plus add just the audio from my original 720p file.

After Premiere did it's thing Vdub added a fade in and fade out effect for me, and also did the deinterlacing. Finally, after working with everything uncompressed up until this point (on 4-5GB files I might add, yeeouch) I compressed it with H.264/mp3 down to under 12MB.

There are screenshots attached of the old version and the new in case anyone was wondering why I bothered to re-render the whole thing. It had nothing to do with going from 720p->1080p, that was just something I decided to do while I was at it. The real reason was because I never liked the proportions of the text in the original file, and now that I know how to use Blender I decided to change it. Oh and the typo in the "original" screenshot was not in my 720p render. I did actually correct that before rendering the first time, but never took a screenshot after correcting it. :D

I also just finished a completely different project and attached a screenshot of it as well. This one was a real doosie... I started with the .vob ripped from the DVD, then converted that to an .avi so that After Effects could read it. Unfortunately I couldn't seem to get an uncompressed AVI while keeping the audio or AE would crash, so I had to remove the audio. (In retrospect I should have just compressed the video or something, but I like to work uncompressed up until the very end). In After Effects I covered up the original studio's text with some text that I created in Blender, and saved a new .avi. This .avi went into premiere with yet another .avi that I'd created from the .vob with audio intact, and Premiere spit out the final combined product for me. Finally, a compression with H.264/mp3 and my final file is only ~2MB :eek:.

In any case, this last project isn't perfect, there's 3-4 things that I'd really like to improve on, but for a quickie afternoon job I think it turned out good enough. I think I'll be doing a couple more similar to this over the next week as I have the week of from work and they really aren't that hard. Let me know what you guys think!

I just threw together another screenshot of another new project in progress. I don't have all of the animation done on this one yet, as I'm not quite sure how I'm going to finish it. So far I have the original video edited in After Effects to cover up the original producer's name and I have my custom text generated in Blender as you can see. I just don't know how to get my text to come in from behind the other video the way the original intro does it.

I'm thinking I need to tell AE that the solid black background should be transparent or something, so that as the main video recedes to the center of the screen my text will be visible through/over the black. Of course I don't know how to actually use AE yet so good luck with that ;).

In any case the screenshot shows what the final product will look like, as soon as I figure out how to finish it off.

Looks good Magius, I also had a go at a couple of intros yesterday, still very much WIP though.

Very nice Theendisnye. Are those in AE?

I'm going to try my hand at some original intros like you've done after I bang out a few more studios. Basically I'm claiming the low hanging fruit with the studios before I try anything too exotic and original, because I don't yet know how to use the software.

Magius, Those were done in Sony Vegas, but proably as simple to do in premier, I have a couple of others I am also working on - some low hanging fruits as you call it which is a couple of extras on a Guitar Hero video and more original dark knight themed intro. I am more than happy to post the project files if someone is after them. Steve

Magius, on your rerender, did you still have the anoying light flickering?

I sorta remember to fix it, peopled used an older version of blender.

Adam

Atagert,
I'm not sure if you mean the flickering of the "shelves" that the letters sit on, or the flickering of the two spotlights (one in center, and one in right). I do not have the flickering of the shelves that some people have, but both of the spotlights do have an annoying flicker. I used an optimized build of Blender 2.46 to do this render, but the spotlight flicker was also in my old render with 2.42a. I have not tried any earlier versions to try and get rid of it.

Also with 2.46 I mentioned there was another rendering problem with both the center and right spotlights. They were initially bright white as if being lit with an extremely intense lamp, instead of the normal golden color. This error was not present when rendered in 2.42a, but to fix it all I had to do was delete the area lamp in front of each one. This made the scene as a whole slightly darker, so I increased the intensity of one of the spotlight lamps just a hair to try and compensate. When compared side by side to a 2.42a render it's still ever so slightly darker, barely even perceptible, but it did render in almost half the time so I'll take it :D

Oh by the way I did finish my Jerry Bruckheimer project this morning. It took me about a half hour to come up with a way to work around my lack of knowledge of After Effects and implement a solution. I have a lot of fun with these things. Since I don't know the "easy" way to do something I get to engineer my own way to fake it ;)

snofz,
I hadn't been able to figure out how to rig the guy with bones so I hadn't been working on the animation. "Some day" (famous last words) I really do intend to finish a Pixar intro, but as I stated when I posted the teaser shots it would likely be a while and I couldn't make any promises.

I'll gladly upload the new .blend file though if anyone else wants to screw around with it. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing the rigging shouldn't be that hard. This is my latest file with some further tweaking done to the spotlights to get rid of a few earlier glitches.

Right now I've got two bones making up the head, but only the neck bone is movable. The other head bone will move with the neck bone automatically to keep the head in place with respect to the new neck position, while always pointing the lamp at an empty object called "lamp focus". In other words, do not try to move the head, or the head bone, or you might screw up this relationship. Just move the empty object and it will automatically look around for you.

If anyone is able to rig up a workable skeleton definitely let me know, otherwise I'll tinker with it among my many other projects as time allows.

Thanks,
Marc


awww, I'm not as good in blender as you, but at least I now have a .blend file to play with =P

Oh and I HATE those famus words =P

not sure if any one has answered this yet only skimmed through, but magnius you can upload that 3gb file into windows movie maker then resave it etc and it cuts it down to like 1mb without losing much quality, not sure what the limit is in uploading the file in movie maker but ive done 2gb projects before, just import them in, add the music soundtrack, save it and produce the file to the desktop, hopefully this works??

Thanks cheesestringer,
I do compress my files of course once I'm completely finished with the project. What I was talking about in previous posts is that I like to work with the uncompressed video all the way through to the end, so that as I hop between programs it's not getting compressed (and degraded) over and over again.

For example I render out an uncompressed .avi in Blender that might be 3-5 GB. Then maybe I have to import it into After Effects to do some touchups. After Effects saves a new .avi when I'm done (still uncompressed) and maybe I load that into Premiere to add audio or do something else. Premiere also outputs an uncompressed .avi, which I load into Virtual Dub to add fade in and fade out effects, and sometimes deinterlace the footage (if the source was a ripped .vob, not if it's Blender). Virtual dub also saves an uncompressed .avi which is ready for compression.

I've never used all of the tools above for one project so that was completely fabricated, but I do often use 3 of the 4, so there are lots of places I'm choosing not to recompress the video to save quality.

At the end I use a neat free program called SUPER to do the compression, choosing H.264 video (4032kbps), .mp3 audio (160kbps), and an .avi container, and my file sizes wind up ~10MB. SUPER is cool because it can render to just about any container with just about any codec and is hugely customizable. Movie Maker would work fine too at this stage, but last I knew it only encodes to .wma and I like having options :D

PS: Before anyone comments about "Why do you do this in Premiere when After Effects can do it" or "Why use Virtual Dub just for that, make Premiere do it" I'll repeat that I don't actually know how to use these tools. Well, OK, I know how to use Blender well enough as long as nothing has to be animated/deformed, and a chimpanzee could use Virtual Dub, but I'm talking about the Adobe tools. I've never really worked with them until just a week or so ago and I'm still at the stage of faking my way through with trial and error. Once something works I tend to do it that same way every time. ;)

If anyone has played with the theatercurtain.blend file could you explain to me how to get it to render and animation correctly? The curtains seem to be animated in some strange way. If you skip thru the frames using the up/down arrows ten frames at a time you see no animation in the wire frame. If you go forward the curtains start to move from their position zero no matter what frame your on and if you go back a frame the curtains close fully and start the animation although they flip all crazy. How do you get a good render from this?

jrl, I haven't looked at the curtain project in a long time I do remember the behavior that you're talking about.

If I'm not mistaken, it's because the curtains are a soft body simulation. With fluids and soft bodies if you want to preview the simulation you have to step through 1 frame at a time and let it recalculate. Stepping through 10 frames or moving backwards doesn't work. Even though the preview doesn't work as you'd expect they will still render fine when you render the project based on how the simulation is set up. ie: maybe it is set to start simulating the curtains at frame 1 in the project render or 20, or 100, etc.

When you're happy with how a simulation looks, but before you render the project, you usually want to "Bake" it. This calculates all of the simulation's frames so that it doesn't have to get done at render time. I think it also gets rid of the funny behavior of the preview that you're talking about because after baking it won't have to recalculate the simulation every time you jump frames.

That's probably a barely understandable explanation of what's going on, but what can I say, I barely understand this stuff :D

Well it's been quiet around here so I thought I'd share a little bit about what I've been working on for the last few days. I'm doing a custom intro 100% in After Effects based on a bunch of tutorials over at www.videocopilot.net. Much thanks goes to Andrew Kramer of the aforementioned site for sharing these amazing tutorials, and Eubank for turning me on to the place. I did my first test render of the complete ~25 second sequence this evening and minus a few glitches to be worked on it's coming together well. There's no audio in the AE project, but I'm planning on muxing that in later.

So basically, it starts out looking like a Universal intro. The earth spins in space starting over Africa and over 6 seconds we cross the Atlantic until Florida is pretty much centered. I'm thinking about adding the opening portion of the Universal audio so that people will be expecting the text to come swinging around "any second now" :D. This portion was based on a tutorial here: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/the_blue_planet/.
Coincidentally, the Earth map texture used in that tutorial is the same one we all got from Peerless Productions "way back when" to start the Universal intro. I'm thinking the Levy brothers have spent some time at Videocopilot ;)

At this point there's a glitchy "twitch" in the footage (and the audio, when I add that later) and suddenly the camera starts falling into the earth, specifically right towards Florida. The ground is zooming up towards us with the camera shaking from turbulence in the atmosphere. We break through two layers of clouds and what's that coming into view but my neighborhood, and my house! The camera's rotation levels out and the shaking subsides as we glide gently down to ground level. Again, all of this based on a tutorial here (though I should mention the tutorial runs in reverse, zooming from a house to outer space): http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/earth_zoom/

At this point, a liquidy transition starts at the outside of the screen and bleeds it's way towards the center, such that the last thing covered up is my house. It's not a bleed to black though, rather a bleed to a nice textured background. Just as the house disappears an off-angle title plate fades into view and rotates to be square with the camera. The plates says "Herndon Theaters" of course, and neat viney designs "grow" out from it while particles start flying out from behind it. As before, all of this based on a tutorial here: http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/fancy_title_plate/. At this point I'm thinking of closing with the final bits of the Universal audio to allude back to how the whole video started.

I highly recommend that anyone interested in working outside of Blender check out Videocopilot.net. There are over 70 tutorials that Andrew has posted for free and they are extremely informative. With a little creativity and some trial and error I've strung three of his short tutorials into a full custom theater intro, and learned a ton about After Effects in the process. I've attached some screenshots (there will be 6 total) to show the flavor of the intro, but if you really want to see the components in motion go watch the free tutorials!

The first 3 shots show the Earth view from space, a view of Florida mid-fall as we're passing through the first cloud bank, and a view as we level out and start gliding towards my neighborhood. In the 2nd shot the splotch in the lower left is Lake Okeechobee if you're trying to get your bearings. I realize the clouds don't look too great over the water, but you only see them for a few frames so in motion it's not noticeable. In the third shot that's not a runway on the left hand side, it's actually Interstate 95.

And now the second set of screenshots. These three show the bleeding transition, the title in mid rotation before it has developed much, and the "fully grown" title with flying particles.

In the first shot my house is dead center, in the middle of the 3 on the inside of the bend. Now you know where to aim the missiles. ;)

Again this was all done 100% in After Effects and about 90% of the work was a direct lift from the 3 Videocopilot tutorials in the first post. The other 10% took some creativity and improvising but if I can do it anyone can. After I get a final version rendered I'll do some fade in/fade out in Virtual Dub and mux in some audio but other than that it's AE all the way.

I should probably disclaim that I'm in no way affiliated with Andrew Kramer or Videocopilot.net, but Eubank turned me on to them and now I'm hooked :D

Another thumbs up for Andrew Kramer and his amazing site!

I am working on a scary type movie intro with some help from his tutorials and some books I purchased. It is only in its' infancy stage right now, but here is a brief look:

http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b96/Willise/?action=view&current=ScaryIntrotest2.flv

I work on it a little each day, so comments are certainly welcome.

Magius, I'd love to see your video when it's finished!!

Hey Magius,

I too have been busy working on another intro as well. Still working on the Terminator intro. Man these render times are killing me! All done in HD = LOOOOOONG renders...

Your intro looks like it will be awesome. I had been planning on doing an intro with the zoom to earth thing as well but you have beaten me to it.

Willise, your intro looks to be coming along nicely.

I will be doing a "scary" type intro after the Terminator one is complete. Maybe once I start we can compare notes. :)

sa91899 I know what you mean about the long renders. FOX in 1080p was brutal. Even just working in AE is frustrating because of how it jumps and stutters trying to calculate each frame when I move my time position around.

I noticed there's an FAQ on the Videocopilot site and one of the questions is what kind of computer does he record the tutorials on (because of course they're nice and smooth). The answer was a dual quad core Xeon machine (total 8 cores) with only 4 GB RAM. Obviously this stuff is CPU limited in the worst way! If only there was something like CUDA for Adobe and Blender so that they could take advantage of my space heater 8800GTX :D

I've been thinking about upgrading my processor from the e4300 (dual @ 1.8) to a Q6600 (quad @ 2.4). If everything scaled linearly (I know it won't...) that chip should be ~3.33x more powerful than mine. Not bad for ~$180. With that and my graphics card I should be able to hold out until there's a whole crazy new generation of stuff out there, I just don't know what I'd do with my leftover processor. My fiance could use an upgrade from her old P4, but that means new mobo, new RAM, new everything :rolleyes:

Hi Magius

Glad you like the Videocopilot web site, addictive isn't it :)

I'm working on a new Universal one in C4D which is looking good.

Theen> Where'd you get the Pearl and Dean fonts from..they're great!!

Welcome back Eubank and thanks again for pointing me in the right direction with Videocopilot. I still don't know jack about any of this Adobe software, but slowly I'm beginning to learn a trick or two here and there. The custom intro that I'm working on coincidentally came about because I tried making a new Universal intro in AE. I couldn't figure out how to bend text so instead I went this whole new direction ;)

sa91899, I forgot to ask how the Disney logo was coming along. I know you're working the Terminator project now and I know what it's like to have projects go hot and cold (*cough* Pixar) but I was really looking forward to some pointers on how to render a Disney logo of my own.

I'm also planning on re-doing a Lionsgate intro from scratch now that I know a little bit about how AE works. Somehow I managed to break your project file but fortunately I got a good render out of it first :D. I stumbled across a .m2ts version of the Lionsgate intro in 1080p so I'm going to see what I can fudge together on my own. It may not come out nearly as good as yours, but it should be a learning experience, and if it works it will be HD w/ 5.1 sound instead of SD & stereo.

Where'd you get the Pearl and Dean fonts from..they're great!! The towers intro is Amelia BT http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/amelia/amelia/

and Filmstrip is Berylium

http://www.1001fonts.com/font_details.html?font_id=807

Steve

Eubank,

I noticed your YouTube channel and the videos you did. Were they done in AE?

I am trying my hand at the Pixar and Dreamworks intro and I saw you did a Dreamworks type intro. What method did you use to move up into the sky? Was it a camera path?

Thanks for the info and nice work!

This is off topic but I thought I'd post that I took the plunge and bought a Q6600 this afternoon along with a new HSF. Hopefully I won't be disappointed with the rendering and editing benefits over my e4300. When I really needed juice for an overight render I would OC the e4300 from 1.8GHz to 2.4 or 2.7GHz so I want to be able to go over 3.0GHz on the quad to really reap some benefit.

It runs at 266x9 stock but I'm thinking that 400x8 (3.2 GHz!) would be a very reasonable jump for when I need the hardcore rendering power. Who knows if the new HSF lives up to expectations I may even leave it over 3GHz full-time. I will of course post more test results and render times once I get it installed and time to play with it. :D

Well I've been tinkering in AE with making my own 1080p Lionsgate intro from a Blu-ray source as I mentioned before. It's too bad AE won't take a .m2ts source file. I had to convert it to 1000 different things before I found something that AE would accept as a video file and my poor dual core machine could handle working with in AE.

Unlike sa91899 I don't understand how to make/use mattes or even what they do really, so I've been using masks instead and animating their shape to show/hide whatever it is I need. So far it's been remarkably easy. I just overlayed my own doctored background on top of the video and used a combination of 2 masks to properly cover the LIONSGATE text.

I really like this method because I was able to retain the moving clouds in the background just like sa91899 did with his matted intro. For some reason I wasn't able to do that properly using his template (probably user error :D) so I'm excited.

At the end it gets tricky because the scene is fading out to black and the doctored background is not, but I've been playing with animating the lightness and saturation of the background to compensate. I may have to experiment with yet another mask, and/or maybe an adjustment layer to really get the fade correct. It looks alright so far but you'll be able to see it's not perfect.

I think right now I've gotten everything to where it's ready for adding custom text. I'm going to fire up Blender, spit out some text, and see if I can't put together a rough video. For now, I'll go ahead and upload a preview of where I'm at. This is reencoded to H.264(528kbps)/mp3(52kbps) and 400x225 res, because I had to squeeze it under the 500k attachment limit.

Well I took a *long* time getting my text just right in Blender, but all is now finished and I'm thrilled with the result. The low res version attached just doesn't do it justice :D

The last time I did this with sa91899's template I "cheated" in Blender and just used a half-circle mesh to cover the right portions of the "E"s. The half-circle was colored identical to the background and set not to interact with specular or reflected light. While that's a handy trick that I've used many times to hide things (ie: both my Disney intros) it wasn't what I wanted to do this time around.

This time I converted my "E"s to bezier curves, subdivided a few vertices and moved the vertices to form a nice curve at the tips of the Es. I also added some lighting from both sides to get the slight orangey color that the sides of the original LIONSGATE letters had. I went with Arial Black font this time to get nice thick letters similar to the originals, and I rendered each line of text as its own 1920x1080 bitmap in Blender. By scaling down the huge text in AE it had the same effect as anti-aliasing it and got rid of almost all the jaggies around the letters. Most of the above is hard to pick out in the low res attachment which is why I mention it.

The only thing I might still work on is the appearance of the text after the door opens. Right now I'm just using opacity keys for both text lines, but I may way to do something more clever with a mask or adjustment layer if I can think of a better looking way.

Thanks again to sa91899 for your original work on this intro, and to Eubanks for pointing me to where I could learn more about AE. Unfortunately tonight wraps up my 10-day vacation from work so these kind of projects will become a weekend only activity again.

Wow Magius!

That looks great! much better than mine by a long shot...

Of course with my bulb being out of commision for the last 9 months, I hadn't had a chance to see my new intros on the big screen, so when I recently got the bulb replaced I watched the new intros and were less than impressed by them. So I am in the process of redoing them all in HD 1080. Yours looks great and I hope mine turns out at least half as good as yours did.

I will take another stab at the Disney intro but I can tell you, I don't have a HD version of this. I think it's a letterboxed 720 X 480 version if I'm not mistaken. If anyone knows where I can get a HD version, let me know so I can pick it up. I don't have Bluray though... :(

I had started my Terminator intro as just a 45 second intro type thing but now has somehow grown into a 5 minute short movie... Not really sure how that happened but I am in the process of storyboarding. So, this might take a bit longer than I expected.

I have always enjoyed the Terminator franchise and it's really nice to actually be able to do a short fan film. Never thought I would but kinda fun even if no one else enjoys it.

sa91899 thank you for the compliments. I was thrilled with how this latest intro turned out. I don't think that an intro will necessarily look bad though just because it's in 480p. My Jerry Bruckheimer and MGM intros were both ripped from DVDs I own (thus in 480i until I had Vdub deinterlace them) and I think they look good enough for the hour or so each I spent on them. Your original Lionsgate one looked good, I just wasn't happy with my butchered version of it after I ran roughshod all over your project template :D

For the record, I don't have Bluray either but I stumbled onto a site called www.demo-world.eu thanks to another thread on this very forum. They have a huge collection of Dolby/DTS/THX trailers, and also a smaller collection of producer/distributor trailers. A few of these are .m2ts in 1080p/24 ripped from Bluray, and Lionsgate just happened to be one of them. Unfortunately they don't have Disney, but I've already ripped the DVD version from my copy of PotC in hopes that some day you'll post instructions ;)

I may even just give the Disney one a shot on my own now that I know a tiny bit more about AE. The only thing that really scares me is the text. It's just such nice text with the reflective look and the way it fades in with the sparkles. It took me so long in Blender to be happy with the Lionsgate text, that I can't imagine putting myself through creating Disney text.

There's another 1-2 projects I have to keep on the back burner as well due to being back at work now, so who knows what I'll get around to. Also, now that people know where I got my Lionsgate source file, if anyone wants some tips, help, or even my project files to help make one of your own I'd be happy to assist. Let me know if there's interest and I'll see what I can put together.

Even just working in AE is frustrating because of how it jumps and stutters trying to calculate each frame when I move my time position around.
To get around the preview problem I turned off OpenGL in the Preview pref screen. You can then zip around in the timeline without problem. I don't think this causes other problems.

Thanks for the suggestion jrl. Unfortunately I tried disabling OpenGL acceleration in the preview preferences and it didn't make a difference one way or another. I don't have any problem working in AE with normal 720x480 projects, but on the 1920x1080 projects it's just unbelievably bogged down.

I guess I can understand that if you have multiple videos or images of that high resolution there must be a lot of calculations going on for how to mix and blend them per your project/effect settings. Hopefully my new quad core will make a huge dent in this problem once it gets here.

I've already ripped the DVD version from my copy of PotC in hopes that some day you'll post instructions ;)

Wow...

Ok Magius, you've really layed the guilt on me. So much so that I have spent the last 2 days getting this sparkle thing done. It doesn't look the greatest but it will suffice.

Newest Disney Intro (http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=NewestDisneyIntro.flv)

Sorry for the small size... not sure why it did that... If you click on full size you can see it a little better. Anyone can help me figure out the size thing please let me know, cause I sure don't want it to render that small for the final video. I used Sony Vegas 6 for this sample...

I have uploaded the After Effects project files to w84no1, and have included a short tutorial with the zip. It's actually very easy to customize this project.

MAN! Those sparkles kicked my butt, hope that's the hardest thing I'll ever have to do with AE.... HA!

Well, as usual, if you have questions or comments let me know...

Steve

I too have been waiting for instructions on how to edit the new Disney Intro in AE (even found a guy on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN2UQm3JAMg) that provides a wmv version of the intro). He provides download links to snag the flv and wmv formats (plus a pretty slick one for Disneynature).

Wow...

Ok Magius, you've really layed the guilt on me. So much so that I have spent the last 2 days getting this sparkle thing done. It doesn't look the greatest but it will suffice.

Newest Disney Intro (http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=NewestDisneyIntro.flv)

Sorry for the small size... not sure why it did that... If you click on full size you can see it a little better. Anyone can help me figure out the size thing please let me know, cause I sure don't want it to render that small for the final video. I used Sony Vegas 6 for this sample...

I have uploaded the After Effects project files to w84no1, and have included a short tutorial with the zip. It's actually very easy to customize this project.

MAN! Those sparkles kicked my butt, hope that's the hardest thing I'll ever have to do with AE.... HA!

Well, as usual, if you have questions or comments let me know...

Steve


Steve,

I think I may be able to fix the file for you and increase the image. Would you mind if I receive a copy of the AE file? I'll PM you

BTW, I think it looks just great!!!

Mangius!

How did you do that Lionsgate intro thing?
If it was with blender, could you send the .blend file?

Hey guys, it might be a few days before w84no1 has the zip up on his site, so in the mean time, I will try to post it here...

Ugh... it's 527KB which is over the limit for here...

Let me try to shrink it some more....

nope that didn't work either...

Even at the most compression it still is 527KB

Let me do some checking around a bit and see if I can get it smaller

Ok,

Let's see how this works...

http://www.mediafire.com/?bndjemail1h

Yeah, I was able to get it to download

Ok,

Let's see how this works...

http://www.mediafire.com/?bndjemail1h

Awesome. Got the download and will try this out later tonight. So excited!! :cool:

Wow...
Ok Magius, you've really layed the guilt on me. So much so that I have spent the last 2 days getting this sparkle thing done. It doesn't look the greatest but it will suffice.

Wow! That looks very nice from the little preview and I was able to download your project files as well. I didn't mean to lay the guilt on you, but you sure planned that well releasing the stuff today on my birthday. Thanks! :D

Reading the instructions I can't believe how simple you managed to make this for us to customize. I never would have dreamed it would be as easy as typing text into Photoshop, and I was dreading creating text in Blender or Bryce (plus I don't ahve Bryce...).

I won't be able to convert my ripped .vob to an AE usable file and try the composition tonight but I can't wait to give it a shot this weekend. Thank you again for taking time away from the Terminator to release this great project file.

Wow...
How did you do that Lionsgate intro thing? If it was with blender, could you send the .blend file?
I made my text in Blender, and I'd be more than happy to share that file so that you could render your own text for compositing. The actual project was done in AE, and I can share that file as well but you have to provide your own Lionsgate trailer. I used the one from Demoworld that I linked above so no big deal getting one. The only other requirement is Photoshop or a paint program with a .psd plugin so that you can take the image rendered in Blender and give it a transparent background. I can probably put together some basic instructions this weekend and upload them with the project files. Hopefully that will help.

By the way the Q6600 that I bought myself for my birthday arrived tonight. I've got to get it installed this weekend as well and run some tests comparing it's performance to my e4300. So much to do, so little time... :rolleyes:

I made my text in Blender, and I'd be more than happy to share that file so that you could render your own text for compositing. The actual project was done in AE, and I can share that file as well but you have to provide your own Lionsgate trailer. I used the one from Demoworld that I linked above so no big deal getting one. The only other requirement is Photoshop or a paint program with a .psd plugin so that you can take the image rendered in Blender and give it a transparent background. I can probably put together some basic instructions this weekend and upload them with the project files. Hopefully that will help.

I would love to have the file as well, if you don't mind. I have done work in Blender before but I am more comfortable with the Adobe products.

Thanks in advance!!!

Newest Disney Intro (http://s40.photobucket.com/albums/e208/sa91899/?action=view&current=NewestDisneyIntro.flv)

Sorry for the small size... not sure why it did that... If you click on full size you can see it a little better. Anyone can help me figure out the size thing please let me know, cause I sure don't want it to render that small for the final video. I used Sony Vegas 6 for this sample...

Steve,

I fixed the AE file you were working on to give the correct resolution. I had to compress it to upload it, so the quality is not as great as the file I have, but you'll get the idea.

http://s17.photobucket.com/albums/b96/Willise/?action=view&current=Sequence01-1.flv

If you haven't got it to work right yet, let me know and I'll tell you what I did.

I've PM'd you with a question I have about the project as well.

Again, great job!

Magius,

Well... Happy Birthday!!

Yeah, compared to the Lionsgate intro, this one wasn't too bad. I tried my best to make it as easy for everyone as I could. The tutorial for the other one was complex. So I was glad this one was just a few lines. Hope yours turns out well.

Let us see what you have when you are done!

Willise,

Looks good.

I see you tweaked it a bit to make it more of your own. Nice work. You may want to work with the original a bit more to fix Tinkerbell but other than that, It looks great.

Sure I'd like to know what you did to get the resolution right. I THINK the original of mine was 720 X 480 but as an afterthought, I changed the comp to 1920 X 1080. Maybe that was part of the problem.

Thanks for helping fix it whatever you did!

Well... It's back to Terminator land for me... But don't worry...

I'll be back :D

Wow! That looks very nice from the little preview and I was able to download your project files as well. I didn't mean to lay the guilt on you, but you sure planned that well releasing the stuff today on my birthday. Thanks! :D

Reading the instructions I can't believe how simple you managed to make this for us to customize. I never would have dreamed it would be as easy as typing text into Photoshop, and I was dreading creating text in Blender or Bryce (plus I don't ahve Bryce...).

I won't be able to convert my ripped .vob to an AE usable file and try the composition tonight but I can't wait to give it a shot this weekend. Thank you again for taking time away from the Terminator to release this great project file.


I made my text in Blender, and I'd be more than happy to share that file so that you could render your own text for compositing. The actual project was done in AE, and I can share that file as well but you have to provide your own Lionsgate trailer. I used the one from Demoworld that I linked above so no big deal getting one. The only other requirement is Photoshop or a paint program with a .psd plugin so that you can take the image rendered in Blender and give it a transparent background. I can probably put together some basic instructions this weekend and upload them with the project files. Hopefully that will help.

By the way the Q6600 that I bought myself for my birthday arrived tonight. I've got to get it installed this weekend as well and run some tests comparing it's performance to my e4300. So much to do, so little time... :rolleyes:


Thx man! I hope i can figure out how to make it look as bad as yours. After school!

Steve,

I didn't rip the VOB directly from a DVD, I used the DemoWorld site and downloaded it from there. It was a small resolution file (320x240 I think). I needed to convert it into a file that AE would recognize, so I used Xilisoft converter and converted it to an HD 1920x1080 quicktime file. Then I changed the PSD file to 1920x1080 (make sure to unchech the constant parameter). I then imported both files to your projects and rendered it out as 1920x1080 quicktime MOV photo JPEG file.

If you need more of an explanation, just let me know!

In the meantime, I may have a couple of questions for you about the time remap feature of AE. I've never used that before.

BTW I am really looking forward to seeing your Terminator file!

Sean

Thanks for the explenation Willise.

I'll have to take a look at the file to see what I can do to fix those issues and then maybe re-send it to w84no1 to host.

Sure, I'll answer any questions I can on AE. I'm not very good at it and am a newbie like alot of others, but if I know the answer I'll share.

Yeah, the Terminator project is really starting to take shape. The only problem is the render times.... They are killing me. For example, I'm rendering a 4 second shot right now and it will take 13 hours to complete. 13 hours for 4 seconds!!!

If I am going to do this very much more, I think I need to upgrade my pc! Really looking forward to hearing how the new pc helps Magius on his render times...

An upgrade may just be in my future.

Got the video rendered and it turned out awesome...almost. Its probably cuz I'm using it in a defferent aspect ratio or a different length of video (or who knows) but the "Walt Disney" text doesn't disappear at the bottom for me and the text that I used from Photoshop fades in overtop.

Any ideas on how to get the Disney text to not show up (or a better place to get that intro where this won't be an issue)?

Thanks in advance (and a GREAT job on this intro...absolutely LOVE it)

Well it's been a heck of a frustrating night but all's well that ends well I guess. :rolleyes:

When I got home from work my fiance was elbows deep putting together her new computer, and she wanted my processor. Thus began a laundry list of issues with me trying to get my computer upgraded to the quad:
1.) My new cooler wouldn't clear my NB heat sink. I had to remove it and bend part of the NB HS out of the way.
2.) In removing the NB HS from the mobo to bend it, one of the springs holding it's retention pin went flying across the room. That took about a half hour to find...
3.) After getting everything finally all put together I found myself holding the "P4" CPU power connector, which of course plugs in near the CPU socket... AKA under the ginormous cooler I just installed. Start over :mad:
etc. etc. etc.

In any case, the quad is finally installed and miraculously it works. I was almost sure I'd damaged my mobo or NB with all the scraping and banging and pushing and bending...

I've got it running stable at 350x9 (3.15GHz) but that's as much as it seems to want to take. That makes my memory only run 700MHz, but it wouldn't even boot at 400x8 (3.2GHz) or 375x9 (3.375GHz) so go figure. Idle temps are great even while overclocked, with 2 cores ~36C and the other 2 ~41C. Those are CoreTemp/Speedfan values too, not the junk software that reads 15C too low :rolleyes: Under full load the highest I could get it was ~48 and ~55 respectively. My old dual core e4300 at stock speed (1.8GHz) and with stock cooler would idle ~51C and go over 60C at full load so this new cooler is doing a crazy good job, and for only $35 :D

Well enough with the technical stuff, I know you guys want to see what kind of rendering improvements I got. If you look back to post #389 you'll see that I was testing a 1080p render of frame 461 of the FOX intro with X&Y parts set to 4. Here are those results again plus the quad tests for the optimized build of Blender 2.46 (since vanilla 2.42a doesn't allow >2 threads). Threads was set to 2 for the duals and 4 for the quads, obviously.

My Dual at stock 1.8 GHz w/ 800MHz RAM got 1:34.32
My Dual overclocked 33.3% to 2.4 GHz w/ 800 MHz RAM got 1:11.81, ~24% improvement

My Quad at stock 2.4 GHz w/ 800 MHz RAM got 31.18 (Not just 200% of a dual, but 230%...? hmm...)
My Quad overclocked 31.25% to 3.15 GHz w/ 700 MHz RAM got 24.26, ~22% improvement

Remember nothing about this PC changed except the processor (and cooler) so there are no other variables affecting these tests. These quads are monsters :D Don't ask how the Quad at 2.4 is actually more than twice as fast as the dual at the same speed (greater than linear scaling, WTH???). I'm not really sure except that maybe with more workers running there's less dead time between pieces when a core is grabbing a new piece to work on? Obviously rendering is a task that is greatly benefited by multiple threads, but I have no real explanation for this. It is what it is and I ran the test twice.

Another thing that's interesting is that overclocking each chip showed about the same amount of return per clock, so there's more performance to be extracted here with faster quads or *drool* octals.

And a third thing that is interesting is this didn't do jack to help me move around a 1080p AE project timeline without stuttering. Not one tiny bit of improvement that I can notice, even with OpenGL off as previously suggested. I'm thinking it must be my hard drive access time or something... maybe it's time to go for RAID-0...

Oh well I've rambled on enough for now. Sorry if I bored everybody. This weekend I'll be a bit busy as we're going back to Disney for my birthday, but I'll get some files posted for the Lionsgate intro and I still can't wait to render sa91899's Disney project.

Got the video rendered and it turned out awesome...almost. Its probably cuz I'm using it in a defferent aspect ratio or a different length of video (or who knows) but the "Walt Disney" text doesn't disappear at the bottom for me and the text that I used from Photoshop fades in overtop.

Any ideas on how to get the Disney text to not show up (or a better place to get that intro where this won't be an issue)?

Thanks in advance (and a GREAT job on this intro...absolutely LOVE it)

Make sure that you turn off the layer that the original movie is on. That layer is used for the audio, more than anything else. Just make sure the "little eye" is turned off in that layer and it should work. I think!:)

Oh well I've rambled on enough for now. Sorry if I bored everybody. This weekend I'll be a bit busy as we're going back to Disney for my birthday, but I'll get some files posted for the Lionsgate intro and I still can't wait to render sa91899's Disney project.

Have fun at Disney!!! We just came back from our annual trip only this time there were 18 of us in a single rental mansion! LOL

Other than 6 days of TS Fay it was great!:D

Happy Birthday

Make sure that you turn off the layer that the original movie is on. That layer is used for the audio, more than anything else. Just make sure the "little eye" is turned off in that layer and it should work. I think!:)

Yeah, that bottom layer is turned off. Not sure if the timing for the final 5sec of the clip is off the mark for my video.

UPDATE: Got it figured out. Just had to correct the Time Remap on layer 4 (had to drop mine down to 0:00:23:27 for the Disney Intro I'm using). But now its working!!! Just gonna adjust the height of my text (its a little high in comparison to the original Disney text) and then I can render. Thank you SO MUCH for this awesome addition!!!!

DevilDog,

The original intro you use should be approx. 33 seconds long.

If that's not the issue, then I would hide all layers and then bring in one at a time to see which layer is the offending one. Once you narrow that down, I think you will find that the issue is just as you said. The timing may be off for the last 5 secs of the video. With a little bit of tweaking you should be able to get it working correctly.

To give you a leg up on this, what you want to do is actually have the video pause just before the original Disney tewxt comes in. That's why the video is split into 2 sections. The second one is the time-remapped section to keep it paused. Which brings up another possibility. Make sure that you are not importing your video in but rather right clicking on the missing video and choosing "replace". If the video is the same length it all should work out nicely. If it isn't then it should just take a little tweaking to get it to where it needs to be.

Any other issues let us know and we'll try to help you out. :)

On another note,

That 4 second clip actually took 15 hours to render! Youch!!

With 5 more 4 second clips to go, I decided it was time to figure out how to set up my other pc's as a render farm. and about 30 mins later I was rendering on all 3 pc's... The same 4 second clip only took 5 hours, so much more managable time frame for sure. This is all in 3D Max by the way. Not even to the AE stage yet... But I have that set up on a render farm as well now too, so putting the final comp together in AE shouldn't be too bad...

Now if only all of them were Quad's like Magius has!

Yeah, it was a timing issue. So I had to tweak a few things. Got it figured out and posted 4 different versions of the intro to the link posted in my sig.

Technically its just two variations (one for each intro I plan on needing in the future). One is the base intro, and the other is just one I had fun with doing the original intro, having it run in reverse, then running the custom intro.

Thanks again as this is probably one of my favs!!!

Sure, no problem. Glad you got it worked out.

Sean,
Quick question. Not very good with AE (or Blender for that matter!) but can muddle thru usually... Did you make any changes to the Pixie Dust when you made your files 1920x1080.... Everything looks fine, but the dust is now so small, it doesn't really work to reveal the name.. Unless I have done something wrong which is possible!

Sean,
Quick question. Not very good with AE (or Blender for that matter!) but can muddle thru usually... Did you make any changes to the Pixie Dust when you made your files 1920x1080.... Everything looks fine, but the dust is now so small, it doesn't really work to reveal the name.. Unless I have done something wrong which is possible!

I think the problem there is that I re rendered the photoshop name into 1920x1080 which caused it to increase quite a bit. I did not increase the pixie dust as it made no difference is the solution to the immediate problem ie the small viewing area.

I haven't tried it, but I think if you increase the pixie dust file in size, it will look like it is supposed to. You might try increasing the scale and changing the blending mode to color burn. As well you may have to change teh position to compensate for the increased size. I am at work right now and can't test it unfortunately.

I hope I explained that right.:) Let me know if it didn't answer your question.

Alright I'm back from a great day yesterday spent at Disney's Hollywood Studios and Epcot, and I just polished off the newest Disney intro.

sa91899, I hope you don't feel slighted but I just used your text in the .psd file and made the rest of the intro from scratch. In your project the time remapping (pausing) was leaving Tinkerbell's arc unfinished, as you can see in willise's demo video, so I preferred another solution rather than tweaking the remap. I also wanted to redo my own particle effect. I decided it'd be easier to just start with my own clean file and do it my way because I'm stubborn :D. I appreciate all the work you put into the original project, I never could have done it without your text! (trust me, I tried before you released your project...;))

I posted a demo file showing how mine came out. It's a little hard to see the particles due to the low bitrate compression, but I was trying to remake them as similarly to the original as I could.

I'll also be posting something a little later for my Lionsgate intro since a few people have asked. I have to see what files I can round up and then type a few short instructions such as what's missing from the project, how to get it, and how to put it all together. I haven't looked at it yet so I'm not sure how long it will take me, but it's coming.

One last thing: I decided it was time to figure out how to set up my other pc's as a render farm. and about 30 mins later I was rendering on all 3 pc's...Not even to the AE stage yet... But I have that set up on a render farm as well now too
How in the world do you do this?! Was there a site online that guided you? I would love to be able to do this as even with my new Quad, I have a dual core HTPC in my living room and I just gave my old dual CPU to my fiance, so those 3 PC's would have 8 cores available. Any help in making that happen would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

OK I have the Lionsgate files all bundled up with instructions. Unfortunately it's a 1.72MB .zip so I can't post it here.

If w84no1 would be kind enough to host it I'll send it to him for his site, I just forgot his email address :o.

sa91899, I hope you don't feel slighted but I just used your text in the .psd file and made the rest of the intro from scratch. In your project the time remapping (pausing) was leaving Tinkerbell's arc unfinished, as you can see in willise's demo video, so I preferred another solution rather than tweaking the remap. I appreciate all the work you put into the original project, I never could have done it without your text! (trust me, I tried before you released your project...;))

I'll also be posting something a little later for my Lionsgate intro since a few people have asked.

One last thing:
How in the world do you do this?! Was there a site online that guided you? I would love to be able to do this as even with my new Quad, I have a dual core HTPC in my living room and I just gave my old dual CPU to my fiance, so those 3 PC's would have 8 cores available. Any help in making that happen would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Magius,

No, I don't feel slighted at all. This has always been a group effort here and I have always benefited from others help along the way.

I'm not sure why willise's pauses so far up. Mine does pause, but only down towards the bottom of the castle. Either way, I see that yours does not even stop there so I also would like to use that one as well. Will be looking forward to the posted files. I like your Lionsgate as well, so will probably use that one too. ;)

As far as the renderfarm goes, there IS a website that can guide you thru this. First things first, you will need AE on all 3 of your pc's. I'll leave you to follow the website instructions on your own but is VERY simple if you know how to set up a network which, if you have 3 PC's you already must have a network setup, so all it will take is some tweaks.

The website is:

http://www.creativemac.com/2002/07_jul/tutorials/aerenderfarm020730.htm

The instructions are for a MAC but it's basically the same setup for PC's as well.

Hope it helps.

Steve

I was able to change the Tinkerbell flight distance to the very end by changing the time remapping and using a short but gradual opacity fade. It now looks very much like the original. The pixie dust does have to be adjusted a little as well in order to give the effect and take your eyes off of tinkerbell's flight. as SA91899 pointed out.

Sean,
Thanks! After fooling around I was able to adjust everything and extend the right way! Thanks again!
Shawn

I actually have a link for a video tut on multi machine rendering for pc. Your suppose to be able to setup AE with just a special render engine install also.
Network rendering
· Divide each render - and the time it requires - over networked machines using a special Render Engine version of After Effects, with no limit on the permitted number of computers. See the product license agreement for details. (Professional edition only.)

http://rhys-works.com/tutorials/multi-machine/

Thanks for the tip on the render farm sa91899. Also, in regards to I'm not sure why willise's pauses so far up. Mine does pause, but only down towards the bottom of the castle. Either way, I see that yours does not even stop there so I also would like to use that one as well. here's my secret:

As I've alluded to in the past, once I figure out one way to do something I tend to do it the same way every time. In this case, I covered the bottom of the scene (basically from the horizon down) with a screen shot of the same footage at the frame before the Walt Disney text showed up. It's effectively the same as your "pausing" approach but only for what's covered by the screen shot, and because nothing in the bottom of the video is moving at that point you can't even tell. I've done this before, and even if there is gentle movement you can usually scale/reposition the screen shot as the footage plays under it to hide whatever it is that you're hiding.

What's really cool though, is that your technique got me thinking and I'm sure I could combine your time remap "pause" with a mask to get the exact same effect as my screen shot, without the potential quality loss or the hassle of having to line up the screen shot "just right" over the video.

As you've said this has always been a collaborative effort and yet again the fact that your method differed from mine has led me to reevaluate my techniques. The mask + remap approach should be very easy and yield better results than either of our original approaches, so I'm going to have to give that a try before posting my project. :D

I'm also going to tweak with my particle field a little bit. I really like how it turned out, but I think I want them just a tad more noticeable. I'll probably add a glow or make them just slightly larger/brighter, even if its slightly less like the original. Regarding my particles, they're created with the CC Particle World plugin so you'll need an actual retail version of AE Pro with the 3rd party plugins CD to take advantage of that effect.

Magius,

Great idea, maybe you can share with us when you get everything worked out on the new Disney intro. Everything sounds really good.

Unfortunately, our electric went out on Sunday and is not scheduled to be back on until either Friday or Sunday... EEEE GAAADS!

I didn't even think that was possible.... It's all due to Ike... The bum!!

Anyway, I am at my borther-in-laws using his pc right now so once I get electricity back I'll be back on here posting. Magius, maybe you'll have the Disney intro worked out by then...

Be back soon...

Magius,

Would it be possible to send me the Lionsgate file? I haven't seen it posted on Woody's site, but I would love to see how it was built.

Thanks!!

sa91899 I'm sorry to hear about your bad luck with Ike. I was complaining about 20+'' of rain from Fay, but that Ike was a monster. I hope you and your family and friends are all doing alright without any major damages.

On a lighter note I tested the combination of Time Remap and masking last night and it works great. I can't say it looks any better or worse than my screenshot method (at least not on 480p material), but it's much easier to do. On a 1080p project for sure this is a much better method than screenshotting as it's hard to get the image big enough on your screen to screenshot it in the first place. And I have a 24'' widescreen! :D

I also spent some time tweaking my particles and I personally like them a little better now, but I think that's all personal taste anyway. I honestly didn't like Disney's original particles as it just seemed there were too many and it was cluttered.

Magius,

Would it be possible to send me the Lionsgate file? I haven't seen it posted on Woody's site, but I would love to see how it was built.

Thanks!!

I am getting ready to post some files to my site in few hours.

Hey guys... Back in business. 4 days without power... geez what a week so far! Everyone is fine and we are just glad that we are back into the 21st century...

Anyway looking forward to having Magius's lionsgate file up on w84no1's site!

I have uploaded all the latest files that I have recieved.

http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp

Hi w84no1!

It seems that your website is out of service or something. It maybe just a downtime for your host but if isn't, could you send me the liongate zip?


EDIT: Now its working, no problems! Thx for uploading it!

Guys, is there any chance that the AE files could be made compatable with AE v7? Steve

Hey! Have i missted something? At woody family cinema, there is a cool intro of the universial intro, BUT! Its a deathstar on it! That's cool! I also found the same movie on youtube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UGoG3JBKk&feature=related

So if some1 here could write were to get thepicture/pictures for this deathstar and how you made the form of the star!

If some1 knows a guide (plz tell me were i can find it) or if someone please could write a guide! Thank you very much!

Here's the blend file for the Death Star intro. I have also included a custom MP3 file I created that has the Stormtrooper March and a lightsaber fx instead of the Universal mp3 file (had to do the files separately as they were too large to do in a single zip).

Its pretty down and dirty if you've edited other blender files for changing the text to what you want it to say. I've got two different versions of this intro on my site (listed in the link for my sig).

Thx man! Your awesome!

EDIT: Its done now. Thx for uploading it! I also had to change the animation of the text because it did'nt go around the globe just stod still and kept spinning in a cirkle like the globe. But finally i made it. I also curved the text! =) Thx again!

Hey all,

Sorry I've been away on a shoot.
Nearly all are done in either C4D or After Effects. AE is great but limited for 3d stuff.
C4D is where most of my stuff is created from now, although Zaxwerks Pro Animator is great for 3D text, simple to use and integrates well in AE.
I've got a few C4D files in anyone wants them?
Great forum folks!

Eubank,

Yep, I'd like to take a look at those files. :)

I'd love to see those files as well, Eubank!

One other word about the latest Disney intro. I went ahead and made an AE project file for a 1080p version of this intro, even though none of us seem to have one. If anyone stumbles across one (or if Demoworld ever posts one for example) it's just an easy footage->replace to render a higher quality version. I already took care of the time remap + mask effect and resizing the custom text and particles.

In the meantime, I used Virtual Dub to manipulate the 480i .vob file into a 1080p version for use with this project and rendered a 1080p video in AE. I won't lie to you and say it looks great, but it looks much much better than just rendering the 480p original in AE and letting your display scale it.

I can't remember the exact combination or order of filters that I applied, but I know I did a blend deinterlace, a pretty strong sharpen filter to "fake" some extra resolution, an unsharp mask to give it a little more contrast and a lanczos3 resize to 1080p. The sharpness and contrast enhancing values took a lot of tweaking to get "just right" and not overdone, but I'm happy with the results until someone finds a better source video.

Magius, Do you have yours available for download anywhere yet?

I was just wondering the same thing...

Magius, Do you have yours available for download anywhere yet?

He is sending the files to me. As soon as I get them I will post back with a link

Sweet! Will be patiently waiting for those files... :)

Well I just uploaded the 1080p Lionsgate files to w84no1. I'll throw together my redone version of sa91899's Disney project shortly and see if there's anything else to scrounge up between now and the weekend. Sorry but I've been really busy lately and now that the network TV seasons have started I'm trying to catch a show now and then too :D.

As far as what is included in the Lionsgate .zip besides the AE project file:
1.) There's a background .bmp just like the one in sa91899's original project, except that mine is in 1080 res and I made it myself in Paint with just a dash of Photoshop.
2.) There's a .blend file for rendering your own custom text. The necessary font is packaged right into the .blend.
3.) There's a set of hastily thrown together instructions. I sincerely hope they're enough to convey the process, but if there are any questions feel free to ask.

I'm really proud of this particular intro as I loved both the challenge of pulling it off as well as how well (IMHO) it turned out. Hopefully you guys will enjoy it, and if anyone thinks they can add to or improve it please let me know. I bet someone with more talent in Blender than I could improve the look of the text, but I spent a long time on it and I'm happy enough with how it came out. Good luck and happy rendering!

The file is now on my site.

Sweet thanks Guys!!

Will check it out over the next few days

you guys know the paramount intro? Do you know any source who describes how you do your own, or do you know how to do it. If you got a blender file, plz post it! thx! =)


EDIT: to w84no1, The clapboard animation that is on your site is very cool, but when i animate it, it says something about no directory. If some1 please could help me with this, i would be very greatful! thx very very much! =)

The clapboard animation that is on your site is very cool, but when i animate it, it says something about no directory. If some1 please could help me with this, i would be very greatful! thx very very much! =)

I believe the issue you're talking about is because the blender file has an output directory. Having not used that file in sometime (and not having is available to reference right now) I can't say for certain but it should be towards the left of the screen that you render the animation. There should be a button you can use to specify the name/location of the rendered output.

I'm sure someone could describe that a WHOLE lot better than I just did, though.

After sa91899 turned me on to After Effects I had looked at doing a Paramount intro. I wasn't going to do their newest one though where the text flies by, but rather the one where the stars fly in and curve up around the mountain and then the text just fades in inside the semi-circle of stars.

It wouldn't be that hard to do in AE as covering the PARAMOUNT text is easy, and fading in your own with an Opacity key is even easier, but unfortunately that particular intro is pretty old so there wouldn't be a source for a high-res version. I'm also not sure I own any DVDs that would have that old version of the intro, but admittedly I never looked.

In any case, the newer Paramount intro looks much cooler, but it would also be much harder to make one customized. I do believe there was a high-def trailer at DemoWorld if anyone wanted to give it a go, but I decided long ago not to bother. It's probably well beyond my skill set.

Well I put together my version of the newest Disney intro for you all. Lucky for you it *just* squeezes in under the 500K limit.

The attached .zip includes a 480p version of the project as well as a 1080p version. Like always it's up to you to get the proper source footage, and unfortunately none of us so far have found a 1080p source. I'd love to hear from someone though if they own a BD-ROM and can rip an .m2ts to give this a whirl. Believe it or not I checked Newegg to see what a BD-ROM costs nowadays to see if it would be worth netflixing PotC... but unfortunately it just wasn't worth it in my opinion. :D

I'll repeat that my intent with this was to fix the pause in Tinkerbell's arc in sa91899's original project, so remember to thank him for making this available in the first place. I also completely redid the particle field which some people may like and others not. Read the included instructions and let me know if you have any trouble with anything. Thanks!

Well I put together my version of the newest Disney intro for you all. Lucky for you it *just* squeezes in under the 500K limit.

The attached .zip includes a 480p version of the project as well as a 1080p version. Like always it's up to you to get the proper source footage, and unfortunately none of us so far have found a 1080p source. I'd love to hear from someone though if they own a BD-ROM and can rip an .m2ts to give this a whirl. Believe it or not I checked Newegg to see what a BD-ROM costs nowadays to see if it would be worth netflixing PotC... but unfortunately it just wasn't worth it in my opinion. :D

I'll repeat that my intent with this was to fix the pause in Tinkerbell's arc in sa91899's original project, so remember to thank him for making this available in the first place. I also completely redid the particle field which some people may like and others not. Read the included instructions and let me know if you have any trouble with anything. Thanks!


I have a Blu-ray drive, maybe I will add a Disney Blu-ray disc to my queue. Can't make any promises though, my media center machine in 10-20 pieces as I rebuild it.

I believe the issue you're talking about is because the blender file has an output directory. Having not used that file in sometime (and not having is available to reference right now) I can't say for certain but it should be towards the left of the screen that you render the animation. There should be a button you can use to specify the name/location of the rendered output.

I'm sure someone could describe that a WHOLE lot better than I just did, though.


Thx anyway! I hope I can fix it!
EDIT: YES! I did it, finally, thx, you guys maybe think i'm stupied but because I only have studied english for like 4 years, I didn't have a clue what a directory was! Thank You!

After sa91899 turned me on to After Effects I had looked at doing a Paramount intro. I wasn't going to do their newest one though where the text flies by, but rather the one where the stars fly in and curve up around the mountain and then the text just fades in inside the semi-circle of stars.

It wouldn't be that hard to do in AE as covering the PARAMOUNT text is easy, and fading in your own with an Opacity key is even easier, but unfortunately that particular intro is pretty old so there wouldn't be a source for a high-res version. I'm also not sure I own any DVDs that would have that old version of the intro, but admittedly I never looked.

In any case, the newer Paramount intro looks much cooler, but it would also be much harder to make one customized. I do believe there was a high-def trailer at DemoWorld if anyone wanted to give it a go, but I decided long ago not to bother. It's probably well beyond my skill set.

Okay, I really want the intro when the stars fly and curves around the mountain but if that is to hard to make i'll just have to stand by the facts that i ain't gonna get it. And i dont have AE, i'm just going with blender, and that makes the impossible even more impossible. :p

Weel hope some1, sometime will figure out how to make it to blender! :)

I have a friend who has Adobe After effects so I saved the disney file from W84no1 site.
Took it over there and tried to create a custom one. I changed the text with photoshop with no problems. But the file is looking for newest disney intro.avi. I then decided to look at the pdf instructions which referenced the file. Question is this, where can I download that avi file to complete the project.
Thanks,
Wimovie

wimovie,
From the sounds of it you're using sa91899's project file and .pdf instructions. The reason you're missing that .avi file is because you have to create it yourself.

Unlike the original Blender projects where people have done their best to emulate a studio intro from scratch in a 3D environment, the AE projects start with the original studio footage and alter it (ie: covering up text and writing over it).

It would of course be against copyright law to provide you the original footage, so the way around it is to provide you a project file and let you import your own into the project. Thus, you have to own a DVD with the original source footage for these After Effects projects to work.

As for recommendations of where to get it, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and Bridge to Terabithia both contain this particular intro. You have to first rip the .vob from the DVD with something like DVD Decryptor and then encode it to .avi with something like Virtual Dub MPEG2 or SUPER. Many times the intro is really just the first 20 seconds of the first chapter on the DVD, so you have to cut it to length too. Really any ripping/encoding tools of your choice will work and then you're ready to import into a project like sa91899's. I hope that helped. Good luck!

Well I started a brand new studio intro project in AE today and I thought I'd post some cryptic shots to see if anyone can figure out what I'm working on. Hopefully this first clue will be hard enough, and I'll post some progressively easier ones every couple of days until someone can figure it out (or until it's apparent that nobody cares ;))

If anyone does figure it out, I don't want to get your hopes up by stating that this project will ever be customizable with your own text. So far it has been very difficult and even though I have a few ideas on how to make it customizable, the #1 priority will be to just get it to work in the first place. I'm really challenging myself and my 3 weeks or so of experience tinkering with AE, so we'll have to see what develops as it comes along.

Feel free to start guessing and whoever gets it right gets... well, probably nothing :D.

wimovie,
From the sounds of it you're using sa91899's project file and .pdf instructions. The reason you're missing that .avi file is because you have to create it yourself.

Unlike the original Blender projects where people have done their best to emulate a studio intro from scratch in a 3D environment, the AE projects start with the original studio footage and alter it (ie: covering up text and writing over it).

It would of course be against copyright law to provide you the original footage, so the way around it is to provide you a project file and let you import your own into the project. Thus, you have to own a DVD with the original source footage for these After Effects projects to work.

As for recommendations of where to get it, Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and Bridge to Terabithia both contain this particular intro. You have to first rip the .vob from the DVD with something like DVD Decryptor and then encode it to .avi with something like Virtual Dub MPEG2 or SUPER. Many times the intro is really just the first 20 seconds of the first chapter on the DVD, so you have to cut it to length too. Really any ripping/encoding tools of your choice will work and then you're ready to import into a project like sa91899's. I hope that helped. Good luck!

Thanks!! Your explaination makes perfect sense and I should be able to move forward.

Well I started a brand new studio intro project in AE today and I thought I'd post some cryptic shots to see if anyone can figure out what I'm working on. Hopefully this first clue will be hard enough, and I'll post some progressively easier ones every couple of days until someone can figure it out (or until it's apparent that nobody cares ;))

If anyone does figure it out, I don't want to get your hopes up by stating that this project will ever be customizable with your own text. So far it has been very difficult and even though I have a few ideas on how to make it customizable, the #1 priority will be to just get it to work in the first place. I'm really challenging myself and my 3 weeks or so of experience tinkering with AE, so we'll have to see what develops as it comes along.

Feel free to start guessing and whoever gets it right gets... well, probably nothing :D.

Is it a style of Dreamworks or Pixar? That font is VERY familiar and right on the tip of my tongue lol

Well I started a brand new studio intro project in AE today and I thought I'd post some cryptic shots to see if anyone can figure out what I'm working on. Hopefully this first clue will be hard enough, and I'll post some progressively easier ones every couple of days until someone can figure it out (or until it's apparent that nobody cares ;))

If anyone does figure it out, I don't want to get your hopes up by stating that this project will ever be customizable with your own text. So far it has been very difficult and even though I have a few ideas on how to make it customizable, the #1 priority will be to just get it to work in the first place. I'm really challenging myself and my 3 weeks or so of experience tinkering with AE, so we'll have to see what develops as it comes along.

Feel free to start guessing and whoever gets it right gets... well, probably nothing :D.

Dreamworks Animation SKG (think Shrek, Prince of Egypt, Madagascar). I think you made it too easy Magius! But thanks for all the great work you've done. Which logo animation are you working on exactly?

After sa91899 turned me on to After Effects I had looked at doing a Paramount intro. I wasn't going to do their newest one though where the text flies by, but rather the one where the stars fly in and curve up around the mountain and then the text just fades in inside the semi-circle of stars.

It wouldn't be that hard to do in AE as covering the PARAMOUNT text is easy, and fading in your own with an Opacity key is even easier, but unfortunately that particular intro is pretty old so there wouldn't be a source for a high-res version. I'm also not sure I own any DVDs that would have that old version of the intro, but admittedly I never looked.

In any case, the newer Paramount intro looks much cooler, but it would also be much harder to make one customized. I do believe there was a high-def trailer at DemoWorld if anyone wanted to give it a go, but I decided long ago not to bother. It's probably well beyond my skill set.

I really wish you or someone else on this thread would reconsider the Paramount logo. I've named my HT the "3 Peaks Theater" after the mountains that rise above my neighborhood and I would love to use a custom Paramount logo that dissolves into one of these 3 peaks ala Raiders of the Lost Ark. See the attached images...I think the two are pretty close. I just downloaded Blender and am going to give this a shot myself, but I sure would appreciate some help.

hey guys,

just a question with the latest disney intro, when replacing the disney.avi do i replace it with the actual disney trailer.avi or do i rip only a certain amount of seconds from the avi then resave it and replace with that??
sorry if im not making sense...

hey guys,

just a question with the latest disney intro, when replacing the disney.avi do i replace it with the actual disney trailer.avi or do i rip only a certain amount of seconds from the avi then resave it and replace with that??
sorry if im not making sense...

Not sure if there's an actual "format" for it. But the one I replaced mine with I had to tweak the timing of some of the layers in the project so it fit with the length of the trailer I used. But that's just for me, I guess it all depends on the length of the avi you use.

Dreamworks Animation SKG (think Shrek, Prince of Egypt, Madagascar). I think you made it too easy Magius!

Darn you're good! Congratulations. I really didn't expect anyone to get it just based on the font and color scheme, so I had already made the next couple of clues to post, oh well. I'm not really sure how I could have made it much harder unless I didn't give the text any colors at all, but that's downright impossible. :D

In any case, I attached a low res sample of the video that I'm using as the source for those who are curious. It's hard to see in this sample but in the real video you can see the letters through the translucent balloons and then of course they pop to reveal the letters at the end. I think it's a cool animation and I'm pretty sure that I can work my way through replacing each letter with a lot of effort. So far I've basically got the letter "D" done so the proof of concept is pretty sound, it just needs some tweaking. Who knows what other obstacles I'm going to run into on the way though.

I really wish you or someone else on this thread would reconsider the Paramount logo.
As I mentioned before the "old" style Paramount logo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNVb8qFth8M) would be fairly simple to modify in AE with custom text. It would be just covering up the existing text with a still frame of the background and fading in your own when appropriate. Getting the right font may not be easy, but I'm sure there's something close enough to pass for it. I do plan to make one of these some day after I figure out what DVD I might own that contains the source footage.

The "new" style Paramount logo on the other hand (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juGUxQ8FCv4) would be much more difficult as the text has to fly by the camera. I already attempted a different studio's intro which was similar and I'm not skilled enough to make that work in AE. Obviously in Blender the options are unlimited, but my skills there are fairly basic as well, so creating mountains and clouds from scratch just isn't going to work :D.

also where can i download the GillsExpert font from the disney intro in photoshop, i tried searchinf for it but couldnt find it...

also was wondering where can i download the GillsExpert font needed for the photoshop file in the new disney intro, ive tried searching for it but cant seem to find it...

I really wish you or someone else on this thread would reconsider the Paramount logo.

jtwfan,

I may be willing to try my hand at the paramount intro and maybe even customize it for you, however it will have to wait until AFTER I finished the Terminator intro. That may be at least 2 - 3 weeks yet.

Give Blender a try and see what you come up with and if, by the time I am done with my current project you would still like for me to give it a try, we can talk then.

Magius,

Things are looking good on your current project. Keep up the good work and let us know once you have it completed.