It was recently suggested that a new thread be created to contain the projects that forum members are working on in Blender. For those who don't know, Blender is a free open-source program for 3D modeling and animation. It is available at http://www.Blender.org.

Many of us have used this tool to create custom home theater intros thanks to threads like http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=715166 (21st Century Fox) and http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=784015 (Universal Studios). Some are now experimenting further, attempting to tackle other movie studio themed intros, or just working on their own interesting projects.

This thread should be a place for posting information about such projects, asking for tips about working in Blender, and most importantly assisting others when they're in need.

If a particular project gets large enough a seperate thread can be forked off as for the Fox and Universal intros. Hopefully instructions can then be added such that others can customize the project for their own theater use. Let the fun begin!

I'll go ahead and start out with some screenshots and a short clip from my latest project. The .jpg labeled "old" was posted in the Universal thread yesterday as my initial layout for the project. The "new" shot is how it looks today and in the video clip.

I'm working on recreating the Pixar intro, with a twist for home theater use. In my clip the letter "I" should act like a manual air pump of sorts. As Luxo Jr. is hopping up and down on it the name of my home theater should somehow inflate in front of the camera. I haven't figured out all the details but that's the idea, and once the first half is animated the second half should/may be customizable.

My lamp is composed of a cone (head) 3 spheres and 6 cylinders (body) and a short fat cylinder (base). To animate him I'm manually repositioning these 11 pieces 2-3 frames apart based on a rough sketch of how I want him to move. It's likely not the best way, but seeing as I've only been playing with this tool for 3 weeks now, I don't know any better :D . Also, ignore the small white tick marks on the ground, I'm simply using those to mark where each jump should start and stop. They'll be removed as soon as the jump animation is finished.

Let me know what you guys think, and let's see some of your own projects!

the lamp is looking good. I haven't been making anything very intersting lately. Just taking the star trek models and figuring out how to light them.

Adam

Yeah atagert I'm looking forward to seeing some shots of your star trek intro once you get it going. I have a few ideas for variants on the Universal thme myself, but before I try any of that I've got to get this Pixar thing worked out.

I've made a lot of progress today, but there are quite a few things in the current version that I'm unhappy with. I have to slow down the animation for one, and there seems to be some extra light leaking out the back of my lamp's head. I'm also not happy with how my "slide and turn" looks when the lamp spots the letter "I".

Anyway, I've attached the latest render, but I probably won't get a chance to work this any further until next weekend.

I found this website http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php and it has some pretty good maps so that you can create planets.

Adam

Thanks atagert, that's a really neat resource. I particularly like the earth at night textures, perhaps I'll use one for some future project.

At the moment I've been practicing with particle emitters to generate a good fire effect. A buddy of mine runs a kayak business called "Blazing Paddles" so for the fun of it I did a quick animation of some red text on fire that spells out that name. If nothing else it was good practice, and he thought it looked awesome :)

Anyway, seeing as this thread isn't being used, I think dumping Blender resources in here is a good start. Later tongiht I'll post the link to the water ripples plugin and the other plugins that I came across, in case anyone can find a use for them.

Magius,

The work you guy's have been doing with Bledder is great.

The PIXAR tests are looking good.....I assume plan is to come up with a Blender file that the PIXAR name can be replaced with a custom Theatre Name. Would work for Theaters where they have an i - how will it work when no i is in the name?

Cheers,
Mark

Here is an earth I created from the site.
http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/earth.jpg

If you figure out a better way to merge the day and night so that I can have the earth rotate and have the lights disappear during the day. I'd be interested in that.

Adam

wow atagert you completely read my mind about using the earth at night texture. I wanted to somehow merge a night and day texture and have a line of sun sweep over the earth changing day to night. I have no idea how it would be done, but I know there is a way to make textures and materials change over time. I think it's called procedural textures or something. Not the slightest clue how to do it, but maybe there's some tutorials out there...?

BritInVA,
With my Pixar test I actually have no plans on replacing the Pixar lettering. As you said anything I did along those lines would only work for theaters with an "I" in them, but the .blend is designed such that the "I" is a mesh while the "P XAR" is plain text, so anyone could use my file and simply replace the lettering if they so chose.

I've actually had a number of ideas of what to do with the animation, but nothing has fallen into place yet. I want the first portion of the animation to proceed exactly like the regular pixar animation, but something different to happen at the end.
Example ideas: Luxo hopping on the letter "I" acts like an air pump, blowing up a balloon with the theater name on the side. Or perhaps the I drives a flame like in a hot air balloon, which blows up the above mentioned balloon. On another whole train of thought, the I could be connected to some kind of fuse, and when it disappears into the ground it "sparks" lighting the fuse, which snakes across the ground and eventually explodes... something? LOL like I said I've got ideas, but for now the focus is just to finish the original Pixar animation (which only lasts ~10 seconds btw) and release the .blend file for people to tinker with. I'll then move on to animating a cool ending, and again release the .blend file hopefully with easy instructions that people can customize with. It all depends on how much time I get to put into these silly projects :)

Earlier I mentioned that I would post a neat water plugin here in case anyone found it useful. I stumbled across it looking for a way to make ripples on water for use in a Dreamworks themed intro. There's a tutorial here: http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2004/12/24/4-blender-faire-pleuvoir---making-rain that links to the plugin, and also a bunch of other texture plugins for Blender. I haven't actually played with them yet, but I downloaded the .blend file for the tutorial and ran it to see what the plugin ripples looked like. It's a neat effect, and some of the other plugins sounded neat too.

Have fun!

I had a quick go from memory at the looney tunes ending in Premier Pro using some music I found here http://www.nonstick.com/sounds/. [EDIT] Hopefully I have managed to attach a picture not sure where I can upload the video to.

Steve

I have managed to make it smaller so it should now attach ok. Steve

LOL! That looney tunes clip is great. I haven't seen the real thing in many years, but I think your memory served you well. Short of bugs bunny popping out of the middle and snapping off a bite of carrot I'd say you nailed it :D The only small suggestion I could come up with, would be to change the font of the theater name to make it look a bit more like this that I found at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Looney_Tunes.png

Maybe I'm going delusional, but didn't there used to be a looney tunes intro where it started out as the MGM lion roaring or something? I realized that looney tunes is a WB thing, but I swear I remember some sort of cross between between the 2 intros.

In any case, good job theendisnye!

Theendisnye / Magius,

there are a couple of good links to Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes at http://bosko.toonzone.net/titles/ and http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~clyde/sounds.html

How do you do the progressive disclosure of text?

A similar question -- Can you use a key to hide a mesh until you want it to appear.

Love the pixar and the looney tunes.

My project is a flickering neon sign that says cinema neon outside of a brick building with a darkened marquee. It is raining heavily and you see someone (maybe several) covered by an umbrella(s) moving quickly towards the cinema. Then lightning flashes and the lightning strike is in view striking the marquee. (subwoofer boom! buzz) and the custom name of the theater is illuminated on the marquee that lights up.

Any ideas or improvements?

I have now had a go at the entrance piece (apologies for the sound quality but I encoded at voice to keep it under 500Kb and revised the exit piece with a tweety pie image (couldn't find a decent bugs bunny).

I did the progressive disclosure of text by creating the text on a clear background and then putting a blue square over the top which I gradually moved to one side exposing the text. I then keyed the sequence (blue screen) so it became invisible until the text was exposed.

There is a more sophisticated way here http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/tutdes_handwriting.htm but I remember the effect as being somewhat cruder.

Steve

zductive,
I did find one way to hide a mesh until you want it to appear, for example the "feature presentation" text on my original Universal intro. They way I did it was simply to set an alpha key with alpha at 0, and then move alpha to 1 when you want it to appear.

Interestingly, in using this trick on later practice projects, I realized it's not perfect. The object with 0 alpha still "exists" in the scene and casts shadows, etc. even though it's invisible. There are some other settings you can change to make it not do this, but I can't remember off-hand if they're keyable or permanent properties.

You're project sounds really neat. Good luck to you, and be sure to post some screenshots and clips as the project evolves.

zductive,
I did find one way to hide a mesh until you want it to appear, for example the "feature presentation" text on my original Universal intro. They way I did it was simply to set an alpha key with alpha at 0, and then move alpha to 1 when you want it to appear.

Interestingly, in using this trick on later practice projects, I realized it's not perfect. The object with 0 alpha still "exists" in the scene and casts shadows, etc. even though it's invisible. There are some other settings you can change to make it not do this, but I can't remember off-hand if they're keyable or permanent properties.

You're project sounds really neat. Good luck to you, and be sure to post some screenshots and clips as the project evolves.


correct me if I'm wrong, but even with alpha being at 0, the objects behind it are invisible and the background shows through. Have you found a way around this?

Adam

atagert,
As I mentioned there are problems with using an alpha key to hide a mesh, but for many simple concepts it will get the job done. In the case that alpha keying won't work because of shadows or other issues like the ones you brought up, there is 1 other way that I came up with as well.

You can simply have the object originate in a position that is out of the camera's view. Anywhere is fine, but perhaps the easiest is just to stick it directly behind the camera. When you're ready to have it appear, simply move it to wherever it needs to be and set a new position key. It will teleport into place and this method avoids many of the pitfalls of the alpha method. On the other hand, I like how the alpha method allows the object to "fade in" rather than just suddenly appearing which is a little unnatural.

Again, different problems call for different solutions, and there's obviously even better methods out there just waiting for someone to bring them up. Being a complete Blender noob I've been using the alpha method which has worked great in my simplistic projects. I haven't had to try the "teleport" method yet, but with some tweaking I can't imagine it wouldn't work.

Cool, at least I'm not missing some obvious way of doing that.

Hopefully if we keep at it, we'll get better at blender.

Personally, I have trouble getting the perspective right.

Adam

Theendisnye, you've got the looney exit looking good. Now how did you do it? Is this a Blend file?

No unfortunately this isn't blender I used adobe premier pro with all the graphics being contained in a PSD file in different layers. I have now found a porky pig so I have a choice of character for the ending. More than happy to post the files if they are of use to someone. Steve

Trying to work out the details of Rain and lightning. I thought that this was kind of a fun start at a rainy day intro. I need to work out details of the umbrella blowing out of the scene and then returns and the lightning is not timed early enough to let the thunder roll through the subwoofer. Lightning needs to be brighter.

For this scene, I wrapped a large sphere around the whole project. Then, textured the inside of the sphere with a cloud pattern. Not happy with that yet.

Anyway, I thought that this was a fun learning exercise.

http://i134.photobucket.com/albums/q106/zductive/render0151.jpg

Video follows:
http://s134.photobucket.com/albums/q106/zductive/?action=view&current=renderrainydayintroreva.flv

Will post blend if anyone wants it.

Trying to work out the details of Rain and lightning. I thought that this was kind of a fun start at a rainy day intro. I need to work out details of the umbrella blowing out of the scene and then returns and the lightning is not timed early enough to let the thunder roll through the subwoofer. Lightning needs to be brighter.

For this scene, I wrapped a large sphere around the whole project. Then, textured the inside of the sphere with a cloud pattern. Not happy with that yet.

Anyway, I thought that this was a fun learning exercise.

Video follows:
http://s134.photobucket.com/albums/q106/zductive/?action=view&current=renderrainydayintroreva.flv

Will post blend if anyone wants it.

rain looks great, I'm curious on how you did that and the lightning, any cool tricks?

Adam

Actually, I found a rain blend and a lightning blend.
makerain.tar.tar
and lsystem are the search terms.

Some interesting things at blenderdungeon!

I haven't figured how to control the rain yet. I would like to be able to get the water to pool on the floor and it doesn't do that for me yet.
Lightning actually creates a final mesh. Currently, I am just scaling it during the strike.
Seems more natural for it to branch as time goes by. Maybe I could make a series and import that??

I'm not sure where the best place is to ask this question, but it's been driving me nuts and no amount of google searching or youtube searching has gotten me the answer.

Does anyone know which movie studio (or production company, or whatever they are) has a logo of lightning striking a tree? I want to say their trailer is just a lone tree next to an old road and suddenly a bolt of lightning comes down, lights up the tree, and it kinda "pauses" right there and puts the company name on the screen.

If anyone can answer this for me I'd greatly appreciate it, it's seriously driving me insane. Thanks in advance.

perhaps you're thinking of bruckheimer films? http://youtube.com/watch?v=0OzoKXbFPLU

Jerry Bruckheimer Films!

Geez no wonder I never came up with it on my own. Thank you so much timdog!

Quick question. I have the rendered output I did of my "Universal" intro and the audio to go with. I also have the VOB file of the DTS Piano intro. What i'd like to do is play the universal intro first, fade out, and then play the DTS Piano clip. However, I want the final file to still retain the dts 5.1 audio. Basically, what program can I use that will add this together into 1 vob file I can burn while retaining the original video/audio. Thanks, it's late, so if this dosnt make sense, sorry.

Hey zductive, you've unknowingly been a great source of creativity for me lately.

Thanks to your mention of blenderdungeon I recently stumbled across this nifty tree generator, which when combined with your sample clip of lightning gave me an interesting idea. Thanks to timdog helping me figure out Jerry Bruckheimer's name, I might have a go at recreating his production company logo.

So far the part with the tree doesn't seem all that hard, as seen in the attached screenshots. And I think I can create a good lightning effect with a simple plane material. Look up something called "Jason's energy field" for a great example of how to stick a material and texture on a plane to simulate electricity waves like lightning or a force field.

Anyway, I have no idea when I'll actually try to put all this stuff together, but the pieces are all lining up. Good luck to you on your rainy day project, it's looking good so far. I'm curious if you've tried messing with soft bodies or an actual "wind" force in blender. I did some silly fun stuff with it a weekend or 2 ago, and you never know, if you got the hang of it it could add some sweet realism to your floating umbrella.

Just imagine .... A tree grows before your eyes and then it turns to gold (autumn). The wind blows and the leaves fall into the name of your theater.


Regarding the use of wind and forces, I have played a little with them. Trying to see if I can get the rain to bounce off the umbrella. It would be interesting if the wind could blow against some planes and cause a random push effect like you would see in nature. That would toss the umbrella around much better than I could move it by hand.

Wish that some "expert" could chime in. Some of these effects may be impossible

I have found some ripple blends but nothing that would show the ripples when the bobber goes into the water. Would a simple circular ripple be enough for the "man in the moon" idea?

zductive,
As far as the Dreamworks logo is concerned, just about any reasonable ripple effect would be a great step in the right direction. Once the water is figured out though, the clouds still pose a major effort to undertake.

For the actual figure of the boy in the moon I would simply "cheat" and use a plane textured with a .jpg of the logo, so it's really just the water and clouds that make this intro challenging.

I *really* like the idea you've described of the growing tree and color changing, etc. though I have no idea if any of that is even possible... lol. It sure would be nice if we had a couple of experts around here :D .

By the way, I whipped up an extremely simplistic version of the Touchstone Pictures logo this morning if anyone is interested. The text is fully editable, so this is easier than pie to customize. I'll admit it's nothing spectacular, but for about an hour's work I figured maybe someone would find it interesting. The halo definitely needs some work when the lightning bolt appears, but again that's a very simple thing for interested parties to play with.

Funny enough, this animation uses the "cheat" I described above, so at the end when the lighting bolt appears I simply cover up the plain blue sphere with a plane textured with the lightning bolt logo. It's nothing fancy, but it works.

I've uploaded two low res sample videos of this animation, one showing custom text and the other with the familiar "touchstone" text. The .blend file is also in the package, as is the lightning bolt texture that I used to cover the plane if anyone wants to play with this.

If anyone is interested, I worked up another very simple animation this morning, this time of the old Walt Disney logo. This is the one before they went all 3D and fancy (ie: on their Pixar movies).

This one has 100% customizable text again so it's easy to make it your own. I've included 2 screenshots that show my version of the "original" logo as well as an example of a customized logo. Before anyone asks, yes the castle is hand draw, and no the font is not. I simply searched Google for a Disney font, downloaded a true type, and loaded it into Blender. It really couldn't have been any easier.

As far as the animation goes, I've finished the castle appearing from top to bottom, the bright halo in which the words "Walt Disney" appear, and the appearance of the word "pictures". The only thing left to do is Tinkerbell flying in an arc above the castle, so once I get that done I'll upload a .blend file. There's some tweaks I'd like to add, such as the "haze" effect as the castle appears, and my halos are notorious for needing work, but for ~2 hours effort it works well enough.

Magius, I would love the disney file please!

Absolutely Echo,
All the junk I create is destined for the boards here, and is geared towards being easily customizable for anyone's use. As I mentioned previously, my current .blend file is missing Tinkerbell and needs a few more tweaks as well before it's done.

For anyone interested in playing with the .blend at this early stage I've uploaded it in a .zip file, along with a test render of how the animation plays out so far, and the files associated with the true-type font that I used.

Just now looking at the test render I can see there are some timing issues with the word "pictures" and the halo needs a bit more work than I thought :D . I'm not sure why I suck so much at creating halos... they've plagued me since the original Universal logo...

Anyways, hope you guys enjoy this, and I'll upload an update whenever I get around to finishing it.

I will post a blend of a float with radial ripples this afternoon. Also,believe that I found a good tutorial for clouds. Dreamworks is almost possible!

Sounds great zductive. I have a tutorial or 2 related to clouds and nebulas as well, so it will be interesting to see if we can all make the Dreamworks thing happen. I'm anxious to see what you come up with for ripples, but for now I'm heading out. I won't have any more time this weekend for Blender projects, so I'll post an updated Disney logo sometime during the week.

OK I lied.

I got back early and decided to knock out this Disney logo. For some reason I'm not able to upload files right now, as AVS just throws lots of errors when I try. I'll upload it later tongiht or tomorrow whenver I think of it.

The logo is very easy to customize, but you may notice that some names just don't look as nice, others won't line up with Tinkerbell's arc, etc. All of this can be played with until you get something you like, but for my own theater name I wasn't overly happy...

Anyway, one word of advice for those interested in customization: There is a dotted line ellipse in front of the castle. These are the points that create the halo effect, so your custom text shouldn't extend too far beyond or it might become visible outside the halo. Some experimentation with scaling will likely be necessary to get your own text just the right size.

If anyone wants to modify this and improve my halo effect (or fix anything else for that matter) I'm all for it. Good luck!

I have attached my first cut of the bobber and ripples. Unfortunately, I rendered it with the ripple starting before the bobber hit the water.

http://s134.photobucket.com/albums/q106/zductive/?action=view&current=dreamworksbobber1.flv



blender file that shows a bobber with ripples
http://www.box.net/public/0v7d9ngddu

OK I lied.
If anyone wants to modify this and improve my halo effect (or fix anything else for that matter) I'm all for it. Good luck!

I love to see the files for this. I've got time to work on it.

Adam

Alright finally the uploader works so I was able to post the finished Disney files. I stuck a screenshot of the finished product here for easy viewing, and a .zip file with everything else.

Inside the .zip is the .blend file, the truetype font (in case you have to load it again, or want it for a different project), and a test render showing how the animation turns out.

Atagert,
Feel free to mess around with this and see if you can improve it. I think it's great how we can all collaborate and share ideas to make these things better. Unfortunately I think you're going to be disappointed with how simple the animation really was. For both the Disney and the Touchstone logo's I just went for "how quickly/easily can I create this and still have it look good", so it's really very basic.

Let me know if anyone finds either this or the Touchstone logo useful at all. I'm just making them for the fun of it, but I like the idea that someone else may make use of them.

[QUOTE=Magius]
Atagert,
Feel free to mess around with this and see if you can improve it. I think it's great how we can all collaborate and share ideas to make these things better. Unfortunately I think you're going to be disappointed with how simple the animation really was. For both the Disney and the Touchstone logo's I just went for "how quickly/easily can I create this and still have it look good", so it's really very basic.
QUOTE]

wow, you're right that was very simple. I never touched it thinking it was complicated. Thanks. Looks really like it too.

Adam

wow, you're right that was very simple.

I'll take that as a compliment! :mad: lol j/k :D

It's funny how simple I was able to make that animation. I never would have tackled it otherwise. I was able to implement some of the little "tricks" that I've posted about before, such as teleporting an object into place when you need it, and using the depth of an image to your advantage by covering up stuff you don't want seen. Based on how well it turned out (IMHO) I think there's a number of "simpler" logos out there that we could bang together this way. Not all of them have to be as fancy as Fox or Universal. (Or Pixar for that matter... If I ever finish it...)

Anyway even looking at it now there's a thing or 2 I might touch up at a later date, but it's good enough for the community to play with. Best of luck to everyone.

Oh I forgot I also had 2 problems that I was hoping someone might be able to help me solve.

First, does anyone know where I could find some music to go with this Disney clip? I did a little searching but didn't come up with anything. I was kinda hoping for the old school upbeat Disney home video type music, but anything that's clearly Disney would probably work.

Second, not to let the cat out of the bag, but can anyone point me to a video of New Line Cinema's logo online. I've scoured Google and Youtube and haven't found it, only still images. I'd like to give their logo a shot, but I can't recall how the animation plays out so I'm not sure how complicated it would be.

Logos I'm currently considering working on:
Dreamworks (assuming it's a good community effort like the Universal logo)
Pixar (Gotta get around to finishing this someday...)
New Line Cinema
Jerry Bruckheimer Productions
Suggestions ??? (Preferably of the "simplistic" variety... no Lionsgate/MGM requests :D )

Oh I forgot I also had 2 problems that I was hoping someone might be able to help me solve.

First, does anyone know where I could find some music to go with this Disney clip? I did a little searching but didn't come up with anything. I was kinda hoping for the old school upbeat Disney home video type music, but anything that's clearly Disney would probably work.

Second, not to let the cat out of the bag, but can anyone point me to a video of New Line Cinema's logo online. I've scoured Google and Youtube and haven't found it, only still images. I'd like to give their logo a shot, but I can't recall how the animation plays out so I'm not sure how complicated it would be.

Logos I'm currently considering working on:
Dreamworks (assuming it's a good community effort like the Universal logo)
Pixar (Gotta get around to finishing this someday...)
New Line Cinema
Jerry Bruckheimer Productions
Suggestions ??? (Preferably of the "simplistic" variety... no Lionsgate/MGM requests :D )

Couldn't find a music file in a brief search, but you could extract from the VOB file on this site: http://www.digital-digest.com/movies/movie_index.php?type=studio

As for the New Line animation, the easiest way to see it, would be to go to Apples trailer page and look at a preview for a New Line movie. :)

I'll take that as a compliment! :mad: lol j/k :D


What impressed me the post is the actual disney casttle. I guess, I'm just not very good at modeling things.

Adam

Quick question. I have the rendered output I did of my "Universal" intro and the audio to go with. I also have the VOB file of the DTS Piano intro. What i'd like to do is play the universal intro first, fade out, and then play the DTS Piano clip. However, I want the final file to still retain the dts 5.1 audio. Basically, what program can I use that will add this together into 1 vob file I can burn while retaining the original video/audio. Thanks, it's late, so if this dosnt make sense, sorry.

Nevermind about this, even though nobody replied, lol. I was able to figure it out using DVD Audio Extractor and DVD Lab Pro.

Atagert,
It's funny you mention the castle and how hard it is to model things. I have to be honest here and say that my entire castle is composed of rectangles and triangles all superimposed on top of each other, because I have no idea how to make shapes like trapezoids in Blender. One might be led to think that each piece of my castle is a single object, but I just don't know how to make those funny shapes, so I had to build them up one at a time from rectangles and triangles.

In the end the effect is the same, but I really could have saved a lot of time if I knew how to make the shapes as a single object...

I really wanted to post this conceptual render that I made earlier for the Jerry Bruckheimer logo. I always liked that particular logo, and I think this concept turned out incredibly well. Unfortunately my current computer is abysmally slow and I can't even edit this .blend file in real time. There are so many meshes making up the tree leaves and trunk that my computer stutters trying to move an object around the window. I won't be building my new gaming workstation for a while (waiting until at least the April 22 price cuts, and the AMD DX10 and/or G90 releases), so this logo is going to have to remain an idea for a while.

If anyone else is interested in working on the concept, or just needs trees or lightning for their own projects, I can provide the tree generator and energy field files that I used to make this. I'm certainly not taking credit for either one, I just combined other people's effects to facilitate my own idea.

Let me know what you guys think of the concept picture. Thanks!

Looks pretty cool, Magius. Can't wait to see the finished product if/when you get the new PC up and running.

Thanks for sharing!

Regs,
Jeff

Oooh, I really like the Disney intro, so I thought I'd take a shot at it. I haven't had much time to work on any 3D stuff lately but this 2D one looked fun. Thanks to Magius for the inspiration and idea! Now I just need to clean it up a little and get Tinkerbell's wings to flap :D

My Disney Intro w/Tinkerbell (http://www.bananamoon.net/avs/Disney_Tinkerbell.wmv)

Here's a screen grab of it:
http://www.bananamoon.net/avs/Disney_Tinkerbell.gif

Justin

Justin that is so great! This is exactly the type of creativity that I was hoping would come from my efforts. I'm curious, did you start from scratch or use my source file? It's obvious you changed the halo effect when the Disney text appears, you're castle is shaped/spaced differently than mine, and the arc in the background is different too, so on first glance I'd have to guess you started from scratch... great job!

Your particle emitter system around Tinkerbell is really cool, I was thinking about splashing some particles around as my arc gets revealed (think like welding sparks maybe), but I never thought of actually importing a Tinkerbell graphic :D .

I also haven't been able to settle on music to accompany my animation, but I liked the "when you wish upon a star" theme that you chose. I may have to steal that idea from you as well.

Once you get it finished you should upload the .blend file so that we can see how you did things. I'm sure the animation flow is a little different than mine, and I'd like to see other ways of accomplishing a similar task. Thanks!

Oooh, I really like the Disney intro, so I thought I'd take a shot at it. I haven't had much time to work on any 3D stuff lately but this 2D one looked fun. Thanks to Magius for the inspiration and idea! Now I just need to clean it up a little and get Tinkerbell's wings to flap :D

My Disney Intro w/Tinkerbell (http://www.bananamoon.net/avs/Disney_Tinkerbell.wmv)

Here's a screen grab of it:
http://www.bananamoon.net/avs/Disney_Tinkerbell.gif

Justin

That is awesome. So simple in a 2D environment. Great job!

Schweet!!! I definately want a copy of that blend file...

Thanks for the nice comments! So here's the deal with my latest render. As you noticed, Magius, the castle is a little different than yours. Yes, I started from scratch. I did all the layout of the castle, text, and arc in Photoshop hoping I could just import it into Blender. But as you may have already figured out you can't just import a 2D file into Blender. You can, but only as a background. If I'm wrong on this please let me know. So then I worked with the castle image as a background and used it to sketch it in Blender and added the text as another layer. I couldn't quite figure out the animated arc and got so frustrated I quit...it was also pretty late.

So to sum it up, the file I uploaded was made using Photoshop and After Effects. I know this thread is for Blender, but I just wanted to see a working version of what I had envisioned the finished product to look like. Unfortunately the .blend file will be a little further off. However, I can provide my .aep file to those of you with AE. I'm still going to try and do the majority of this in Blender so everyone can have access to it and make it their own.

As for the music, I edited a version of When You Wish Upon A Star by Olivia Newton John. It's the begining 20 seconds.

If I can't get Blender figured out I may just start another thread for After Effects. I know it's not free so everyone won't have it, but I'd be willing to modify the files for anyone who wanted them. In the meantime I'll keep trying to get this worked up in Blender.

Justin

Thanks for the nice comments! So here's the deal with my latest render. As you noticed, Magius, the castle is a little different than yours. Yes, I started from scratch. I did all the layout of the castle, text, and arc in Photoshop hoping I could just import it into Blender. But as you may have already figured out you can't just import a 2D file into Blender. You can, but only as a background. If I'm wrong on this please let me know. So then I worked with the castle image as a background and used it to sketch it in Blender and added the text as another layer. I couldn't quite figure out the animated arc and got so frustrated I quit...it was also pretty late.

So to sum it up, the file I uploaded was made using Photoshop and After Effects. I know this thread is for Blender, but I just wanted to see a working version of what I had envisioned the finished product to look like. Unfortunately the .blend file will be a little further off. However, I can provide my .aep file to those of you with AE. I'm still going to try and do the majority of this in Blender so everyone can have access to it and make it their own.

As for the music, I edited a version of When You Wish Upon A Star by Olivia Newton John. It's the begining 20 seconds.

If I can't get Blender figured out I may just start another thread for After Effects. I know it's not free so everyone won't have it, but I'd be willing to modify the files for anyone who wanted them. In the meantime I'll keep trying to get this worked up in Blender.

Justin

I am cool with After Effects. To me, it is however we can get it completed. I did the same type of thing with the Marquee, not everyone has Photoshop and Illustrator CS2, but I still had a lot of interest. Maybe it is time we setup another thread for After Effects work. I am thinking of setting up a thread for Marquee ideas as well. It is just a good forum to get some creative ideas going.

Besides the Studio Themed Intros, there are also the various THX intros that are pretty cool--some are pretty basic, like the THX with the blue border, some are more complicated, like the shattering ball that liquifies and forms the THX letters, or the guy who plugs the cord from THX into the "moo generator".

Justin,
In a way it's good that your file is in AE. Now people who know how to work in Blender can use my file, and people that know how to work in AE can use your file. Mine of course has no Tinkerbell, but with a .jpg textured plane and a halo textured particle emitter system that could be easily changed if someone spent the time to do it.

I did start the thread with Blender projects in mind, due to the large Fox and Universal threads, but this is not the first project we've seen in AE, and I think it's a great idea to keep the thread diverse. Different tools for different people, but great results all around.

I haven't done anything in Blender yet this weekend, I feel like such a slacker :D .

Well, I haven't been doing nothing lately, though I haven't been working on a studio intro. I've been trying to build a complete intro. Anyway, here is the first part, Its a space shuttle orbitting the earth with "please turn off cellphones." The space shuttle was imported from a 3ds file I found on the net and what I found the hardest part was to get it to look right. I started with with it orbiting at the equaitor and growing so it didn't look like a tiny dot. I then tried to have fire coming off as it entered the atmosphere, but that looked like it exploded, finally after watching the core, I realized that the orbit isn't horizontal but verticle. It really does fly upside down.

Adam

A frame, and a link to the whole video.
http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/cellphones2.jpg

http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/cellphones2.wmv

That is awesome. So simple in a 2D environment. Great job!

I agree very good. Has anybody seen the new intro? Take a look at the one from Open Season. The whole castle is a 3D model. Its really impressive.

Adam

Atagert that's a really cool idea that you're working on. I love how you've put the night Earth pictures to good use. The sample video you posted looks great, and the orbit is very well done. I do have an interesting observation though, which really cracked me up.

Right between 2 and 3 seconds when the shuttle just peaks it's nose out from under the earth it appears that it's actually a person's face. I know, you think I'm crazy, but I swear my 1st time watching the video I thought a head was coming straight at me :eek: . Because of the camera movement the shuttle/head soon goes out of frame before coming back in again at around the 6 second mark. At this point it's easily identified as a shuttle, but I swear just a few seconds prior it looked like a floating head.

Anyway I know nobody is going to believe me so I took a screenshot. If anyone can look at this picture and tell me they don't see a very detailed face including nose, ears and goatee I'll commit myself to the loony bin immediately. :p

All kidding aside the intro looks fantastic atagert. You've certainly been practicing!

haha. I see it too. I was going to edit it out so it didn't appear, but with your comment, I'm leaving it in there.

The practice hasn't been coming the way I would like it to, I keep forgetting to save before exiting blender, or blender crashes, and I loose the work.

I'm now working on an Serenity flyby. I'm just not sure what I should write.

Snacks in the Kitchen
Drinks in the Fridge
Forage Quietly
Please Dim Laptop Brightness
Hearing Protection is recommend beyond this point
Restroom, is to your right and down the steps. (I may be only person here, who doeesn't have a bathroom on the 1st floor but instead it is in the basement)
1 million pixies for your enjoyment

Suggestions?

Adam

Any other suggestions?

Forgetting to save before exiting Blender... ugh, don't remind me. Interestingly, there is a feature in the File menu called "Restore last session" or something like that. It has saved me on more than 1 occasion, but typically I have more than 1 Blender window open and as Murphy's Law would have it I close them in just the wrong order for this feature to be useful... :rolleyes:

It's funny that you mentioned the new 3D Disney logo also. I know the one you mean with the fireworks and everything. Very nice, but way beyond my abilities. Along the same lines, I did decide to challenge myself by creating a 3D version of the Walt Disney logo. Not the one that you're thinking of, but the CGI one that Pixar did for them on all of their films. Check it out on Youtube here if you can't think of the one I'm talking about: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nk_Ow_-sitE.

I've attached a screenshot of my initial progress on this, but it will be a *long* time in the making. Modeling this castle in 3D is painstaking, and the tricks and cheats that I used on the 2D version likely won't work. The lighting also becomes difficult, as you can see in my screenshot the lighting and colors are all out of whack.

Let me know what you guys think!

Wow, Magius! I love the castle and look forward to seeing your end product. I just picked up a Blender book today from Borders. It focuses on character animation, but hopefully it will help me put some of my ideas together. I'm anxiously awaiting the new 2.43 version books to come out before I get too heavily involved. ;)

Keep up the great work!
Justin

I got the Serenity One Done.

http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/ss_dimm.jpg

And the video file

http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/ss_dimm.wmv

I'm open to suggestions on how to make any of these better.

Adam

Atagert that's a really cool idea that you're working on. I love how you've put the night Earth pictures to good use. The sample video you posted looks great, and the orbit is very well done. I do have an interesting observation though, which really cracked me up.

Right between 2 and 3 seconds when the shuttle just peaks it's nose out from under the earth it appears that it's actually a person's face. I know, you think I'm crazy, but I swear my 1st time watching the video I thought a head was coming straight at me :eek: . Because of the camera movement the shuttle/head soon goes out of frame before coming back in again at around the 6 second mark. At this point it's easily identified as a shuttle, but I swear just a few seconds prior it looked like a floating head.

Anyway I know nobody is going to believe me so I took a screenshot. If anyone can look at this picture and tell me they don't see a very detailed face including nose, ears and goatee I'll commit myself to the loony bin immediately. :p

All kidding aside the intro looks fantastic atagert. You've certainly been practicing!


You're right! It looks like the "alter" Mr. Spock from the Trek episode where there was a parallel universe and the Federation were the bad guys...

You're right! It looks like the "alter" Mr. Spock from the Trek episode where there was a parallel universe and the Federation were the bad guys...


Mirror Mirror?

http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/mirror_spock.jpg

You're right! It looks like the "alter" Mr. Spock from the Trek episode where there was a parallel universe and the Federation were the bad guys...

That's funny--I thought it looked like Frylock from Aqua Teen Hunger Force:

http://i25.photobucket.com/albums/c90/Etienne_72772/frylock.jpg

Anyone see the new POTC 3 trailer? That Disney castle was awesome and looks like it would be a REAL challenge (nudge, nudge).

Tom

I think the one you're talking about tlogan is the same one that atagert mentioned earlier, with the fireworks and such. Disney paid someone to remake their logo in 2006 so I imagine that's the one you saw.

Unfortunately something like that is far beyond my meager capabilities, but I'm still having fun working on the Pixar version of the Disney 3D castle. I've noticed that every time I touch my .blend file the castle looks less and less like the original, but I'm going to chalk that up to "creative license" and say it's close enough :D . I try to be as accurate as possible, but it has been difficult so in the end it'll just have to be my best interpretive effort. Anyway, I've uploaded an updated screenshot showing tonights progress if anyone's interested.

The flags I think are going to look really good once animated. I have them set up as soft bodies, and there is a wind source that causes them to blow to the left. I'm working on creative ways to make them all blow in a slightly different manner, so if you look closely you'll see that the 4 flags don't look exactly the same. It's a minor detail, and I'm not done playing with it yet, but I thought it might stand out if they were all following the exact same deformation pattern.

There's still a long way to go with this thing, but it's coming along...

Magius -

No kids in the house...guess I don't watch enough Disney!

Your 3D Castle is looking great. Keep up the excellent work!

Tom

Well I've finished the layout for the 3D Disney castle animation. I haven't actually animated anything but the camera motion and flag waving yet, but I think the same methods I used in the 2D version will work for the text and tinkerbell arc.

Unfortunately I'm not too happy with how this is turning out, but I guess it's not terrible. At this point I've put enough hours into it that I can't just not finish, but I wish I knew how to spiffy up the look a bit.

An example of the final positioning can be seen in the attached screenshot. All of the intricate details that I tried to add are completely lost once the camera zooms out, which is part of the reason I'm not very happy with the look anymore.

Anyway, I have a fairly busy weekend scheduled but I should probably be able to find the time to finish this off at some point. I'll keep everyone posted.

Anybody upto anything lately?

Adam

Magius,
The 3D Disney castle looks awesome!! Very nicely done!!

Atagert,
FYI, I get a username\password screen every page of this thread, and also when clicking http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu/videos/ss_dimm.wmv (using FireFox 2.something, same with IE6).

Keep up the good work all. I have made HD files of the Fox and Universal logo's for my HT (see my homepage, HT Art). Would love to do some more (esp. Disney!!) but my blender skill are very limited unfortunately...

Thanks!!

Atagert,
As DenW mentioned I keep getting a popup message that says enter username and password for "" at http://atagert.andrew.cmu.edu. Hopefully you can simply edit an old post or two that links to that server and it will go away? Then again maybe this is a devious plot to phish our AVSForum passwords!! :eek: j/k.

DenW,
I appreciate the compliment about my Disney castle . I really dropped the ball on that one... It's been over a month since I posted the last screenshot and I just haven't had the time (or interest) to go back and finish it off. I do intend to finish it at some point, but I've been busy both at work and in my personal life lately. If anyone is interested in the current file I could post it for someone else to work on. Most of what's remaining can be done in a similar way to how I did the 2D Disney animation, so with both files one might be able to piece together an ending.

Perhaps this weekend I'll finally give it a shot. I don't want to promise anything, but at least things have slowed down again for me, so if I can tear myself away from video games I might just get into some Blender again.

Hey Magius,

Would be great if you could finish the Disney one. But i certainly understand you, as we all do, have a life besides the Blender- (and HT?) stuff, taking up much time for these things.
Thanks for your time!!

As I'd hoped, I found some time to myself this morning and made a little progress on the Disney logo. It's not finished yet, but the ending is coming together pretty well. I've attached a new screenshot as a sign of good faith :D .

I have to head out for a little while, so I can't promise this will be done today, but now that I'm back in the game I actually feel like finishing it. Hopefully I can find the time tonight. All that's left is finishing off Tinkerbell's path and adding a bright spotlight to follow her around, but the spotlight has me concerned so we'll see how it turns out.

Magius - thats really starting to look cool.

Cheers,
Mark

Magius,

That looks terrific!!! Very cool. Great to hear you feel like doing some blender stuff again!

Thanks!
Den

Well I've had a slight "motivational setback" as I did a test render this weekend and it looks alright for the most part but there is a major problem that I don't know how to fix.

Some of you may remember the FOX logo and how it had a "flickering" problem. Various spots on my castle now do this same thing, and flicker between lit and unlit as the movie goes on. To the best of my knowledge even the best Blender folks never figured this out in the FOX file, so I have little hope of fixing it here, and it's quite distracting.

Otherwise the concept that I was working towards for this animation is basically done. Tinkerbell flies over the castle trailing sparks and a spotlight follows her around to shine on the castle. All of the text shows up roughly on queue, and the bright halo is slightly better than my attempt with 2D Disney IMHO. I'm not happy with how the Tinkerbell spotlight looks, and currently my yellow flags look like they've OD'd on crack, so I need to fix those effects and some other minor timing issues.

I probably won't get time to work on this until Friday like usual, but I'm disappointed that the castle itself has become a major source of problems. I'll try to post an example clip in the next day or 2, and if anyone has ideas on how to get rid of the flicker I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Well I've had a slight "motivational setback" as I did a test render this weekend and it looks alright for the most part but there is a major problem that I don't know how to fix.

Some of you may remember the FOX logo and how it had a "flickering" problem. Various spots on my castle now do this same thing, and flicker between lit and unlit as the movie goes on. To the best of my knowledge even the best Blender folks never figured this out in the FOX file, so I have little hope of fixing it here, and it's quite distracting.

Otherwise the concept that I was working towards for this animation is basically done. Tinkerbell flies over the castle trailing sparks and a spotlight follows her around to shine on the castle. All of the text shows up roughly on queue, and the bright halo is slightly better than my attempt with 2D Disney IMHO. I'm not happy with how the Tinkerbell spotlight looks, and currently my yellow flags look like they've OD'd on crack, so I need to fix those effects and some other minor timing issues.

I probably won't get time to work on this until Friday like usual, but I'm disappointed that the castle itself has become a major source of problems. I'll try to post an example clip in the next day or 2, and if anyone has ideas on how to get rid of the flicker I'd appreciate it.

Thanks!

Have you seen these recommendations to reducing the "flicker" problem?
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=8797660&&#post8797660

It worked for me in doing the "FOX" intro.

-t

I've had success eliminating flickering by setting "faces" to solid. Straight lines set to smooth tend to flicker. So if you select the flat faces, and then set them to solid, the flickering goes away.

The mesh has to be in edit mode and the face has to be selected (orange). Then click Mesh, Faces, Set Solid.

Looks great! Don't get down, at the very worst you are one step ahead of someone else(read me) who can only get as far as having the ideas...im great with theory but suck at practice.......

Hey thanks guys for the feedback. I had no idea this many people were still monitoring this thread, and figured it was pretty much barely hanging on to life support.

Those suggestions about the flicker problem sound like they should work. Thinking about it now I can distinctly remember setting certain portions of my castle to smooth because of the way the lights/shadows/colors were interacting. I'll try setting them all back to solid to see if the flicker goes away, and if it does hopefully whatever I didn't like about the lighting I can fix or at least improve.

I have to spend my Friday afternoon building a computer for a friend, so again this project might get delayed, but I promise I won't abandon it. For grins I might try to upload an example of what the test render looked like so you guys can see all the silly little things that need fixing. I swear the flags are hilarious. Because they're all actually simulated as soft bodies being blown by a wind source, I had no idea how strong to set the wind force. I'm thinking it's somewhere between F5 tornado and the speed of light, so I'll have to play with it to get the "gentle breeze" I was hoping for :D

I'd love to a see a sample of the render too, what you've done so far looks great!

the links should be working again. I was updating my server, I went from running iis on Vista Ultimate RC1 to Longhorn Beta 3. In the upgrade I tried switching to using Share Point Service to manage my website. It was freaking out abit with the user name and stuff. It wouldn't even let me to login. :mad: I gave up for now, and am back regular IIS 7. I know, probably more details than any of you ever wanted. :D

Adam

the problem I found when you set faces to solid is that you loose the ray tracing and then all faces don't have highlights and shadows. Are you doing something different than I? I am refering in particular to the fox logo.

Adam

Atagert,
That sounds like precisely why I changed some of my castle faces to smooth in the first place. Something just wasn't working right with the lighting and shadows, and making them smooth fixed it, so I just did that and moved on. I haven't gone back to re-render with solid yet, but it sounds like one way or another it won't come out the way I want.

Unfortunately I seem to have deleted the sample render that I generated, presumably because I was ticked off that it came out so poor :rolleyes: . I'll have to make another one some other time to show the coked-up flags and other current problems.

Three nights ago my RAID 5 array went critical so I'm anxiously awaiting a replacement drive from WD. Until this morning I'd been hesitant to even turn on this machine due to fear of data loss. No the blender projects aren't on the RAID, but man if I lose 800GB of data I won't be very happy...

On another note, I'm being sent on business travel for the next week so odds of getting any time to work on Blender are slim. I did stick a copy of the installer and my latest project files on a USB stick so if I get bored the company's loaner laptop may just become a rendering device :D .

Seems like the Disney project will be delayed again, but I'll keep you guys posted as things go along.

When you get around to it, try being selective about what you set solid. You don't have to select an entire mesh, just the surface that's flickering. That's what I did with the fox intro and had satisfactory results.

Hey Magius,

Hope you get your RAID array fixed in time so no data is lost.
Hope your business trip is a somewhat fun one. I'll keep an eye on this thread for any updates... :)

Best,
Den

Well I'm back from traveling and fortunately I found the time to get a few things fixed while I was away. The flickering problems were completely fixed using the "set solid" tip, so thank you to all who suggested that. There is one section of the castle's roof that now looks a lighter shade of blue than all the rest after it was set solid, but other than that everything looked great afterwards.

I also fixed the excessively strong wind by reducing the force by a factor of 10. I'll probably play with this a bit more until it's "just right", but at least I found the correct variable and a good ballpark number to use. One thing I still need to implement is a slightly different wind effect for each flag so that they don't all move exactly in sync. I think that I know how to do this, it just needs a bit of experimentation.

Finally, I worked on the spotlight that follows Tinkerbell around her arc. I used a different technique and the results are far superior to my first test render, but now I have an even better idea so I'm going to do that part over again. I think that by using an armature/bone I'll be able to keep Tinkerbell and her spotlight in perfect sync all the way around the arc, making a much more realistic lighting effect. This is how I did the Universal text coming around the earth, so at least I'm familiar with how it works ;)

As a side note, the movie "Bridge to Terabithia" was playing on my return flight. As it's a new Disney movie it had the brand new castle animation with the fireworks and everything that you can see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Waltdisneypictureslogo.png or here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=FOvLsFKrvaM&mode=related&search=. Sure made me wish I was good enough to recreate that animation... but for now the older Pixar version will have to do.

Apparently I took too much credit for fixing the hyperactive flags. When trying to make them all move independently of each other the problem of the wind being too strong got reintroduced somehow. I'm not sure how to fix it ATM, but I'll work on it and hopefully it doesn't come down to having to make them all move in sync like they were before...

Anyway, here's an extremely low quality test render showing the full animation. There's a lot of artifacts due to the compression, but I figure it will give those of you who are interested an idea of what the final animation will look like. Comments are welcome.

Apparently I took too much credit for fixing the hyperactive flags. When trying to make them all move independently of each other the problem of the wind being too strong got reintroduced somehow. I'm not sure how to fix it ATM, but I'll work on it and hopefully it doesn't come down to having to make them all move in sync like they were before...

Anyway, here's an extremely low quality test render showing the full animation. There's a lot of artifacts due to the compression, but I figure it will give those of you who are interested an idea of what the final animation will look like. Comments are welcome.

Wow! Looks really nice. Especially the way the light from the arcing star reflects off the castle as it goes from right to left. Very nice.

Is it just this test animation or does the whole thing seem too fast? I think it clocked at 12 seconds?? Can it be slowed down?

Really impressive though!

-t

I prefer the animation you're working on, not too fond of all the detail of the florida swamp lands surround the castle, at least that is what I think of when I see that castle :)

Teknoguy, I do agree that the animation looks a little fast, but I was trying to be as accurate to the original as possible. The original can be seen here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nk_Ow_-sitE and you'll notice that one lasts about 12 seconds as well. I added a little delay at the beginning and end for fade in/out, but I tried to estimate the timing of the actual animation as close to the original as possible to sync up with the music.

Speaking of the music, I tried to run a loopback from my line out to my line in and record the music from the youtube clip above. For some reason my soundcard stopped working after that, and only just yesterday (a week later) spontaneously started working again. I don't dare try it again, but that file is the only location I'm aware of for that particular fanfare. If anybody has a copy of that same music could you please upload it to the thread, or if anyone has sound recording software and wants to do the loopback method I'd appreciate it.

Back to the animation, anyone that knows how to play with keyframes or the Animation IPO window in Blender could change the timing of the whole thing, but it's no simple task. An easier method might be to lower the rendering rate from 25fps. 20fps would make it go from 12s to 15s, but I have no idea if it would still look alright.

Magius - really coming together nicely.

Great work.

Cheers,
Mark

Magius,

Excellent job!!
It does feel a little quick to me also, but i'd still be very very happy with it.

Let me see if i can "make" an AC3 audio track when i get home from work...

I can get you a music track this evening if you dont have it all ready.

For those who are asking about it I do not yet have a music file. I usually just go with a stereo mp3 with these things because it's all I can typically find, but if there's an AC3 version that'd be great too. As long as virtualdub can take it as an input I'm happy. Go ahead and post it in the thread so that others will know it's available and can use it with my .blend file once I'm done.

Thanks in advance, and thanks again for all the positive feedback. Apparently there's going to be more travel in my future which could be a good thing or a bad thing as far as working on the animation, so we'll have to see how things go...

I forgot to mention that I put in an order for all my new computer parts on Saturday so in the near future I won't have to be puttering along with Blender on my old P4 2.4 w/ 512MB RAM. This should drastically help me work on things like the softbody flag simulations and stuff that just takes forever to preview in real-time.

I rebuilt my HTPC in February (C2D E4300@3.0GHz, 2GB RAM) and have been sending .blend files out to the living room for rendering via remote desktop, but there's just no substitute to seeing what each frame looks like in real time while you work.

Interestingly enough, and I know I'm getting off-topic, I was able to pick up 4GB of RAM (two 2GB kits) for $20 less than the exact same 2GB kit cost me in late February... Too bad I won't be able to see it all, but it was so cheap I couldn't resist :D .

On one last note, someone needs to make a GPGPU version of Blender so that the 12-inch long space heater I bought will contribute something useful when I'm not playing Oblivion :rolleyes: OK enough rambling, I'll keep you guys posted regarding further glitch fixes in my animation.

Magius - where you been? Wondering how the Disney Logo is coming along.

Cheers,
Mark

You guys are way over my head. Based on previous information in the forum, I rendered my home theater into the "20th Century Fox" type intro. The computer spent 20 some odd hours doing the rendering of 600 shots. Then I tried to animate it into a 18 - 20 second animated intro as I understood could be done. I have failed multiple times in accomplishing this feat.

Is this some software program I can get that steps me through the process or a short course buried in the forums that tells me how this is done?

I managed to find the 18 second (or so) 20th Century Fox music file so IF I can figure out how to animate it in about that length of time, I am ready to burn it to a DVD for my home theater.

You guys are way over my head. Based on previous information in the forum, I rendered my home theater into the "20th Century Fox" type intro. The computer spent 20 some odd hours doing the rendering of 600 shots. Then I tried to animate it into a 18 - 20 second animated intro as I understood could be done. I have failed multiple times in accomplishing this feat.

Is this some software program I can get that steps me through the process or a short course buried in the forums that tells me how this is done?

I managed to find the 18 second (or so) 20th Century Fox music file so IF I can figure out how to animate it in about that length of time, I am ready to burn it to a DVD for my home theater.


If you rendered the blender file as an avi with 30 frames per second then it should be close to the 20 seconds, all you need to do is add the music.

I used blender to render it as an avi, then used Windows Movie Maker to add the sound.

BritInVA, I am sorry to have kept you waiting so long for this Disney animation. For whatever reason I simply cannot achieve the results that I want with the flags blowing in the wind and thus have become very discouraged. I also spent a week on business travel and had family staying with me for 3 weeks so haven't had nearly as much time to spend on this animation as I might have liked.

I've toyed with millions of ways to render the flags as softbodies with various amounts of mass, wind and gravity, but nothing works to my satisfaction. Most of the time things will look alright for about 160-200 frames but eventually the system reaches "steady state" if you will, and all motion stops. In other words after oscillating around for some time the force of gravity and the force of wind will eventually just cancel each other out and the flag will come to rest at some awkward diagonal angle. There are ways to "fake" this blowing in the wind effect using a procedural normal texture on a static object, but I am not satisfied with how that method looks in this animation. In short, for lack of a better method I simply cannot finish the project.

What I will be happy to do is release some .blend files for any interested parties. I wouldn't mind quickly slapping together a file where the flags are completely static and don't move at all, so that anyone can go ahead and just render that version. If I remember correctly everything else works well enough, and I'd even improved the tinkerbell arch and fairy dust since last uploading a demo. I can also upload my main file where the flags are set up as softbodies so that anyone can play with the variables and see if their luck is better than mine.

I don't know what we have around here for Blender expertise, I'm a complete noob myself, but if there was anyone with the skill to wave my flags even halfway realistically I would be extremely grateful. Give me a day or so and I will upload what exists of the project so far.

Well I may have spoken too soon... :D

In an effort to show everyone what I was whining about I wanted to make a quick clip showing what my soft body flags looked like compared to a procedural texture and a plain old static object. I figured this would show the "steady state" behavior problem that I referred to last post as well.

Anyways, by sheer accident I figured out that something I'd long believed impossible is in fact quite easy to do... dynamically changing the wind strength! There is no key for this that you can insert with the "i" key, but on the IPO graph itself there is an "fstrength" key and it actually works. By changing the wind to blow harder and softer over time the flag can never get to a steady state with the force of gravity and is constantly in motion!

Combined with this fact I just stumbled across a tutorial of someone rendering a sail for a boat and realized that they are using different weights for their soft body vertices than I was. A weight of 1 means the vertex is immobile (ie: the part of a flag attached to the pole) and I was using a weight of 0 for all other points to allow them to move freely. This resulted in a very jerky unrealistic motion as there was practically zero inertia, but by setting my vertices to weight .25 as in the tutorial the motion is smoothed out considerably.

So I now submit to you all the demo clip showing the behavior of 3 types of flags both close up and at a distance similar to that in the Disney animation. I'll admit that the wind could use a little more "oomph" but that can be fixed in the final Disney version. You'll also notice that this procedural texture looks like junk up close, but is almost passable at a distance... it just wasn't good enough for me :rolleyes: At least I now know how to resolve my flag problems, and hopefully this weekend will get some time to apply the new knowledge to my Disney project.

Thanks to BritInVA for spurring my interest in this again, if all goes well I may just finish this project yet! :eek:

Well I may have spoken too soon... :D

In an effort to show everyone what I was whining about I wanted to make a quick clip showing what my soft body flags looked like compared to a procedural texture and a plain old static object. I figured this would show the "steady state" behavior problem that I referred to last post as well.

Anyways, by sheer accident I figured out that something I'd long believed impossible is in fact quite easy to do... dynamically changing the wind strength! There is no key for this that you can insert with the "i" key, but on the IPO graph itself there is an "fstrength" key and it actually works. By changing the wind to blow harder and softer over time the flag can never get to a steady state with the force of gravity and is constantly in motion!

Combined with this fact I just stumbled across a tutorial of someone rendering a sail for a boat and realized that they are using different weights for their soft body vertices than I was. A weight of 1 means the vertex is immobile (ie: the part of a flag attached to the pole) and I was using a weight of 0 for all other points to allow them to move freely. This resulted in a very jerky unrealistic motion as there was practically zero inertia, but by setting my vertices to weight .25 as in the tutorial the motion is smoothed out considerably.

So I now submit to you all the demo clip showing the behavior of 3 types of flags both close up and at a distance similar to that in the Disney animation. I'll admit that the wind could use a little more "oomph" but that can be fixed in the final Disney version. You'll also notice that this procedural texture looks like junk up close, but is almost passable at a distance... it just wasn't good enough for me :rolleyes: At least I now know how to resolve my flag problems, and hopefully this weekend will get some time to apply the new knowledge to my Disney project.

Thanks to BritInVA for spurring my interest in this again, if all goes well I may just finish this project yet! :eek:

OK, now I see what you were worried about and it makes sense.

The soft body definitely looks better than the other 2.

Congratulations on the Discovery! Please let us know when you think it's ready.

-t

Thanks to BritInVA for spurring my interest in this again, if all goes well I may just finish this project yet! :eek:

Glad that I could be of inspirational assistance :D

Cheers,
Mark

Well just for the heck of it I thought I'd upload what the project looks like in its current state. The softbody flags are working much much better now, but I have to admit I'm still disappointed in the end result, and all of the work that's gone into them just doesn't seem worth the effect achieved. I think the biggest part of it is that they are so far off in the distance that the detail of the softbody simulation is lost.

For comparison's sake, this .zip file also has an older test render from back in May where I believe I referred to the flags as being "on crack". This should show just how far the effect has come since I first started twiddling with it, but I think at this point I'm going to just call it "done".

Please let me know if you guys see anything abnormal with this final test render or if you have any last minute suggestions or fixes, otherwise later tonight or tomorrow I'll upload the .blend file and call it a wrap on this effort.

Oh as a special bonus I'm uploading the result of an idea that I had around the 4th of July that never made it out of the conceptual phase. I spent an hour or 2 playing with this and reading tutorials and unfortunately got fed up with it and don't plan on touching it again :mad: . I just thought perhaps someone else might draw inspiration from the idea, or else it's just a cool screenshot :D .

That to me looks excellent - see what you meean about the effort vs. how noticible the flags are.......maybe on the big screen they will be more noticible.

Have you thought about fading it out at the end to blue screen for aiding transition to another clip in a intro? Those that don't want the transition can easily not render those last frames.

Will the Walt Disney text be easily editable to replace with a custom name?

Great work and glad you found time and the solution to be able to finish.

Cheers,
Mark

Agreed, I think it looks good. Will serve as a perfect base for a lot of custom work. Always kind of cool that you know a bunch of people are using your artwork and showing it off.

Thanks guys for the positive feedback. To answer a few of your questions:

The extra time at the front of the clip where nothing moves was put there intentionally to allow you to fade in from black on top of it or simply crop to the point where the movement starts, depending on how you want your clip to start. In a similar vein, at the end of the clip I left some time where nothing is moving except the softbody flags, to allow you to fade to black if that is what you want. In my own final render I anticipate fading both in and out of the clip, but other people may simply use it as demoed or even crop the sides.

The Walt Disney Text couldn't be easier to edit. If you're familiar with my 2D version of the Disney animation you'll remember that it's just straight text with an imported font. All you do is select it, press tab, delete the existing text and type what you want it to say. Maybe some re-centering is required if you type something very long or short, but otherwise it's cake. The goal of the animations I produce is to minimize the effort that someone else has to put into customizing them :D

Now, there is one thing that I will have to ask "the community" to assist me with if anyone is willing. I have tried and tried but been unable to find a music file to match with this animation. The one that I want can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLWAt-6Oli0. I'm sure that with a loopback the audio could be recorded from YouTube, or it could be ripped from a Disney/Pixar DVD, but my soundcard input is busted and I'm too lazy to go hunt for a DVD. I would very much appreciate if someone could provide an .mp3 file of that music to couple with this animation.

Anyways, I was tied up this weekend so I apologize for not posting. I will attempt to stick the .blend file online this evening after work. Thanks again for the compliments!

Well I'm going to need some suggestions and assistance in getting the .blend file uploaded to the forums. Because the softbody simulations are actually pre-baked right into the .blend file, the final size is something like 11MB. Even using maximal compression .zip or .rar I could only get it down to about 4.5MB which is far too large to post here. I tried using a multiple part archive but because of the file extension limitation I cant post .001 or .r01 files, only ".zip"

I don't want to break any forum rules trying to get around the filters for attachments so if someone would be willing to host this somewhere for me it'd be appreciated.

I'm going to start a 1280x720 render to run overnight and find out if there's any little glitches to take care of, but I believe that this is ready to go pending a place to put it.

BritInVA,
I have to admit I didn't read your initial question closely enough and I didn't see that you were asking about fading to "blue" at the end of the animation. This is certainly possible by setting an Alpha IPO on the materials used for the castle, text, arch, etc. and have them all fade to 0.000 alpha at the end of the clip. Everything would just gradually disappear leaving only the blue background color. For now I will leave that as an "exercise for the reader", but if you would really like it that way and are having trouble with Blender I could probably whip something together for you.

Thanks everyone for your support. Please let me know if someone is willing to host this, and also if anyone can find the accompanying audio file for me it would be much appreciated!

I will host it for you. I am trying to get the audio for you. Once I get you the audio, you can add that to the blender project and send me the zip file.

Magius,

Great work. Would you be willing to add the name of my theater to the intro and render it for me for a nominal fee? I could never get the hang of blender.

This would make a great addition to my universal intro!

let me know via PM. Thanks.

Hi Magius,

Great work!!

I can host it for you too... The Fox .blend intro is already on my site. I can set up FTP for you to upload it.

I'm at work now and can't play the YouTube video, but would this be the original Disney music theme that is in the original clip?
If so, why settle for an .mp3 version? I once extracted the Fox Fanfare from DVD as a AC3-track. If I can only remember how i did it ( :) )i'd be happy to do this for the Disney anim aswell.

I'll see if i can get around to it this week... (both the remembering and the doing... )

Hi Magius,

Great work!!

I can host it for you too... The Fox .blend intro is already on my site. I can set up FTP for you to upload it.

I'm at work now and can't play the YouTube video, but would this be the original Disney music theme that is in the original clip?
If so, why settle for an .mp3 version? I once extracted the Fox Fanfare from DVD as a AC3-track. If I can only remember how i did it ( :) )i'd be happy to do this for the Disney anim aswell.

I'll see if i can get around to it this week... (both the remembering and the doing... )


If I remember....DVDdecrypter will allow you to de-mux the audio portion out.
I did the same thing for the FOX fanfare track. I'll do it for the Disney track if folks have problems. Just won't get done till the weekend.

Let me know.

-t

Thanks everyone for the rush of support!

W84no1 already supplied me with a .wav file and I spent a bit of time playing with it to sync it up to the animation. Despite my best efforts, I didn't render this at exactly the same speed as the original so it doesn't exactly match the music. A bit of tweaking to the .wav file and I bet I can make it close enough though. I will be sending him the file to host tomorrow and hopefully have a modified audio file to accompany it. I'll send the file to anyone else that wants it as well, and you're all free to rehost it or do anything else with it that you like.

Also, an AC3 rip sounds like a great idea but then I wouldn't be able to play with it to sync it up better with the animation. On my previous Fox and Universal intros I just used a stereo mp3 as I doubt my audience will be discriminating enough to notice :D Hosting an AC3 version would be good though for those who want to take that route.

Greg_Mitch: If it comes down to it I can probably make you a custom .blend file when I find a little more time, but you'll have to render it on your own machine. Otherwise I'm not sure how I would get it to you as the end videos can be a little large. I wouldn't feel right charging you for it, as it's not hard to do, plus I don't want to step on Disney's copyrights/trademarks :rolleyes:. Perhaps once the source file gets hosted another member will be willing to do it for you as well in case you don't want to wait for me to get around to it.

Thanks again everyone for being so supportive. It's thrilling to see this thread come back to life after so long of inactivity. I halfway expected nobody to be reading it anymore and that only 1-2 people would notice the completed animation. If only the other members who were working in Blender had news on their latest projects... I'd really like to see if anyone else is still playing with the program.

Thanks everyone for the rush of support!

W84no1 already supplied me with a .wav file and I spent a bit of time playing with it to sync it up to the animation. Despite my best efforts, I didn't render this at exactly the same speed as the original so it doesn't exactly match the music. A bit of tweaking to the .wav file and I bet I can make it close enough though. I will be sending him the file to host tomorrow and hopefully have a modified audio file to accompany it. I'll send the file to anyone else that wants it as well, and you're all free to rehost it or do anything else with it that you like.

Also, an AC3 rip sounds like a great idea but then I wouldn't be able to play with it to sync it up better with the animation. On my previous Fox and Universal intros I just used a stereo mp3 as I doubt my audience will be discriminating enough to notice :D Hosting an AC3 version would be good though for those who want to take that route.

Greg_Mitch: If it comes down to it I can probably make you a custom .blend file when I find a little more time, but you'll have to render it on your own machine. Otherwise I'm not sure how I would get it to you as the end videos can be a little large. I wouldn't feel right charging you for it, as it's not hard to do, plus I don't want to step on Disney's copyrights/trademarks :rolleyes:. Perhaps once the source file gets hosted another member will be willing to do it for you as well in case you don't want to wait for me to get around to it.

Thanks again everyone for being so supportive. It's thrilling to see this thread come back to life after so long of inactivity. I halfway expected nobody to be reading it anymore and that only 1-2 people would notice the completed animation. If only the other members who were working in Blender had news on their latest projects... I'd really like to see if anyone else is still playing with the program.

Ripping an audio stream is nothing compared to what folks like you are able to do with Blender!
I've nearly beaten my head against the concrete walls trying to figure out the basics of changing the text in the blend files. Never mind figuring out how to make a circle colored blue. :D
You wouldn't believe how many saves I do per edit... :o

Thank you for the hard work.
-t

Hey guys, been reading through this thread and sounds like a bunch of interesting projects are going on. I know after I saw the FOX intro that I figured I'd give it a go an try to create my own custom intro. Its not based on any studio intro or anything like that, but more like some of the intros for the theater itself that I remember seeing. Any how, I wanted to post a video of my finished project and see what others think about it. I've left it as a still fairly large .avi file (4MB encoded with XVID) so I've got it hosted off site. Download it from htintro_xvid.avi (http://www.timncindy.com/video/htintro_xvid.avi)

Just a little synopsis to explain some elements in the video. The remote control you see is an accurate 3D representation of my actual HT remote. The second half of the intro actually takes place in a 3D model of my theater room. I think I've spent upwards of 300-400 hours (or more) on this, and it feels SO good to finally feel like I'm done and have accomplished something.

I'd love to hear any comments and feedback on this, good or bad. Thanks, and good luck to everyone on their own projects.

- Tim

Hey guys, been reading through this thread and sounds like a bunch of interesting projects are going on. I know after I saw the FOX intro that I figured I'd give it a go an try to create my own custom intro. Its not based on any studio intro or anything like that, but more like some of the intros for the theater itself that I remember seeing. Any how, I wanted to post a video of my finished project and see what others think about it. I've left it as a still fairly large .avi file (4MB encoded with XVID) so I've got it hosted off site. Download it from htintro_xvid.avi (http://www.timncindy.com/video/htintro_xvid.avi)

Just a little synopsis to explain some elements in the video. The remote control you see is an accurate 3D representation of my actual HT remote. The second half of the intro actually takes place in a 3D model of my theater room. I think I've spent upwards of 300-400 hours (or more) on this, and it feels SO good to finally feel like I'm done and have accomplished something.

I'd love to hear any comments and feedback on this, good or bad. Thanks, and good luck to everyone on their own projects.

- Tim

That looks good, I wish I had the time and skills to do that. My theater is still in the construction phase.

-w84no1

Hey guys, been reading through this thread and sounds like a bunch of interesting projects are going on. I know after I saw the FOX intro that I figured I'd give it a go an try to create my own custom intro. Its not based on any studio intro or anything like that, but more like some of the intros for the theater itself that I remember seeing. Any how, I wanted to post a video of my finished project and see what others think about it. I've left it as a still fairly large .avi file (4MB encoded with XVID) so I've got it hosted off site. Download it from htintro_xvid.avi (http://www.timncindy.com/video/htintro_xvid.avi)

Just a little synopsis to explain some elements in the video. The remote control you see is an accurate 3D representation of my actual HT remote. The second half of the intro actually takes place in a 3D model of my theater room. I think I've spent upwards of 300-400 hours (or more) on this, and it feels SO good to finally feel like I'm done and have accomplished something.

I'd love to hear any comments and feedback on this, good or bad. Thanks, and good luck to everyone on their own projects.



- Tim



Tim,
Wow! Thats excellent!! You should give yourself a BIG pat on the back for that!
I can see why it took the 300-400 hours it did.

Congrats,
-t

I'd love to hear any comments and feedback on this, good or bad. Thanks, and good luck to everyone on their own projects.

- Tim
Wow! That is very nicely done. Do you care to share the .blend file?

tpag2000,
All I can say is WOW! That truly was incredible and far beyond my own capabilities. I can still barely putter around in Blender but with enough trial and error I've managed to copy existing works such as the movie studio intros. Creating something entirely new is a whole different story and I think you did a fantastic job.

Do you have any plans for future projects or was this your one big hurrah? I'd love to see the .blend file for this project if you were inclined to share it. In any case, congratulations on a job well done!

Well I've just finished tweaking the audio file supplied by w84no1 to a point that it's a good enough match with my animation. I wrapped up the .blend file, the tweaked .wav, and the Disney style truetype font into a 6.72MB zip file that is ready for you all to dig in to. All credit for the font of course goes to the original author, and his readme is included as well for completeness. The .zip file was just sent to w84no1 and hopefully he'll let you all know where to go get it shortly. DenW, or anyone else for that matter, send me a PM and I'll be more than happy to email or FTP the .zip file to you for rehosting.

I also finished my 1280x720 test render and everything looks pretty good. There are 2 very minor things in the animation that bug me but I'm convincing myself to ignore them as the last thing I want to do is work on this anymore ;) I'm also not going to tell what they are as I figure why draw attention to the flaws and potentially ruin it for someone else :D

A funny observation: Once compressed with Xvid my 1280x720 render is only 6.11MB... ie: smaller than even the *zipped* files that created it. I just thought that was interesting.

Thank you all for your support!

Can't wait to see this... anticipation is killing me... my computer is going to be rendering all weekend :)

Wow! That is very nicely done. Do you care to share the .blend file?

I was actually thinking about that before I posted this. I haven't actually decided, but I can't see why I couldn't share... =)

I'll actually have to do a little bit of work to figure out how to share them. The project is actually split across a few .blend files. The theater exterior is one file, my HT room is a second, and the words that show up on the screen is actually a third (rendered and used as an animated texture in the HT room .blend). The steps of putting it together aren't too bad, but are a bit more than just hitting render. Also, most of the text has been converted to a mesh for one reason or another (wanted to use warp tool, funky stray vertices from the font, multiple textures), so its not easily editable.

Do you have any plans for future projects or was this your one big hurrah?

I don't actually have any plans, but that doesn't mean I won't be doing anything else. Just not sure what I'd do next. I've still got a lot of learning to do in blender.

- Tim

Magius,
I am setting up FTP as we speak. I'll pm you shortly.

Everyone:
I am having problem rendering things in Blender, which i hope someone can help me with.
I downloaded and altered the Universal file, but after rendering I can not view the file.
I am rendering to a raw AVI, and have tried this with both HD and SD resolutions, getting the same results on both. Windows Media Player (and other players) just says it can't play the file.
Am I missing something?

Thanks!

DenW,
The file is now on the FTP site where you asked me to put it. Thank you!

As far as your other problem I have no idea. Have you uninstalled Blender and reinstalled it clean to see if that helps? Playing the RAW .avi file is a difficult task and most computers would be expected to skip and stutter, but there is no reason that they wouldn't at least play the file. Sorry I couldn't be of any more assistance.

OK guys, here's the url:

http://walterfang.homedns.org/downloads/HT-Blender

All the AVS-member created Intro's are here in blender-files. The DisneyIntro is in the DisneyIntro folder. From here you can save the file (7MB) to your HD. My bandwith is limited, so if it takes too long please stop the download and try again later.

Have fun!!

Re: the rendering problem: i'm running Vista on that PC. The rendering is not a problem afaics, the playing back is... may be a Vista problem. It searches for the correct codec, but can't find any...

ewwww Vista... :p

Since you say it tries to find the proper codec and can't, it really sounds like a Vista problem. I don't use Vista myself so I don't know how to help you, but I still don't see any reason why WMP wouldn't be able to play a raw rgb .avi file.

If you want to try something different, change your file output type from AVI-Raw to AVI-Codec in Blender and choose one of the codecs that it finds on your machine. I would recommend using the latest version MSWMV codec it finds so you know it's compatible with WMP. Render a short clip this way and see if it plays, and that should prove that it's not a blender problem but something with Vista's WMP.

Thanks again for hosting my Disney intro. I hope people are able to make use of this with their own theater names. Please feel free to ask for help if you get stuck, and lets see some screenshots of your finished renders!

Here is another location to get the file.

Zip file (http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects/Walt_Disney_3D_(Final).zip) (6.8 mb)

Rar file (http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects/Walt_Disney_3D_(Final).rar) (5.3 mb)

Both archives have the same files in them, I was just trying to get the size of the download down a bit.

Thanks again to Magius for the hard work!!!



DenW, I have Vista and I will try and render something and see if I can play it back.

And as promissed, the AC3 intro:

http://walterfang.homedns.org/downloads/HT-Blender

In the DisneyIntro subfolder. File size is 739 kb. Again, have fun.

Magius: as I said to you before, glad to be able to return something for all that AVS has given me.
Re: the blender problem: i tried all sorts of AVI settings, even rendered one in .MOV. That one worked, but my PC isn't fast enough to play it back in HD. Could make a lower res rendering, but i'd rather do a high res rendering to AVI once and go from there.
Magius, would you be able to write up a short explanation on how to change the text?

w8... that would be great. It seems i'm also having problems viewing the intro tpag2000 made, and i'd very much like to see that... :(

DenW I'll put together some brief instructions another time as I'm currently on my way out to Disney's Blizzard Beach water park. Kinda a fitting reward for completing the animation :D .

Anyway, as best as I can summarize here:
1.) Right click the text, press TAB to enter edit mode, backspace out the text and type what you want, press TAB to go back to object mode.
2.) Go to frame 187 and move what used to be the "Walt Disney" text to wherever you want it (ie: recenter it, etc.). A tip here is to render a screenshot while you're playing with it to make sure your text is fully inside the halo on this frame. Also, you can press "s" and move the mouse to scale the text larger or smaller to make it fit in the halo. Once you're happy with the placement press "i" then choose "loc" from the popup menu. This sets a location key at frame 187.
3.) Go to frame 225 and repeat step 2 for what used to be the "pictures" text. Here you don't have to worry about any halo or anything, just line it up with the rest of the objects by eye and scale it however you like. Dont forget the location key ("i" -> "loc") when you're done.
4.) Final step is to render a screenshot on frame 375 (last frame) and check out where Tinkerbell's arch is. Depending on what you've entered for text there might be some overlap with the arch, and you might want to go back to step 2 to reposition or recale your text. It's all a matter of taste.

That's all there is to editing the text, it's mostly just changing the scale and position to taste and then making sure you set the location keys on the appropriate frames to tell it where it needs to be. Now let's see some screenshots of your guys' efforts!

It seems i'm also having problems viewing the intro tpag2000 made, and i'd very much like to see that... :(

DenW, my AVI is compressed using the Xvid codec. You may need to download the codec and install it in order to view it. www.xvid.org (http://www.xvid.org) I assume it will run on Vista, but it doesn't say anything one way or the other on the site. I'm surprised that WMP is having a problem with it, Xvid is basically MPEG4 so I would have expected it to play.

If you're going to be doing these renders you may want to pick this up anyway. I find that the quality is excellent for the file size you end up with.

- Tim

Magius - I have installed the Walt Disney font via Control Panel - Fonts. However, when I open the blend the Font does not appear in the Disney font.....is this normal?

Cheers,
Mark

BritInVA,
I didn't actually install the font the way that it seems you did, but rather just import it into Blender. It has to be imported once and then unless you move the .blend or .ttf file it will remember to use the font from then on. Don't ask me why it doesn't just embed the font into the .blend file the way it does textures or softbody bakes... but anyways here is what you need to do:

1.) Right click on the text to select it and press F9 to bring up the edit panel.
2.) On the font tab click the load button and browse to the .ttf file.
3.) Click the "select font" button once you've clicked the .ttf and the font will be automatically applied to the text. Now you're good to go.

Sorry for the lack of instructions associated with this file. It sounds like I should whip some up, you just might have to give me a couple of days. I figured that those who had done the Fox animation or especially the Universal animation would have minimal problems with this one, but loading the font is something that only those who played with my 2D Disney animation would recall. Anyways, continue to bring up the issues and I'll do what I can to walk you through them.

Perfect - Thanks

Its looks like you've been busy and output great, whileI went on vacation and did nothing. :)

Adam

Atagert,
It's been a long time since I've heard from you. Tell me you've got something up your sleeve, even a half-done project, something that tells me I'm not the only one still playing with Blender :D .

In all seriousness I hope you had fun on your vacation. I hadn't worked with Blender since May when I temporarily gave up on this Disney thing, but just last weekend someone rekindled this thread and I decided to give the project one last hurrah. Now that it's done I'm not sure what I'll do, but I probably won't produce anything new for a while.

Someone else is going to have to pick up the Blender torch and run with it *nudge nudge*.

OK - here is a render with my Theatre name

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k242/BritInVA/HT/Disney-Wright.jpg

Cheers,
Mark

Magius - After my render I'm seeing a some light black boxes around the castle then again as the arc is drawn... not sure if I screwed something up when I edited the text, I'm going to try and render again and see if I can see them... as well, I find if the text is longer then "Walt Disney" when the words light up it is still lighting up only enough room for "Walt Disney" and not my entire "Sheahan Family"... I did edit the Fox intro without too much trouble, but this one seems a little more complex. Any thoughts?

Magius - After my render I'm seeing a some light black boxes around the castle then again as the arc is drawn... not sure if I screwed something up when I edited the text, I'm going to try and render again and see if I can see them... as well, I find if the text is longer then "Walt Disney" when the words light up it is still lighting up only enough room for "Walt Disney" and not my entire "Sheahan Family"... I did edit the Fox intro without too much trouble, but this one seems a little more complex. Any thoughts?

I don't see the black boxes on my render.

You need to rescale "Sheahan Family", see post #134 (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=11087343&&#post11087343) step 2) for details

The problem I now have is the word that was 'P I C T U R E S' seems to start at the bottom of the screen around frame 180 and the jumps to the correct place at frame 225. Does not do that on the Magius example.

What did I do wrong?

Cheers,
Mark

OK - here is a render with my Theatre name

http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k242/BritInVA/HT/Disney-Wright.jpg

Cheers,
Mark


Looks nice Mark! Congrats!!

-t

BritInVA,
Your render is looking great except you Brits misspell the word "theater" :p j/k. I think I know what may be up with your "jumping" text problem; did you by chance change the resolution and/or aspect ratio? I designed the animation for a 16x9 aspect ratio, doing the development and test renders in 800x450 with the final product expected to be rendered in 1280x720 or 1920x1080. The trick that I use to make the "Walt Disney" and "Pictures" text appear is to enter a position keyframe with them slightly off camera and then when the time is right enter a new position keyframe with where I need them to be. In the case of the "Pictures" text it has off-camera keyframes at frame 1 and 224, and then at 225 I have it jump to where I want it.

It sounds like you may have changed something that put the original location within the field of view after the camera zooms out a bit, and then of course it will jump to where it needs to be at frame 225. I'm guessing that you used a 4:3 aspect ratio and created this problem? :D In any case it's easy to fix. Just go to frame 224 and drag the text out of the field of view and set a new position keyframe, then go to frame 1 and do the same thing. This should keep it off camera until at frame 225 it goes where it's needed.

Roar,
BritInVA already answered your second question about the scaling, you'll need to rescale any text that is significantly longer or shorter than "Walt Disney" to make it fit inside the halo. The best frame to experiment with placement and scale is frame 187, as this is where the keyframe is set to make the text appear inside the halo. See the instructions a few posts up.

As far as your issues with the black boxes I'm not entirely sure what that would be. The trick I used to cover up and reveal the arc involves 2 boxes the same color as the background (ie: invisible), and if the spotlight were to shine off them the right way it can make them slightly visible. I know this because I had to make sure it didn't happen when animating their movement and the spotlight, and I also turned off their ability to reflect light and their specularity. Unless you changed something with the scene lighting or the materials on those boxes I cant imagine they would be the problem, but I also can't think of any other issue that would make you see boxes in your render. Perhaps you could post a screenshot so that I could help identify the issue?

Glad to see people have already dug into this one and I'll be glad to help with any other issues that you are finding.

It sounds like you may have changed something that put the original location within the field of view after the camera zooms out a bit, and then of course it will jump to where it needs to be at frame 225. I'm guessing that you used a 4:3 aspect ratio and created this problem? :D In any case it's easy to fix. Just go to frame 224 and drag the text out of the field of view and set a new position keyframe, then go to frame 1 and do the same thing. This should keep it off camera until at frame 225 it goes where it's needed.

Yeah, I changed to 1080x720 in error instead of 1280x720. Corrected this and rendering again now.

[EDIT] Yep - that fixed the issue.

Thanks,
Mark

Well Mark I'm glad that your problem was easy enough to fix. Now to figure out what is wrong with Roar's render. Hopefully with a screen grab of what he's seeing I can help figure it out.

For my own custom render I tried a few different things and eventually settled on "Welcome To" - "Herndon Theaters" and/or "Herndon Theaters" - "Feature Presentation". I've attached screenshots of what they both look like if anyone is curious. For one thing, the 2nd pic proves that fairly long text can be made to fit under the halo without looking too bad. (HerndonTheaters is 15 characters, to WaltDisney's 10, and Wright Family's 13 :D )

There's aspects that I like about both of these pics, so I'm not sure which I'll wind up using in the theater. I may also create a 3rd option changing "Feature Presentation" to some other tag line, assuming I can think of something clever.

Anyways, I can't wait to see what else some of you come up with. We should give out a prize to the person that fits the most text under the halo while maintaining the overall look of the logo :p . According to Roar he's only trying for 14 (Sheahan Family), so someone else is going to have to step up and top my own character count.

I just rendered mine and it looks awesome.

DenW, I have the k-lite codec pack installed and it has most of the common video codecs that you will see on the internet. It works fine with Vista and I am able to watch the render without any problems.

DenW, I have the k-lite codec pack installed and it has most of the common video codecs that you will see on the internet. It works fine with Vista and I am able to watch the render without any problems.

w8... Thanks for trying it. I installed the XVID codec saturday, and now at least I get a something on screen, but it isn't exactly watchable. I'll give the k-lite codec pack a try...

Thanks for the tips, I will try to get a chance tonight to update my render and see what happens... internet is down at home so I will have to print the instructions out and try again :)

w8... Thanks for trying it. I installed the XVID codec saturday, and now at least I get a something on screen, but it isn't exactly watchable. I'll give the k-lite codec pack a try...


Here is exacly how i got mine to work.

1. install k-lite codec mega pack
2. render as raw avi
3. use Virtualdub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) to encode as Divx 6 and add the sound.

You can use whatever video encoding software you like, I just am very familar with virtualdub.

The easiest way to get it to work is to use Windows Movie Maker and add the sound, but then it is WMV instead of AVI.

Here is exacly how i got mine to work.

1. install k-lite codec mega pack
2. render as raw avi
3. use Virtualdub (http://www.virtualdub.org/) to encode as Divx 6 and add the sound.

You can use whatever video encoding software you like, I just am very familar with virtualdub.

The easiest way to get it to work is to use Windows Movie Maker and add the sound, but then it is WMV instead of AVI.

w8... Thanks! The codec pack did the trick.

tpag2000: Nice intro!! Well done...

What format settings are you guys rendering these in to get the best 16:9 quality. I understand I need the final resolution to be 1280x720 or 1920x1080, but what about all the other format settings such as aspX and aspY.

Are you guys just picking a preset on the right hand side such as NTSC or PAL 16:9, then modifying the resolution?

Ronnie

aspX and aspY I've always left at 1:1. I'm not sure at all what they do, but that always seemed to work for me.

Speaking of settings in Blender, I have my own question, along with some observations, regarding how quickly you can make it render. First the question: I have a new dual core machine and Blender will only use "50%" of the total CPU, usually about 75% of 1 core and 25% of the other, totaling up to a complete single core. It will never go over this amount, so I feel like I'm wasting available horsepower. Does anyone know if there's a way to correct this or is this fairly normal? I know that if there aren't threads available theres nothing the extra processor can do, but I thought rendering engines were one of the programs out there that were heavily multithreaded...?

Now for the observations. I did a lot of playing with the render settings and also using one of the optimized Blender builds linked to in this post or the Universal post and got some interesting results.

1.) Using stock Blender form blender.org the test frames that I was rendering took 3.9 seconds each on my 1.8GHz C2D.
2.) Using the optimized Blender build the same frames took 2.5 seconds each, or almost a 36% reduction in time.
3.) Then I fiddled with the Xparts and Yparts settings (default 4 and 4) thinking maybe by making more pieces it would make more threads and use my processor more. This was entirely backwards and in fact the less pieces the faster it rendered. The best I got was at Xparts = 2, and Yparts = 1 where the render time came down to 1.8 seconds per frame, or another 28% reduction.
4.) Finally I decided to overclock the processor to see what effect that would have, and jacked it up to 2.8 GHz. This is a 55.5% overclock, and further reduced rendering time to 1.25 seconds, for another reduction of 30.5%. I was surprised that it wasn't closer to a 1:1 linear reduction when overclocking, but still it wasn't bad.

Anyway, to sum all of this up, the total render time went from 3.9 seconds per frame to 1.25 seconds after all this, for an overall reduction of 68%. You can't complain much about reducing your render times to under half before overclocking, and down below 1/3 with a moderate overclock. In the end though, none of this helped me solve the "50% CPU usage" problem, so if anyone can find a way to improve that for me I'd be particularly grateful.

Thanks much, and I hope my ramblings didn't get out of hand. :D

I'm also setting AspX and AspY to 1. Seems like the safest value.

About CPU usage: i'm using a dual core laptop for rendering with Blender and I had almost the same problem. The THREADS setting in Blender (the rendering menu) allows you to set how many threads Blender will use for this. Play a little with this value, when I set it to something other than 1 my second CPU is participating in the rendering.
The great thing about Blender is that even though CPU is at 100% (both cores) you can still do other stuff on your computer.

When I rendered the Fox intro a while back i used the intel optimized version of Blender, which dramatically reduced render time. It still took a couple of days, mind you...

DenW,
First of all thank you for the tip, but I'm curious what version of Blender are you using? I've looked and looked for a way to change the number of threads in Blender but have not been able to find it in 2.42a. Because you said it's there i scoured and scoured some more this morning, and did eventually find a button in the output panel called "threads" that on mouseover says "Enable/Disable render in 2 threads". I don't have time to experiment right now, but that button sounds like it will solve my problem by creating a 2nd thread.

I would still like to know about this threads setting that you mentioned however, so that I could play with it and try settings other than 1 or 2. I do plan on upgrading to a quad-core in the future, but ONLY if Blender is compatible with rendering in 4 threads, which simply by using the button I found I'd guess my version isn't.

Anyways, thanks again for the help. Maybe I'll re-download one of the optimized versions of Blender and see if it had the menu you're talking about. I'd really like to see what kind of render savings I could get out of a moderately overclocked CPU w/ an optimized Blender build and set to run in multithreaded mode. :D

Magius,

Yes, I meant to change that in my post, but didn't have time. The THREADS option is in the Output panel. Maybe this thread is of use to you:
http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9755&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

I'm using V2.43 I think, but not sure (at work now). I'm curious about the rendering times you mentioned: I started a new rendering of the Universal intro this morning but render times are about 24 seconds per frame. The 4 second render time, is that with the Disney intro?

Update: This morning I did a test render of the Universal intro, about 80 frames. I could play that without a problem with Media Player. The final full length rendering (700 frames) is over 4GB (1080p), same codec settings, but now Media Player says the file is corrupt...
Is this just a problem of file size or am I missing something else completely?

I have similar problems rendering in high def. An easy solution is to render 0 to 350, and then 351 to 700. The 2 files patch together seemlessly in a video editor when you add the audio.

BTW DenW, thanks for hosting these files. Here's the audio that goes with the Universal intro...

http://www.reelclassics.com/Audio_Video/Music7q/universalpictures_moderntheme.mp3

DenW,
Apparently the option that you're talking about is a simple pushbutton in v2.42a but can bet set to a value from 1 to 8 in 2.44. In any case, this is the solution that I was looking for so thank you very much for pointing it out.

Also, because you asked about the testing I had done, and I couldn't remember what the file was that I was rendering, I decided to redo the tests with the Disney animation. I set the resolution to 1920x1080 to make the machine work harder and animated just the first couple of frames to see how long it took.

Using the standard Blender distribution from Blender.org v2.42a:
Threads....Xparts....Yparts....Seconds....Improvement
Off............4............4............16.16
Off............2............1............15.24.........5.7%
On............2............1..............8.19.........46.3%

Using a CVS optimized distribution of Blender 2.44:
Threads....Xparts....Yparts....Seconds....Improvement
1...............4............4............9.52..........41.1 %
1...............2............1............8.71..........8.5%
2...............2............1............4.83..........44.5 %
4...............2............1............4.88
4...............2............2............4.81

For the record, to animate the first frame of the Universal animation in 1280x720 res w/ threads enabled, Xparts and Yparts = 4, in the CVS optimized Blender takes me 17.28 seconds on my 1.8 GHz C2D. I'm curious to run the overclocking test again but looking at this data and the expected payoff I'm thinking it's not worth it. :p

So in conclusion:
1.) Enabling 2 threads will cut your render time roughly in half on a dual core machine. This one should have been obvious, and no before anyone asks Hyper Threading is not dual core :D
2.) Using an appropriate "optimized" Blender distribution should also cut your render time by as much as half, probably even without a dual core machine?
3.) Doing both of the above should cut your render time down to about 30% of what it used to be.
4.) Setting more threads than you have cores is useless, even if you set the appropriate number of Xparts and Yparts.
5.) As a word of warning, Xparts and Yparts need to be set based on what you're rendering. On a nice symmetrical animation like Disney where both cores will be fed basically identical data, 2 parts works. Where stuff is not symmetrical you'll want to break it up to let the cores balance easy pieces and hard pieces so that one doesn't finish long before the other and stall. This can be seen easily on the Universal animation when using less parts greatly increases the render times.

Anyways that's all I have for now. Thanks again DenW for the help in finding the thread option, it certainly makes a difference!

Sorry for this somewhat obvious question, but I've now customized and rendered the Disney intro and everything looks great. Just wanted to make sure Magius that indeed I'm not supposed to be seeing any signs of Tinkerbell. I know she was in an early attempt so I just had to make sure.

Thanks for all of your help thusfar!

-Ben

g1976b,
That was not my animation that had Tinkerbell in it, well actually it was but... ok starting over: I released Disney's older 2D logo quite some time ago, and one of the custom versions that somebody made included an image of Tinkerbell floating around the screen.

My animations try to look as close to the originals as possible with only the text being modified. For this reason there is no actual Tinkerbell in either of my animations (2D or 3D) but of course she is implied by the fairy dust falling from the arch as it appears.

An overcomplicated answer to a rather simple question, but the short answer is that there's no Tinkerbell :D

MikeFalz,

That is indeed the obvious solution. Why didn't I think of that?
Thanks for pointing that out. :)

Magius,

You're very welcome. Thank YOU for making the Disney intro. I haven't had a chance to edit and render it, but I will do that soon...

When ever I change the position (g) and scale of the text (s) and select render current frame the text always goes back to the original location and scale - I am obviously doing something wrong can anyone help? Steve

Theendisnye,
The reason for this is that there are already keyframes set telling the text where to be, and unless you overwrite the keyframe it won't show your changes.

The instructions are back on the last page, but the key you're looking for is "i" for insert, and then choose "pos" for position keyframe. The WaltDisney text has a keyframe on frame 187 and the pictures text is on 225. Make sure you do your scaling and such on these respective frames, and when it looks like it's in a good place overwrite the keyframe and do a test render. Repeat until you like the way the test render comes out.

Hope that helps!

Wow Magius, that was incredibly easy to use, thanks. My only issue is finding a program that will convert to an mpeg format and keep the resolution, that way I can import it on my PS3. So far I can use it as a mpg1 with low res.

Anyways, thanks again!

I'm not sure about the mpeg issue, I only use .avi myself. Back in the day I used to use a program called tMPEGenc or something like that to encode mpegs. I forget exactly why I had to use it (we're talking 8 or 9 years ago) but I would use it before running a file through virtualdub if vdub couldn't open the original file or something...?

Anyways, maybe that program is still around, or otherwise I'm sure there are better options nowadays that someone will suggest. In any case thanks for the compliment and I'm glad you enjoyed the intro!

I'd love to see one of you artistic/clever folks pull together a candy/popcorn/silence cell phone trailer. Thats one area that seems to be lacking for a cool custom theatre intro.

Cheers,
Mark

Mark,

That's a great idea. Several short video's come to mind:

- No Talking
- No Bag-O-Chips Noises
- No Cell Phones
- No Kicking Seats
- No Farting

...

By the way, I whipped up an extremely simplistic version of the Touchstone Pictures logo this morning if anyone is interested. The text is fully editable, so this is easier than pie to customize. I'll admit it's nothing spectacular, but for about an hour's work I figured maybe someone would find it interesting. The halo definitely needs some work when the lightning bolt appears, but again that's a very simple thing for interested parties to play with.

Funny enough, this animation uses the "cheat" I described above, so at the end when the lighting bolt appears I simply cover up the plain blue sphere with a plane textured with the lightning bolt logo. It's nothing fancy, but it works.

I've uploaded two low res sample videos of this animation, one showing custom text and the other with the familiar "touchstone" text. The .blend file is also in the package, as is the lightning bolt texture that I used to cover the plane if anyone wants to play with this.

I took your touchstone project and added a better logo. I will upload it when I get home tonight. It has been a while since I have seen this intro in an actual film, does it have sound?

I would like to see a Lions Gate type intro, wish I had the skills to do it.

I am new to the Forum and just came across this thread. I downloaded the Disney blend, however I do not see the fairy dust when I play back the animation rendered at 100 x 150 to see what it looks like.

Thanks to you and the guys for the great work.

Welcome to the forums loma! Hopefully you'll find all kinds of good information around here.

As much as what you claimed about rendering in low res didn't make sense, I just confirmed it and there is in fact no pixie dust at 150x100 resolution. Hey, at least you know it's not a problem on your end :D . My guess is that there just aren't enough pixels available so they got cut during the scaling process, but what do I know.

Anyway, render it in higher res and I promise you'll see the dust. ;) Before I bought my new computer I used to use 400x225 for my test renders and never noticed this kind of problem.

Thanks. Will use 400x225 and check it out.

Tried 400x225 and all is well. Thanks again.

Has anyone tried to do the "NEW" Disney intro? I'm sure it's 1000% more complicated because it's a fly over of the castle with trees, lights, etc... but it still has the pixie dust and "WaltDisney" like our current intro.

rgroves,
I did an old school Disney logo that you may have found on VHS tapes, and now this 3D one. I never planned to attempt this 3D one as I thought it would be well beyond my abilities, but with the right tricks and cheats I managed to fake it pretty well. As an example my castle is hand build out of only cubes, cones, and cylinders because I don't know how to make any other shapes. As another example if you go to top view you'll notice that some pieces of my castle aren't even connected to each other, but from the camera's view the perspective seems correct so that's all that matters.

To make a long story short, the newest 3D Disney logo is so far beyond my abilities it's not even funny. :D It'd be great if we had a true Blender expert to tackle some of the requests that keep coming up, like Lionsgate studios, but unfortunately most of us are just beginners ourselves.

Magius - That's what I figured...most of us are blender noobs !! LOL. I don't even know enough to be dangerous in blender.

I did manage to figure out how to make the FOX intro look like the one that was made for "The Black Hole" with Welcome To the on the top line, but that's the extent of my tinkering.

I really appreciate all the work everyone has put into these intros. My wife thinks I'm crazy and just rolls her eyes every time I show here what I've done.

Did anyone else have a problem with the Disney project? When it is rendering, it does a first pass, and it looks clear, then it appears to do a second pass, and that pass is a little different lined up, but it looks clear too, then it seems the 2 images are combined into one picture. The one picture is then blurry.
I have attached what the picture looks like for slide 75.
I am using blender 2.42a.

Did anyone else have a problem with the Disney project? When it is rendering, it does a first pass, and it looks clear, then it appears to do a second pass, and that pass is a little different lined up, but it looks clear too, then it seems the 2 images are combined into one picture. The one picture is then blurry.
I have attached what the picture looks like for slide 75.
I am using blender 2.42a.

No, not me....but I think I'm using Version 2.43a.
-t

Great, thanks...

Lessons learned: Upgrade to latest release (now 2.44)

Bonus: seems to go about 20% faster :)

Has anyone considered making the Paramount "Stars" intro? The one where the stars come flying into the picture and form around the mountain. THere are two versions I've seen recently, one with a mountain and another with a DVD (and sound).

I've got lots of ideas, but neither the time or patience to work with Blender to get it working.

Ok, how do you add the ac3 file? In windows explorer, my system doesn't know how to play the ac3 file (no player attached to the ac3 extension) I tried Virtual Dub, but it only accepts WAV files. (or do I need a newer version of VirtualDub too?) No idea what version I am on (at least 1 year old) as I am at work now...

Magius, great work on the Disney intro. it looks wonderful.

Does anyone have THX or DTS or Dolby blends. They would be cool but the best I can do is take the posted blends, change the name and add music. I just started so well see. Thanks to everyone for their efforts and unselfishness in sharing.

Also I took the FOX render, put in on disc, and took it to staples and had them print it out poster size for $25; it looks great! You can see mine under members photos. I will try and attach one in this reply.

Hello, can someone point me in the direction for adding sound to blender files? I am a noob at this blender stuff. I am doing the Universal Studio (inserting my name "here") blender and am ready to add the Universal Studio sound...but do not know how.

Hello, can someone point me in the direction for adding sound to blender files? I am a noob at this blender stuff. I am doing the Universal Studio (inserting my name "here") blender and am ready to add the Universal Studio sound...but do not know how.

There are quite a few posts on adding audio within this thread.

Do a search and you should find them.
-t

humm
mine does something odd.
after rendering the word "Pictures" appears in the bottom frame for a few seconds before appearing where it needs to go.

the only thing i can think of is that im rendering this bigger than it needs to be?
848x480 is what im aiming for.

is that the case?

ahh yup. that was my problem. encoded it at NTSC standard size and its fixed.
heres my final product. audio added + voice over.

http://users.rcn.com/latnhacker/disney_colon_intro.mpg
very neat stuff. thanks!

Chiahead,

i know it's a bit late but the issue you were describing looks to be the program interlacing the 2 frames. this is good for 480i or 1080i but useless for any progressive video.

Back from the dead....

That Disney file is great! Really been enjoying setting this up for my theater.. Just a couple questions about a few edits...

First, Is it possible to get the Tinker Bell arch to stop a bit lower than it does right now? It seems to stop on about frame 285, so how do you make it stop on a later frame?

Second.. Can the halo be larger? How do I edit the blender to maybe put a halo around the second part of the text also?

Thanks much in advance!

Can anyone recommend a simple still image template to use as a custom sartup logo (custom startup 'intro' still) when I power up the PJ?

How about this?

http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/5663/modernologoiz0.th.jpg

http://img106.imageshack.us/my.php?image=modernologoiz0.jpg

Cool Mike. I am actually alread playing around with that FOX themed blender file. Blender is not easy, and I do 3D work for a living LOL! Very different GUI from what I am used to. Thanks! I will play an adapt the blender file to my needs, this is basically what I needed!

You got PM!

How about this?

http://img106.imageshack.us/img106/5663/modernologoiz0.th.jpg

http://img106.imageshack.us/my.php?image=modernologoiz0.jpg

Does anyone have any suggestions for rendering this in a 2.35 format. I can then stretch it out for 16x9 to match projector and let my VC lens compress it back down for the proper look on my 2.35 screen.

Ronnie

Absolutely Echo,
All the junk I create is destined for the boards here, and is geared towards being easily customizable for anyone's use. As I mentioned previously, my current .blend file is missing Tinkerbell and needs a few more tweaks as well before it's done.

For anyone interested in playing with the .blend at this early stage I've uploaded it in a .zip file, along with a test render of how the animation plays out so far, and the files associated with the true-type font that I used.

Just now looking at the test render I can see there are some timing issues with the word "pictures" and the halo needs a bit more work than I thought :D . I'm not sure why I suck so much at creating halos... they've plagued me since the original Universal logo...

Anyways, hope you guys enjoy this, and I'll upload an update whenever I get around to finishing it.

I also made a Disney render. You can have my file as well if you like.

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

Hey guys, been reading through this thread and sounds like a bunch of interesting projects are going on. I know after I saw the FOX intro that I figured I'd give it a go an try to create my own custom intro. Its not based on any studio intro or anything like that, but more like some of the intros for the theater itself that I remember seeing. Any how, I wanted to post a video of my finished project and see what others think about it. I've left it as a still fairly large .avi file (4MB encoded with XVID) so I've got it hosted off site. Download it from htintro_xvid.avi (http://www.timncindy.com/video/htintro_xvid.avi)

Just a little synopsis to explain some elements in the video. The remote control you see is an accurate 3D representation of my actual HT remote. The second half of the intro actually takes place in a 3D model of my theater room. I think I've spent upwards of 300-400 hours (or more) on this, and it feels SO good to finally feel like I'm done and have accomplished something.

I'd love to hear any comments and feedback on this, good or bad. Thanks, and good luck to everyone on their own projects.

- Tim

That looks AMAZING!! I don't suppose you'd do up a mini tutorial?:)

very good job!

Can someone give me some quick assistance? I downloaded the 3-d Disney Intro, completed the blender file and did the animation of it. However, the word Pictures gives me problems, I changed the word the Theater. When I did the animation, the word suddenly appears on the bottom of the screen at about the same time as the wording Walt Disney (changed to my theater name) and then POPs up the correct location. It looks weird. I dont think it should show up at the bottom, but rather just appear after the halo effect, correct??

I used to have that. The word is stored at the bottom, and at the right time it moves up to what is supposed to be viewable. You probably have your dimensions set weird, so that you are seeing the temporary "storage" area. Are you using 16:9, or 4:3, or 2:35:1. Try some different ones, and just render the the slide of where you see it just before the halo. That will let you see if you will see it after a full rendering.

Yes I am attempting to render it at 1080 x 720

thats more like 3:2, which isn't a TV standard. Try 16:9 or 2.35:1. The trick to just render 1 slide will save you allot of time. I think you are just seeing more of the bottom than was originally planned for viewing.

Can anyone list some 2.35:1 resolutions to render this stuff in for the mathmatically challenged :)

someone posted some true 16:9 as follows: Im lookin for the same type of response for 2.35:1.

16x9
832x468
800x450
768x432
etc.

Ronnie

You could try these

2.35:1
*1920x816
1280x544
*960x416
*480x208

*Note - Rounded to the nearest number divisible by 16

I'm surprised this thread is suddenly back from the dead, but it feels good seeing people still talking about and messing around with my Disney file.

For dhageremtp's question, Chiahead nailed it regarding the "storage spot" for the Pictures word. I was lazy and left it juuuust off camera on a 16x9 render. I could have just as easily stuck it 10 light years away but I wasn't thinking about people rendering different aspect ratios and I like to be able to see all my objects on screen while editing even if they aren't on camera.

As far as figuring out what resolutions will fit a given aspect ratio I recommend starting with the width that you want to render. Perhaps 1920, or 1280 as these are common depending on your screen, or try to go with an even divisor like 1/2 of these values, etc. To find the appropriate height to correspond to your chosen width, just multiply by the inverse of the aspect ratio. So for example if I wanted a 1920 pixel wide render with a 16x9 ratio I would get 1920*(9/16)=1080 pixels high (sounds familiar:D). 2.35:1 on the other hand would give 1920*(1/2.35)=817 pixels high. You can round these numbers off arbitrarily if you get decimal places, or do like w84no1 and round everything to the nearest multiple of 16.

The reason I posted this as a long explanation rather than just giving a table is this allows you to calculate any resolution for any aspect ratio based only on how wide your screen is, which anyone should be able to figure out. If you want a crazy 3.62:0.95 aspect ratio (I made this up) and have a 1280 wide display you'll want to render in 1280x336 resolution (1280*.95/3.62=336) it's as simple as that.

Man these things look great. Wish I had the time to mess with this again. I'm jealous.

Thanks for re-awakening this thread; my discovery of it led to two quick and painless intros for me using the Fox and Universal themes, respectively.

I'm thinking now I want a United Artists intro with different text. If you are a fan of Bond, you know what I am talking about; it is the intro you see/hear just before the famed Bond moving gunsight graphic and music on (almost?) every Bond film. Has anyone done something similar to this?

SCD

Magius,

I actually stumble with this thread I tried the link from your post and still works and now I have fox intro made for my hometheater. Before all I could do was just look at all your work now I have one for myself.

Thanks for re-awakening this thread; my discovery of it led to two quick and painless intros for me using the Fox and Universal themes, respectively.

I'm thinking now I want a United Artists intro with different text. If you are a fan of Bond, you know what I am talking about; it is the intro you see/hear just before the famed Bond moving gunsight graphic and music on (almost?) every Bond film. Has anyone done something similar to this?

SCD


me too would like to say thanks and maybe members here who have done quite a bit of intro could share a file for their work.

So far I have FOX intro

there is another thread for universal and the one that mikefalz file I am having a hardtime doing it. I followed his instruction but I could not get it right. So I am stuck with it and gave up. so for the update I only have FOX intro and would love to have the disney and unversal as well.

willise can you share a file that is avi ready? just like the FOX when I render it if fell to my wma file and were able to save it.

Rutlian, I believe that I've done exactly what you're asking with both my Disney file and my Universal file. If you search back in this very thread you should be able to find a download for my Disney file which is extremely customizable. Unfortunately I can't host it myself so a few generous members were hosting it for me, and I have no idea if they've all since gone done or what. With my project file all you need to do is delete the old text and type in your own text and re-render with no knowledge of Blender. :D

Also, if you start at the *very* beginning of the Universal thread you'll notice that I uploaded various Universal projects along the way. I was the first one to "break the code" if you will and get a working Universal intro up. After me Atagert and MikeFalz sorta ran away with the show and kept adding improvements and updates that didn't all make it into my own project. Unfortunately the Universal logo is unlike Disney and Fox in that the "text" is not actually "text" and cannot be edited directly. It needs to be deleted and new text added to replace it and many of the motion characteristics re-coded. If you're happy with a slightly simpler Universal intro than what you can get from MikeFalz, I would look for the Blender files that I uploaded to that thread with a Word .doc of instructions on how to make it your own. You might even learn a bit about Blender while you play with it, and maybe MikeFalz's project would then be like piece of cake to follow along with.

Unfortunately I can take no credit whatsoever for the Fox intro. Like many of you I just stumbled across that thread and thought it was an amazing concept. That was my inspiration to go out and try to make other intros like my Universal, Disney, and Pixar (still unfinished :rolleyes:) projects.

In any case, I'm glad that there are still people discovering these projects and making use of them. Blender is quite a powerful tool and if more members of this community begin to dabble with it (as I did a few months ago) I can imagine a great number of new projects for us all to benefit from.

Magius,

I have been slowly (very slowly) working on the Pixar and dreamworks intros as well. I would love to see your Pixar intro if you finish before I do.

Hehe my poor Pixar intro will never get finished, as I gave up on it long before creating my 2 Disney intros and haven't been working in Blender since I finished the last Disney one. I got it to the point where the lamp skids to a stop, wiggles his butt, and jumps up to the top of the "I". I was having trouble finding the best way to have him bounce up and down while compressing the I and it's painstakingly time consuming as I was manually adjusting every other frame to keep the animation smooth. I'll render you a demo of where I was when I stopped and upload it in a little bit.

In any case, I'm thrilled to hear that you're working the Dreamworks intro! For me that was the one I always wanted to make, and I just couldn't get anywhere with it. I had all these ideas... fluid simulation for the bobber splash, particle generated clouds, etc. etc. but I just couldn't make what was in my head work in Blender. I would love to see any sort of a demo that you might have for the Dreamworks intro, and who knows, you might even inspire me to give it another go :D.

It seems it didn't take as long to render the Pixar intro as I'd thought being that it was only 150 frames. The only thing that I could compress it with in VDub was some Radius Cinepak codec so let me know if it won't play back on your machine.

I'm certain that I've said all this before, but in defense of my work, the little bumps on the ground would get removed before a final render. They're just there as distance markers so that I knew how far to jump the little guy while animating. Also the color of the text and the cloudy sky in the background I treat as "creative license". For some reason when I was doing this I preferred it this way instead of the true black text on grey/white background.

I will upload all the project files I have for various intros to my website. I will post back when I have added them.

I will upload all the project files I have for various intros to my website. I will post back when I have added them.

I am really looking forward to seeing this. I would like to do an intro similar to the "Pearl and Dean" intro that is on one of the threads here.

Rutlian, I believe that I've done exactly what you're asking with both my Disney file and my Universal file. If you search back in this very thread you should be able to find a download for my Disney file which is extremely customizable. Unfortunately I can't host it myself so a few generous members were hosting it for me, and I have no idea if they've all since gone done or what. With my project file all you need to do is delete the old text and type in your own text and re-render with no knowledge of Blender. :D

Also, if you start at the *very* beginning of the Universal thread you'll notice that I uploaded various Universal projects along the way. I was the first one to "break the code" if you will and get a working Universal intro up. After me Atagert and MikeFalz sorta ran away with the show and kept adding improvements and updates that didn't all make it into my own project. Unfortunately the Universal logo is unlike Disney and Fox in that the "text" is not actually "text" and cannot be edited directly. It needs to be deleted and new text added to replace it and many of the motion characteristics re-coded. If you're happy with a slightly simpler Universal intro than what you can get from MikeFalz, I would look for the Blender files that I uploaded to that thread with a Word .doc of instructions on how to make it your own. You might even learn a bit about Blender while you play with it, and maybe MikeFalz's project would then be like piece of cake to follow along with.

Unfortunately I can take no credit whatsoever for the Fox intro. Like many of you I just stumbled across that thread and thought it was an amazing concept. That was my inspiration to go out and try to make other intros like my Universal, Disney, and Pixar (still unfinished :rolleyes:) projects.

In any case, I'm glad that there are still people discovering these projects and making use of them. Blender is quite a powerful tool and if more members of this community begin to dabble with it (as I did a few months ago) I can imagine a great number of new projects for us all to benefit from.

Thanks manguis, and yes I have seen in first few pages of the universal thread that is what really got me into this and so with fox intro it is amazing,
I finally burned it to dvd and played in my panny blu ray and my wife could not believed it she saw her name (Ruth) under Ruthplex in the opening intro. Thanks every one for sharing and continious effort to build intros I appreciate it. I am now still working with others file. like the disney, universal (Could not get to warping right it always look like a dna when I'm done rendering).

I will upload all the project files I have for various intros to my website. I will post back when I have added them.

Me too I am looking forward to it. Thanks

Now a Pearl and Dean version would be neat. I do have some really old versions of the different P&D openings (Pillars, Towers and Filmstrip) and had thought about mocking up one of those but not using blender

Well, I haved added the Disney one. I am trying to separate all the projects and create screen shots. Woody Family Cinema Projects (http://www.woodyfamilycinema.com/projects.asp)


OK, I have added all the blender projects that I have. I didn't create any of these and I am a novice at blender. If you have any other blender projects that you would like to share, send me a PM me and I will add them to my site. (if they are not too big) Enjoy!!

http://www.moviewavs.com/Movies/Production_Companies.html

This page has WAV files of the music that you need to complete most of the files. I noticed that on the Woody Family Cinema page, Touchstone intro needs music. Check out that page!

http://www.moviewavs.com/Movies/Production_Companies.html

This page has WAV files of the music that you need to complete most of the files. I noticed that on the Woody Family Cinema page, Touchstone intro needs music. Check out that page!

Nice find!! I just added sound to the Touchstone project file.

Thanks.

How do you add text to the clapboard blend file?

How do you add text to the clapboard blend file?

I don't know how, but maybe someone on the forums can help. You could look at this tutorial (http://www.cdschools.org/54223045235521/lib/54223045235521/BlenderBasics2.42a.pdf)

Thanks w84no1

Great job man, I will try them tonight.

which blender you guys are using? blender.org or graphicall.org it seems that the second one render faster. Thanks,

Peter

W84no1 that's really great that you're aggregating the different projects in one spot. I noticed that you only had my 3D Disney render and not the older 2D one. If you'd like it I've attached it to this post with a preview pic. No hard feelings if you don't want to host it, it's not nearly as popular as the newer 3D one, but man was I shocked that you're hosting that Touchstone 5-minute hackjob :D.

I was also wondering if you might want to link back to the relevant AVS threads from your site? I'm thinking specifically of this one plus the giant Universal and FOX threads.

I think that would serve a variety of positive roles. For one it would let people read through the collective tips and lessons learned of others who have tried to customize these projects, and possibly become more familiar with Blender. Secondly it draws more people into our community here, perhaps to become involved members or even share projects of their own. And finally, it would give small indirect credit to those of us that have contributed these projects to the community. Particularly to those like blazer003 and reaper that started the craze and inspired people like myself, atagert and MikeFalz.

Anyways, just a thought. Thanks again for hosting the projects for everyone. Lets all hope that in the not-too-distant future you'll also be hosting a Pixar and Dreamworks project and willise will be basking in the spotlight.

this is my fox logo picture and thanks for everyone who made this all possible.

W84no1 that's really great that you're aggregating the different projects in one spot. I noticed that you only had my 3D Disney render and not the older 2D one. If you'd like it I've attached it to this post with a preview pic. No hard feelings if you don't want to host it, it's not nearly as popular as the newer 3D one, but man was I shocked that you're hosting that Touchstone 5-minute hackjob :D.

I was also wondering if you might want to link back to the relevant AVS threads from your site? I'm thinking specifically of this one plus the giant Universal and FOX threads.

I think that would serve a variety of positive roles. For one it would let people read through the collective tips and lessons learned of others who have tried to customize these projects, and possibly become more familiar with Blender. Secondly it draws more people into our community here, perhaps to become involved members or even share projects of their own. And finally, it would give small indirect credit to those of us that have contributed these projects to the community. Particularly to those like blazer003 and reaper that started the craze and inspired people like myself, atagert and MikeFalz.

Anyways, just a thought. Thanks again for hosting the projects for everyone. Lets all hope that in the not-too-distant future you'll also be hosting a Pixar and Dreamworks project and willise will be basking in the spotlight.

I will add the 2D project to my website. I was thinking about adding inks back to the different threads, just haven't had the time. Thanks.

So how have folks used the clapboard or theatre curtains in there into's? I'm assuming that some test is added like "now for feature presentation". Are you adding within blender or tagging on after using another program?

Cheers,
Mark

So how have folks used the clapboard or theatre curtains in there into's? I'm assuming that some test is added like "now for feature presentation". Are you adding within blender or tagging on after using another program?

Cheers,
Mark

I haven't used either project, they were files given to me from PeerlessProductions (http://www.peerlessproductions.com/animation.html).

--David

I have used the clapper board to announce a party for my daughter. The original version had some words on the clapper board that were easy to amend. I could not get the theater curtains intro to correctly render and had thought about going back to Peerless to see what the issue was. Steve

I have used the clapper board to announce a party for my daughter. The original version had some words on the clapper board that were easy to amend.

Do you still have the version with the words? I don't see that in the version I have......I tend to use these too for kids movie nights.

Cheers,
Mark

I have just lost my PC with Blender loaded but have found what I believe is the file on my central server. Unfortunately it is too large to add as an attachment but I am more than happy to send it. I also have the generic death star version of the universal opening if anyone is interested. None created by me I am just a hoarder! Steve

I am interested in the clapboard with words, what I have has no text to edit.

dhageremtp, send me a PM and I will send it on. Steve

dhageremtp, send me a PM and I will send it on. Steve

Hi there theendisnye I am also interested with the clapboard with text in it. send you pm.

Thanks,
Peter

That's interesting that you have a version with text already Theendisnye. I never saw that one. When I saw the blank clapper that w84no1 was hosting I was actually just starting to plan creating a version with some text of my own and a little bit more on top of that. I haven't done anything in Blender in months but I thought this might be a fun way to get back into it. :)

In any case, I'd like to see the one you have also and perhaps I'll still play with it to make something interesting of my own. Maybe if w84no1 could host your version instead of or alongside of the textless one?

By the way just so everyone can see what kinds of ideas were going through my head regarding text on the clapboard, here's a render that I was able to make without much effort.

The idea was based on an example clapboard that I've also attached. The name of the movie could be spelled out in it's own font if you can find a truetype, or else just something that you thought looked good. Maybe a marquee style font if the real font wasn't available.

Furthermore, the three boxes on bottom could be labeled with any information you liked (Date, Time, Rating, etc.) and filled in with a "chalky" looking font. The best part is this leaves a ton of room in the center for glorifying your own home theater. For example "Presented by the <insert name> Home Theater!" in it's own cool looking font.

The hardest part was finding truetype fonts that fit the look I was going for. It took about 3 times longer to find the fonts than to actually get the text on the clapboard :D. In any case I thought I'd share the ideas that I'd had and see if there was any interest in this type of custom logo.

It's been a while since I've messed with Blender. As I recall, I was able to add text to the clapper pretty easily. The hard part I had was finding a really good sound effect of a metal clanking/banging sound when the clapper comes down. Like a lid slamming down on a dumpster or something.

Anyone?

I was actually thinking about that before I posted this. I haven't actually decided, but I can't see why I couldn't share... =)



Decided not to share?.... :) - Just messing with you tpag200.


It would be nice to see some of your project and how you smoothed out a lot of the animation. It would surely help out a lot of newbies to the program.

I will be having some custom stuff to upload as well but I agree, it takes a long time to get everything to fall into place.

Keep up the good work!

wow magius, i just viewed your pixar demo and it looked great, keep up the good work!!

Hi Guys,

Can someone tell me how to realign the text after I have edited it to say what I want?

At the moment it appears off centre.

Hi Guys,

Can someone tell me how to realign the text after I have edited it to say what I want?

At the moment it appears off centre.

Strictly from memory, so I hope this is right, you select the "G" key and the "X" key and then move the text. It has been a while since I did this now, so my memory is a little foggy.

Would be cool if we could get some of the intros from this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_XzCR2MbrU

wow atagert you completely read my mind about using the earth at night texture. I wanted to somehow merge a night and day texture and have a line of sun sweep over the earth changing day to night. I have no idea how it would be done, but I know there is a way to make textures and materials change over time. I think it's called procedural textures or something. Not the slightest clue how to do it, but maybe there's some tutorials out there...?


Magius you could use the Celestia software to do this. The site that atagert went to is a repository of Celestisa files and textures. Go to http://www.shatters.net/celestia/index.html and download the software, then add textures from the Motherlode site. Celestia is very cool software that allows you to travel around looking at planets, galaxies, constellations, the list goes on. You would be able to do exactly what you are looking for with Celestia whcih, by the way, outputs images or movie files.

The contex, that you put Celestia in, is really nice. I know I'm going to playing with it. thanks. I get what is going on now.

Adam

Thanks Hawkes for the Celestia suggestion. I haven't had a lot of time lately for playing around with Blender but I just downloaded the Celestia software and sometime when I'm more free I'll play around with it. Looking at the screenshots on the website it looks like a very capable tool. Maybe Atagert will whip up something cool to show off in the meantime.

W84no1: I just checked out your website again and I think it's awesome. Thanks for adding those links to the forum threads, I think that will help getting people lured over here where maybe they'll browse around and get interested in Blender more than just stealing your bandwidth :D

As I said before I haven't been playing with Blender at all recently, but sometime I'd like to get the chance to finish the clapboard demo that I posted a page back. I know a couple of people that want me to finish off that Pixar intro as well but I just got so burnt out on editing every little movement every other frame by hand. It's a lot of work for a novice like myself. I was just looking at the files on my hard drive and they're all from Feb 3-4, 2007. Hard to believe it's been over a year since I was last working on that demo...

hey i'm trying to do the 2d disney animation, however I changed the words and then had to move them horizontally so that they'd still be centered. But, whenever I render it, or even if I just do the preview animation, it immediately moves them back to their off center location. Could anybody tell me how to fix this??

timdog it sounds like you may have forgotten to set a location key after you moved the words up. The way I did that animation the words just linger around off camera and then when the time is right they teleport into the middle of the halo. This is done by setting location keys on certain frames telling the object where it should be.

For example, if you wanted to have it teleport on frame 100, then you'd store a location key with it off camera on frame 1, and another in the same spot on frame 99, then store a new key for the new spot on frame 100.

I don't remember the exact frame number that you'll need to set the key but you can find it by single stepping through the frames until you see the words pop into place. On that frame, move the words to the new spot that you want them and then press "i". A menu will come up called "insert key" and you just have to choose "Loc" to overwrite the old location key. That should be all there is to it.

Sorry for the lengthy explanation, I just thought it might be interesting to know what's going on behind the scenes instead of just hearing "go to frame XYZ, move text, press i, choose Loc, render" :D

ah makes sense. thanks for the explanation! It seems to work and I now have it rendering again :)