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Blender Projects and Studio Themed Intros - Page 3

post #61 of 912
3/18/07 at 9:07am
Quote:
Originally Posted by volley View Post

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
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post #62 of 912
3/18/07 at 1:51pm
Thread Starter 
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 . 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.

All kidding aside the intro looks fantastic atagert. You've certainly been practicing!
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post #63 of 912
3/18/07 at 2:43pm
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?
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post #64 of 912
3/18/07 at 5:39pm
Thread Starter 
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...

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!
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post #65 of 912
3/18/07 at 7:32pm
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
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post #66 of 912
3/19/07 at 8:04am
I got the Serenity One Done.



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
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post #67 of 912
3/19/07 at 8:29am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Magius View Post

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 . 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.

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...
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post #68 of 912
3/19/07 at 10:22am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy238 View Post

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?

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post #69 of 912
3/19/07 at 11:04am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy238 View Post

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:

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post #70 of 912
3/20/07 at 10:15am
Anyone see the new POTC 3 trailer? That Disney castle was awesome and looks like it would be a REAL challenge (nudge, nudge).

Tom
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post #71 of 912
3/20/07 at 7:23pm
Thread Starter 
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 . 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...
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post #72 of 912
3/21/07 at 6:57am
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
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post #73 of 912
3/23/07 at 12:54pm
Thread Starter 
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.
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post #74 of 912
4/28/07 at 4:47pm
Anybody upto anything lately?

Adam
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post #75 of 912
5/1/07 at 12:35am
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!!
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post #76 of 912
5/3/07 at 2:56am
Thread Starter 
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!! 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.
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post #77 of 912
5/5/07 at 3:52pm
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!!
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post #78 of 912
5/6/07 at 5:54am
Thread Starter 
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 .

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.
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post #79 of 912
5/6/07 at 12:10pm
Magius - thats really starting to look cool.

Cheers,
Mark
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post #80 of 912
5/6/07 at 1:35pm
Magius,

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

Thanks!
Den
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post #81 of 912
5/8/07 at 3:10am
Thread Starter 
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!
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post #82 of 912
5/8/07 at 5:13am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Magius View Post

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/showt...&&#post8797660

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

-t
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post #83 of 912
5/8/07 at 7:13am
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.
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post #84 of 912
5/8/07 at 12:39pm
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.......
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post #85 of 912
5/8/07 at 5:42pm
Thread Starter 
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
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post #86 of 912
5/9/07 at 5:54am
I'd love to a see a sample of the render too, what you've done so far looks great!
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post #87 of 912
5/9/07 at 9:34pm
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. I gave up for now, and am back regular IIS 7. I know, probably more details than any of you ever wanted.

Adam
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post #88 of 912
5/9/07 at 9:35pm
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
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post #89 of 912
5/11/07 at 3:44am
Thread Starter 
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 . 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 .

Seems like the Disney project will be delayed again, but I'll keep you guys posted as things go along.
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post #90 of 912
5/11/07 at 8:09am
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.
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