Hasta La Motion!

I did a ww2 animation a few years ago and was quite happy with the outcome. I was thinking i might come back to these techniques and see where i’ve gotten better and where the technique can be developed further.

I don’t have a strict plan yet, i know what direction I’m going in, but I’m going to take them 1 step at a time.

Starting with a jet fighter. On loan from a very generous Mike James , i have a F22 Raptor. My first stop has been to do some textures..

I’ve started with low res t maps as i don’t want to make detail that wont be seen later. I think these bad boys will be flying pretty fast.

Now I’m gonna rig everything that will be used in my animation, from the control surfaces to the thrust vectoring afterburner and weapons bays.

Then i might take her flying, to put it through it’s paces..

P.s. One question, the cannon that’s in the mid stbd fuse, where do the rounds come out?!

Ok, I know it’s not the best in the world but I like it. I used 3ds Max, Photoshop, Final Cut Pro and just a little Shake to fix little problem with some missing background. This is my first project done with 3ds Max, I’ve been learning about it with the help of some books and Lynda.com which is a great site if anyone hasn’t been there. It was a fun way to learn about UV texture mapping, modeling and camera control. I did add film grain with Sapphire and it made it look pretty cool but the compression killed it. Oh well.

If I wanted to spend some more time on this I would model out the box better so it actually had flaps. Also I would blur out the BG with some depth of field settings. I’d like to learn to do that. I didn’t use motion blur because it made it much more difficult to read any of the box when paused. I suppose you could keyframe it? Well that’s most of my disclaimers. Anyway, just wanted to show it off to give someone a laugh. It’s my tribute to a pot smoker who can probably hold a bong hit longer then anyone!

Anyway, please post a reply and let me know what you think. Like it or not let me know. Any tips or good things to try with 3ds? Thanks.

:niceone:

Attached Files

Michael Phelps Weedies.mov (5.42 MB)

Hello VFXtalk Community,

I’m having a bit of trouble properly stabilizing a steadycam shot:

The shot contains a closed bathroom door filmed from the outside, with only the door itself in the picture as well as a huge lamp next to the door.

Now, I had to speed up the middle part of this sequence to shorten it a bit (I needed to
"take out" 592 frames without anyone noticing; if there’s a better solution to this – I’ve
tried some, but they didn’t really work out well – please let me know 🙂

What I intend to do now is to absolutely stabilize this shot, then filtering the tracking
data in the curve editor to simply give back some subtle shakiness.

I’m a novice to Nuke (but love it already 😉 so please excuse if my following problem is
too trivial..

Well, I got three points within the image which are suited for tracking; the doorknob on
the left, and two lamp features on the right. When I track all these and hit "stabilize",
the image tends to "morph" in order to stay in one fixed place. I guess that’s because of
the subtle perspective change due to the original shake, so it makes sense. But this knowledge doesn’t help me at all 😮
Using just one tracking point doesn’t help either due to the source’s rotation.

Could someone please give me a hint where my thinking lacks? Any help would be appreciated 🙂

Thanks a bunch in advance!