Chase over Endor (animation test)

Hi you all!

I'm starting to practice with the program Cinema4D because I would like to animate some Star Wars battles some day...

I have read many times the phrase "start small", and I think that it has a lot of reason, so I decided to animate the Space Battle of Endor
Well... in fact I started small. This is my first animation, it's about 8 seconds long, and it consists of an X-Wing being chased by a TIE defender (I know, there weren't TIE defenders on Endor... But Hey!, it's just a test! )

http://www.savefile.com/files/5034032

I hope you like it.

Any comments and critics would be appreciated.

P.S.: I'll try to add sounds now...

 

Pretty good animation, I think the fighter size might be a little too big. You need better lighting----Global Illumination--and you forgot probably one of the top things that makes an animation realistic-------Motion Blur.

 

I like your cuts. I see what your going for. Ship resized defintely. When your going over that SD, looks like a 20 man SD. Ship movements are a little fast and jerky. Assign some motion blur to those objects too. Other than that, glows, environment looks good. Keep that money machine rollin.

 

Yes, the fighter sizes seem too big, but they have the correct scales, every ship has its exact size in meters...

About the Global Illumination... I can't find that in my program .... I need a module called Advanced Render. That might be the problem, but I don't know.

And last, I have never used motion blurr, so I'm rendering a test image now. I see that it has to render each frame a lot of times with a light variation, and my computer is so slooooooooow... Well, I'll see what can I do.

Thanks for the comments!

Any more?

 

hey good!!

I like the space battle!!

but you need MOTION BLUR!!!!!!!!


fro the lightning, in my anim, I don't used GI, I just faked

 

The ship scale looks okay to me... to increase the illusion you might slow down the starfighters when they're close to the big ships.

 

Bobabert, I loved your animation

Thanks!

I saw that you used motion blur, and it was incredibly realistic!!!
But I wanted to participate in the "noob film competition", so I finished the renders without it. (it takes several hours for each take )

Now I'm learning how to use that effect. I'm making tests after tests, and I hope that I would soon be able to render the animation again... with MOTION BLUR.

I suppose that sound effects can wait...

EDIT:

oops

Mmmm yes... Actually I have to slow down some parts of the animation... But each frame in which appears that StarDestroyer takes long time to render........
So, again, I didn't change that. I could do it now....

 

What you should be doing is 1st: render animatic tests with no lights, textures, even just boxes for objects. Rough out the animation first. 2nd: you do renders to test the look of each object. Do renders to test the look of the backgrounds, and diff. elements. 3rd: you can render in layers and composite them later so you don't have to render it all over and over. It also makes it easier to add mo-blur later too. At least for now.. do yourself a favor and work out the animation first.

 

Yes, of course I still have to work hard on the animation , but I'm doing this as a hobby in my free time, and my first objective is not making this little scene a really serious project, but learn how to improve it for appliying that experience in later and more important projects. Now I want to enjoy it.

Remember that I had never animated anything before, and I still have to learn how to make laser shots, explosions, sound effects, etc. This small animation is a test, a practise exercise. And you are helping me so much. Thanks for that

At the moment I'm rendering the first 28 frames using motion blur to see how it is working. I will post that second of animation for your critics

See you later...

 

Pretty decend but definatly needs motion blur. I agree with most of what's been said really

 

If you want a nice looking motion blur without rendering the multiple passes, select all of the objects, right click in the viewport to and then select properties for those objects, in the lower right-hand corner there are motion blur options, switch it to Image Motion Blur, set the Multiplier to 0.5 (I find that 1.0 is too much blur). If your background is set as an image, you'll want that to blur also, so go to the Render window, select the Renderer tab at the top, scroll down to the part that says Image Motion Blur, then check the box that says Apply to Environment Map.



Those motion blurs work really well and don't take that long to render.

For good lighting, try placing one central light with Raytraced or Area Shadows, then place several other lights(I use the omni light) all around in random places, with Shadow Maps as their shadow type, set the Intensity for them lower (like at 0.2 or so, depending on how many you make) and then with all of those secondary lights selected, right-click in the viewport window and in the pop-up menu there will be a bar that says Affect Specular (the white highlights on the models caused by lights) just click that and it will uncheck. That way there will be a central light source but there will not be a bunch of weird highlights on the models.


I hope you understand this, I try to be as clear as I can with tutorials when I don't have pictures to show you.

 

Yes, I understood what you wanted to say, and I will try it if I have time

¿Are you sure you were talking about Cinema 4D?

I think that you were referring to another program, but it doesn't matter. They work in similar ways, so your comment is useful. Thanks.

 

Oh, well I was talking about 3ds Max----it sounded like that was the program you were using.

 

They might be very similar... But I think that motion blur works slightly different in Cinema and in Max, or at least the way you reach the similar effect isn't exactly the same...

I rendered some tests, and now I think that I achieved the ideal values for blur parameters . I would like to know what do you think:

Blur test, 9 renders per frame
Blur test, 5 renders per frame

Those are my two latest tests. The difference between 9 and 5 samples per frame is almost inconsiderable, isn't it? I think that I will render the entire animation using 5 samples, instead of 9 (it only allows 5, 9, 16 and 25, using 25 frames per second)

 

Hi there!

I made a test animation for the motion blur effect, but with all the elements, perhaps in the fastest moment in the animation

http://www.savefile.com/files/5036283

Definitely there is too motion blur in there... What do you think?

 

I would set it to like half that amount of motion blur--that amount shows the amount of samples and it's too much anyway. Look into other forms of motion blur, I'm sure there has to be a faster way of doing it in C4D without having to render multiple passes of each frame.

 

I think that's a good amount of motion blur, really - the problems are the shot is too fast, the fighter should really be a bit slower (the camera shouldn't be panning so quickly), and the blur needs some dithering.

Having said that, if you put all the shots that you've done under that level of motion blur, it'd look quite good - just, as has been mentioned by others, way too zippy.

 

Well... there actually... is...

Haha. In Cinema there are two types of motion blur:
- Motion blur in scene (which I used): this type does some renders of the whole scene and then makes a composite of them. With more than five renders per frame, it can look very realistic... Especially for a static, good resolution image, I think

And the other one is...
- Motion blur IN OBJECT: it uses only one render of each frame, and then the moving object is blurred. I tried to use this at first, but the value was put at 100%, and I rendered an image, not an animation... So I didn't like the result and decided to use the other type...

Now I have put the parameter to 30%, and made a test animation. The result seems acceptable... Is it really acceptable?

http://www.savefile.com/files/9039928

I'm rendering a test in full scene of the first second and a little of the animation. I will edit the post when it finishes to see what do you think

 

There was a problem with the server...

Here's the "in-scene" test:
http://www.savefile.com/files/9063480

I think that there should be more blur... How do you see it?

 

Yeah, more motion blur. Looks better though.

 

Well, I made another render using blur at 50%, as darthviper107 said :
http://www.savefile.com/files/2224613

But I don't know if there's too much now... That might happen because I use 24 fps, instead of 30. Shall I change it to 46% or something, or 50% is OK?

 

Hi you all, I finally tried to make my first attempts of laser bolts. Could you make me know what do you think?

Here's a render image:
[image=http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/5773/laser00027nf.jpg]

And here's an animation test:
http://www.easy-sharing.com/259473/Lasers.mov.html

 

I can't seem to download your animation, however, your picture looks really good. Just show more of the core and it's perfect in my opinion.

 

What's happening with free hosting sites? The Savefile servers are full, easy-sharing doesn't work now...

The effect looks slightly different when it's animated, so I uploaded it again.
http://rapidshare.de/files/13613982/Lasers.mov.html

I still have to do a test with a non-black background, because I don't know how it would look like...

More comments?

 

Wow! I think your lasers look very good and convincing, I really like them!!
They're just not very Starwars-like...

Laserbolts in Starwars tend to be more cilinder-like then ovals like yours. The core of those cilinders are more yellow with a green glow. So it's more like a gradient instead of your all-green color. The fact is that the color in your previous picture looks allmost perfect, in the animation they look too green. Also I'd speed your blasts up a little. The first blast is the only one we can see disapearing in the distance it seems a little slow.
The muzzleflash is a nice detail but it looks a little off. Don't know what it is exactly but the core of the flash looks a bit too solid. I'd experiment some on that if I were you.

Anyway, I'm also working on a space-battle, have been working on it for some time now. Have done a thousand little tests but never seem to be pleased enough with it to show something here... It's great you did dare to show some of your work, hope you can do something with my comments.