type animation
 

I know this thread is called type animation, but for now I'm still creating the light setup. Actually I am just learning about light I am not even hlf way were I want to be. I started of animating some type to realize that it will all look really shit if I don't get my rendering and lighting skills up a bit. Unhappy to discover (actually I knew it) that lighting and rendering is a science of its own I am now back to rendering cones and spheres.
Here's one render I did to learn a bit about light fog and intensity curves. Did that following a tutorial on the web

http://www.halbstein.com/tutorials

here's another one me playing with a three spotlight setup using depth map shadows

and the same one with ray traced shadows, what a difference! Light radius is set to 4, shadow rays to 8 and the ray depth limit is 2. Unfortunately using production quality, this took my computer about 7 minutes to render, If anyone has any suggestions for improvements they are very welcome as I am absolutely new to the field of lighting.

and last a pic of how the setup looks like, and tow things don't bother writing any advice for mental ray - unfortunately it doesn't work with my graphic card, and does anyone know how to post multiple pics in one post?

stupid me... forgot image

Tat looks like a really useful tutorial!

Cheers,

Mat.

I've been mucking around with lighting for a while now & you are already producing better results than me......:beer:

I'm now goin to try the tutorial you posted.

Thanks....

thanks for the praise tiddles, here's another one I found quite useful

http://www.3drender.com/light/3point.html

And here's an update, somehow you only really see the fog on the LCD of my laptop. The FIRST one is what my maya software render spits out.

The SECOND one is if I composite the vector outline. For some very anoying
reason it does render all the edges (I already checked render globals and it
is not that I ticked render entire mesh or anything) My text are extruded
Polys could that be the reason? If anyone has any ideas...

The THIRD one is sort of how I want it to look like. Unfortunately it is a
Photoshop composite were I used a lot of tools in a way that it would be impossible to batch. But if someone out there has an idea how to get that look it would be great! I need the white outline to be somewhat light sensitive, that it "flares" up when i move it into the light.

second

third

Do you need this to be animated? fade in / out? or just a still ?

animated:headbang: !!!

hmm... sorry, I don't know how to do it! :(

Hmmmm,

I may know of a way to do this using 2 seperate image sequences from Maya; 1st is just the light with fog (note if this does not change, then it can be a single still) & 2nd is another image sequence of the text, well light with alpha background.

These 2 outputs can then be comped in either after effects or vegas with en effect to highlight the edges. It may not have all the light subtleties or dynamics you are after though...

If you think its worth a shot, I'd be happy to lend a hand...

thanks for the help, I'll see wht I can do. But tomorrow I have to go to sleep, to much maya made my brain into mush:zzz: