Bullet Time
 

I'm doing a plotless fighter plane animation to teach myself particles and path animation. I currently have started a 1 minute run through a canyon and a bullet-time shot of a missle hitting the plane. C&C gladly accepted (in particular, how to make the fire and smoke more realistic?). the terrain is just a temporary version with the general geometry I am going for. This is just the bullet time shot (if anyone can host it I will post the rest when rendered, but for now I do not have my own page).

Also, does anyone know of a good FREE DivX encoder that does not leave a watermark? when I try to use VideoMach's DivX encoder it has an error.

Thanks'o
Ben

Oops, it messed up...

Will check it out when I get home, as I cannot un-rar stuff here at work:(

PS, when I try to download it, it just shows up as "Attachment" rather than the filename shown?

Either way, I'll check it out tonight!
Can't wait!

PSS, check out my VIP explosions tutorials for tips on creating nice fire and smoke trails:)

People, use the RAR one and chose "select from list", select winRAR or whatever your unRARer is. worked for me. If it just opens by itself like it's supposed to, that should work too.

The explosion and jet looks cool, the camera movement is a bit off though imo.

yah, still working on that- I'm thinking of going to path animation for that, 'cause keyframes just aren't smooth enough (read: I'm not good enough at keyframe animation to do that yet)

NOT BAD AT ALL!

My only flag would be:

Did you notice that your fire particles just "blink-out", rather than "fade-out"?

To make the SWCloud particle type fade out before it dies, add a ramp from black to white-or vise-versa depending on your setup to the "Life Transparency" channel in the SWCloud attrributes.


NOTE:
You may, or may not see this actually happen in the Maya viewport, so, to ALSO see this happen in the actual viewport:

Create a OpacityPP attribute that is a gradient from gray/white to black.

Click the Opacity button under the Add Dynamic Attributes section and choose Add Per Particle. OpacityPP now shows up in your Attribute Editor.
Right click on it and choose Create Ramp.

This will make the particles fade out before they die:)


Keep up the great work!

Thanks'o Rage! will try that out and post the results. Also, I think I will lower the fire's glow intensity, make it more red, and make the smoke more transparent- for anyone (probably most of you) who has seen The Matrix: Reloaded I am going for the same look as the smoke when the two trucks collide head-on in bullet time (that was increadible cg, by the way)

of course it won't look quite so good if I expect render times to be managable, but I will try to acheive someting similar.

Can't wait to see it bud!

i think that looked awesome :D good work :D!

OK! I finally finished all your suggestions and it looks much better! Batch rendering now, will upload in like 20 minutes
:beer:

one hour later...

sorry! I accidentally set all the flame particles with the exact same speed/spread etc. settings as the smoke, so the result was very polka-dot like and funny. also I am now using raytracing to get depth in the smoke, which I forgot about, so the render time should be closer to 2 hours. I just started the new render, which means it'll be out at about 2:07 a.m. GMT

sorry

2 hours 31 minuites later...

lol :D

sry, it is 3:30 and still only 262 of 300 frames rendered... this raytracing is taking much longer than I anticipated. incedentally, both VidioMach and my other program ( the one that left the stupid watermark on my last video) have both started having errors when trying to convert to DivX. it's the only format that fits the 2mb or less requirement, so until I find a working converter I will not be able to post it.