A little movie

museummaker

The local pub had a competition for local film makers to make short film about the bar.

I modeled the bar in SU, my buddy did the characters and animation in Lightwave.

80 hour render, it could have used a lot more. I can see a few places where I lost textures (due to inverted normals) it taught me to double check, I am hoping I can fix some surfaces and that we can re-render with an updated model.

Happy Friday everyone!

EDIT: link to better resolution version
[flash=400,267:1dpxlz5n]http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4864431[/flash:1dpxlz5n]

johnsenior1973

Did you win the competition? What were the other films like? What kind of feedback did you receive?

@unknownuser said:

I modeled the bar in SU, he did the characters and animation in Lightwave.

Who's he?

What was the integration between SU and Lightwave like? Was all the texturing done in SU? Do you have experience in Lightwave, or is that all your partner's department? How easy/hard was it to create the animation in Lightwave?

Were the characters in the film taken from what was inside the bar, or did you just make them up yourselves?

Really good film. Good to see SU involved with animation like that, even if the animating was done in another app. Will take a long look at your webpage when I get the time to really look at it.

museummaker

Thanks for the feedback, I haven't heard from the judges yet. I think you win dinner or something, it took a lot longer to make than the cost of the dinner but it was a heck of a lot of fun.

"Who is He", is my friend Michael -- he did the animation, lighting and camera movement in Lightwave. I actually didn't get too see much of that end of the software, as he was working on it I was finalizing the bar, we finally combined everything and let it render away.

Lightwave ate up the 3ds file no problem. Textures were primarily in SU but were tweaked in Lightwave for reflection, etc. We could have spent a lot more time just finessing textures but ran out of time.

The characters are from the bar, they are stuffed moose, goat, they have a big plastic frog as a mascot and the odd penguin dude who lives over the door -- I guess it would make more sense to people who have been to the bar. The dancing girls are prints on the wall, I have no idea how he made them dance like that.. but I am going to find out.

I think it may be time to stop by that bar.. cocktail time in Michigan!

solo

Very cool video, good editing and the score worked great.

80 hours?...yikes! what resolution and frame rate was the original animation?

The images on wall are animated gif's or avi's I assume.

museummaker

Thanks Solo

Its rendered for a DVD at 740 x 480, we could only do 3 passes per frame due to time constraints. I think its 25 frames /sec. I am not sure what machine was used to render, I think its a couple year old gaming machine and not a full blown rendering monster.

We actually used the film and stage plugin to set up the scenes, so we did a pre-visualization for the animation. When the file was opened in Lightwave there were cameras in the model that served as anchor points for the pan and swoops.

The cheesy sweep at the end was a screen capture of Google Earth+ some of my models. I did the pan with a Space Navigator-- took me about ten tries to get it where we liked it.

cheers,

Gaieus

Cool and fun video, indeed!

(And also, nice avatar - where is it familiar from? )

solo

Ooh, what I'd give to be young.

That's some serious work, was it worth it? would you do it again?

I have only been envolved with animation for the last four years and I also remember how long it took for test animations, but I also knew that renderfarms would do the final render.
So yeah back in the nineties on 16 Apple Macs would have been cutting edge stuff, and in 10 years from now 80 hours will seem like ages too.

TIG

@solo said:

Very cool video, good editing and the score worked great.

80 hours?...yikes! what resolution and frame rate was the original animation?

The images on the wall are animated gif's or avi's I assume.

Every good video - b u t ...
Only a few hours - that's no time at all... In the nineties I made some software to animate inside the old Bryce SW [built-in now]... The scenes were animated within the Bryce generated 3D CGIs - e,g. Seville City, The Cigar-Factory, The Bullring etc and the real human actors' scenes were blue-screened onto 'planes' within the Bryce scenes themselves [at 31 insertions maximum per frame - meant the bullfight-scene needed lots of duplicates for the crowd ! ]. It took ~six months to extract all of the human bits from the filming [there were several scenes where one actor played several parts, and even horses and coaches etc] and another ~eighteen months more to make the film itself [that was with 16 people on [then] top-end Macs working full time].... The 60min+ film [opera/comedy] called 'Carmen Mit Ich' was an Xmas special on EU TV... with English sub-titles... [by Tonder Studios NL - now defunct ?]
You youngsters.... don't know your are born...

museummaker

I started out on the old AtariST, I remember struggling to make a wire frame box rotate, coded by hand and never did get it to work.

I found out a little more about using a SketchUp file in Lightwave.

It imported the 3ds file with the textures intact but there were no components or groups, just a big mesh so it would of been very difficult to move the furniture around.

The dancing girl sequence was done old school style a'la a flip book of about 30 frames in in each picture frame. They flipped as the camera panned.

The entire scene and animation was rendered together which may have made it take so long, about 90 seconds to render each frame. Lightwave lets you render parts separately and combine them but the room and character animation was all done together.

I would definitely do more of these. Its fun to see the SU models come to life in new ways.

Things I learned: Plan the camera moves early and only model what you need to. Double check that you don't have any inverted faces. Watch out for high poly components from the warehouse. I eliminated 20,000 poly's by getting rid of a clunky wine rack I downloaded.

Here is the stats on the model. Does that seem high? stats