Re: The CGI Thread
Absolutely no way 
Note: These days, community activity has largely moved to the BiM Discord. Join us!
Bricks in Motion
Bricks in Motion
We are a friendly filmmaking community devoted to the art of stop-motion animation using LEGO® and similar construction toys. Here, you can share your work, join our community of other brickfilmers, and participate in periodic animation contests!
A place to discuss, share, and create stop motion films.
Ad
You are not logged in. Please login or register.
Absolutely no way
Absolutely
Pfft
So I guess I'm trying to ask how to make a background so that it fits and angled greenscreen. If the answer is to just make the background with the camera in the same perspective as the greenscreen is, I don't see how that would be possible; you would have to get the angles EXACT, and that would be extremely hard.
Whoa, sorry it took me so long to notice your PM. Anyway, Lechnology pretty much already hit upon what my answer would be. In the shot of mine you posted, I filmed it with a basic building structure in place, which I then used to aid in positioning the CGI building. The angle doesn't have to be exact or perfect, it just has to be pretty good.
I dunno what's up with the face and arm
Straight from MLCAD, eh? Keep in mind that the folks at Ldraw never meant to build their pieces for CGI purposes so some pieces aren't optimized for 3D modeling and animation.
For the face, there's some polygons not filled out so you have to manually fix that in Edit Mode. Know your Fill commands. As for the arm, not sure, but it looks like the figurine is mounted to a bone structure? If so, you'll need to adjust the weights for each piece.
As for the leg, if you're going for malleable minifigs with bendable arms and legs, you should tessellate the pieces to give it more flexibility.
We were wondering if someone like Smeagol or Lechnology could post a list of the setting on the particle emitter that they use to make their starship engines have "fire" coming out of them.
Actually, I used light spheres for most of my ships. Particle systems take too long to render these small engine flares if you're using shaders with an alpha layer.
What about when you animate the small blue ship attacking the big red ship?
I've never used particles for ship engines either; I usually use lense flares or glowing pieces with aura/glare effects on them.
What about when you animate the small blue ship attacking the big red ship?
Actually, I have two videos of that, first one I used Fire (located between Volumetric Clouds and Surface Replicator), made it cylindrical, changed the shader and applied a spin on it.
Second one was with particle systems, my mistake. I still wouldn't recommend using it.
Use Emission Cube with 0 0 0. No velocity, default mass is fine. Size depends on how the particle size relates to the engine. Also free in space.
Important part is the graph for the Size of particle over life. It should shrink to 0 size so it the graph is a downward slope.
View this before reading further
In the video I posted, I have a particle emitter moving 100 in/sec. The particle's life is 0.25 sec. First rendering is with 0 velocity. Notice the gap between particles. Second rendering has velocity at 90 in/sec. Essentially, the particles are trailing 10 inch behind the particle system at any given time. Notice, there's gap between particles.
Now there's a side effect in doing this, and you'll notice it in Mythical Bailout (5:23) and in Fighter Shot Down: A tail effect. Now imagine your fighters doing 180 maneuvers.
Main reason I don't recommend using particle systems for engine flares is how the alpha channel in your shader affects rendering time. First off, you can't have square particles coming out of your engine so you use a blurry circle image (blurrier than this) as the alpha channel to make the particles come out round. But Carrara takes so long to render these particles with the alpha channel (what I've noticed is due to Shadows being enabled in rendering although I haven't tried disabling Cast/receive shadows). My work around so far is to render the particle systems separately without shadows enabled and overlay/additive/screen them over the w/o particle system footage.
I've never used particles for ship engines either; I usually use lense flares or glowing pieces with aura/glare effects on them.
What about in your Cannes film entry, when you had the ship flying around the planet near the end? Wasn't that using the particle generator?
Sméagol wrote:I've never used particles for ship engines either; I usually use lense flares or glowing pieces with aura/glare effects on them.
What about in your Cannes film entry, when you had the ship flying around the planet near the end? Wasn't that using the particle generator?
I think it did, but in my opinion it looks pretty bad. Flames/particles don't go well with space at all. It looks much better to use emitters or self emitting objects.
BuilderBrothers, here's a simple solution if you're aiming for simple thrusters like modern jet engines: Concurrent spinning cones with a gradient alpha texture and bright glow color.
The project file if you want to see how it works.
And btw, emitters are emitting particles, BG 
.
emitters are emitting particles, BG
Yeah, I didn't really say that well, did I? 
I sometimes use the wrong words.
I finished that bouncing ball animation I started working on over a month ago.
Y/N?
Yes. Convincing. Pixar-esque.
The anticipation seems weird.
Add motion blur and it'd be perfect
Posts [ 261 to 280 of 1,429 ]
Is it as hard as it looks?
