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Robin--I actually wanted the flyover to be slower (the motion path of the copter is designed to bring it right across the face of the sun so the spinning rotors can occlude the Sun Flare.), so, for what I intended for the shot, it's the beginning where the copter is moving too fast. And, yeah, I need to bring it to a halt a little above the ground then s-l-o-w-l-y go those last couple of feet.
Incidentally, this is a really simple comp. there's only the environment map, the copter model, a shadow catcher and a particle sim (one emitter, two particle systems) and two lights. One light is sitting where the sun flare would be, the other is actually sitting at the camera position, targeting the heli as it moves. The second light is down at something like 10% brightness, just for a bit of fill.
Animation was done backwards--I started with the heli on the ground (Using that van on the left of the frame as reference to try and get the scale and positioning correct) then worked back to the beginning of the shot.
Also--I picked my "landing spot" pretty carefully--but, if you look closely, I didn't do any kind of masking of the particle sim or the shadow... they're totally sitting on top of everything else, but it doesn't read like the shadow and dust are totally over those bushes in the mid-right of frame. I think it's because of the Lens Dirt effect. Those "camera artifacts" cover up the shadow.
How's the dust at the end working--that's the bit I can't decide if I'm unhappy with?
I had a long-ass description here of what the particle sim was doing, but Now I'm just keeping the bit about what i changed--there's also a good hint in here for getting depth occlusion in an environment map, so read on.
The particle sim for the dust was a single "circle" emitter with two particle sims--brown dust and grey dust. the Trajectory has been set to random. There is a turbulence force and the shadow catcher layer is also a particle deflector. Mass and friction are low, bounce is pretty high. It didn't quite have the right look. I tried changing the trajectory of the dust emitter to "Cone", raising the height of the emitter on the y axis and aiming the cone at the deflector plane at a 120 degree spread and increasing the bounce of the Brown Dirt layer. I changed the emitter to "Boundary," then went into the lifetime panel and adjusted the gradient I was using to drive alpha--I then decreased base texture size, increased Particles per Socond and used the Lifetime panel to increase the size of the particles over time. I also went ahead and rotated the emitter in the same direction as the copter main rotor, and gave the particles some attachment to and velocity velocity from emitter. It's looking a bit better, but It's still not getting the "waves" effect.
Any other ideas?
*EDIT* (30 more minutes later) The changes I made to the particle sim means I am getting a lot more billowing from the dust--it was blowing over the parts of the environment map that should lie between the copter and the camera--so (pay attention, this is a good hint) I took a copy of my environment map image into Photoshop (GIMP would work as well) and took the polygon lasso tool. I made a quick and dirty selection of just the areas of the environment map that should be between the camera and copter (foreground fence/trees/sidewalk) and deleted everything else. this second image is the exact same size as the original map, keeping just the areas I want to use for occlusion, leaving the rest transparent. I brought this occlusion layer back into Hitfilm and gave it the same Environment Map settings as the main background layer.
Everything lines up perfectly, and now the "foreground" elements cut off the billowing dust.
Revised according to notes above.
Dateline--Anaheim, CA
For ten years Bug and the Hoot Supercrew have worked to expand their Halloween extravaganza from it's humble roots in a garage to it's current "mighty" standings in a driveway.
It's amazing how much structure you can pack in a driveway...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cisQNWpVQvk
If Anaheim were in Wisconsin- I'd be there for HHX!
I made small children cry, their mothers scream, their fathers laugh, and I chased teenaged girls down the street, all caught on our 24 security cameras and/or by our handheld cameraman...
[attachment=679:Me and Laura A Hoot X.jpg]
Basically, I'm working on creating a "Black Hole" with the particle simulator, and, as I was messing around, suddenly I ended up with this star shape--very odd considering that I have a point at co-ordinate 0,0,0 and a second point orbiting the center point on a single axis with a point emitter set to a random trajectory locked to the orbit point with a big, cube gravity force pulling everything towards 0,0,0.
Hey, sometimes when you play with physics, you get random, somewhat useful things.
http://youtu.be/ESaivZxKyZ8
Here's the relevant settings if you want to try something similar:
Comp: 1280x720 @ 23.97fps
"Vortex Point" is at 0,0,0
Vortex point rotates 360 degrees every 10 seconds
Emitter:
Point
Attach to layer: Vortex Point
Position 250,0,0
Trajectory: Random
Particle Systems: (there are two--identical except Particles per second, Particle Color and Particle Scale)
particles per second: 200 ish
Life: 10 seconds
Emitter Attachment 0
Velocity from Emitter: 100%
Speed: 0
Mass: 5.8
Forces:
Cuboid, 2000px X, 2000 px Y, 500 px Z
Attraction, Strength 50%
I don't think anything else in the particle sim is relevant (Particle textures and colors can always be changed), but this combination of rotational inertia and attraction seems to form a stable star (I'd originally set mass from 0 to 7 and got a near-star. When I saw what was happening, I finessed the Mass to get it to line up right).
Also, if you keep everything else the same, but play around with the mass settings, you can get different shapes. I've gotten a triangle and an uneven 6-pointed star.
I'm keeping this in mind for next Halloween--Attach another particle sim to the same rig with no gravity and I can get the circle to make a full rotating 3D pentagram, and THAT, my friends, is gonna be part of next year's Hoot logo.
*Always fun when the client sends the edit notes 12 hours before the final project is (in theory) due--I LOVE pulling all-night finishing sessions. Third time in a row the client delivered edit notes within 48 hours of delivery date--I delivered my initial edit on October 12....
EDIT Ah, yes, and just noticed I rendered it with the music missing. Heh. Fuggit, it's 5am. ;-)
http://youtu.be/l9SsmfF0gq8
http://youtu.be/ZVjQjGysZD0
Building off his proof of concept, I did this shot with two pieces of stock footage, then used time shift to seed particles one second before the animation began to get more motion variation.
With a dancer, it's a mess, but if it were more subtle movement--say, a clone army standing at attention during a briefing, or even if it were clones deploying weapons, you can see where this would add more variation.
Incidentally, Simon's technique could be useful for large space or ground battles---create a plate of a tank or a fighter or something, use the particle sim to create clones, then move the whole emitter layer around. Or use an explosion as the particle source and you have a far-off chain of explosions, like in a Star Wars battle, or the background of the Dalek invasion in Day of the Doctor---there's just a lot of uses for this technique.
Perhaps this test isn't aesthetically pleasing but it's a great example of what can be achieved with subtle movements. The technique can be used for anything.
I would love to see it used in a battle sequence.
Because, once in awhile, one must redo one's logo. Don't know if this is the one I'm going to go with.
Another Logo--Note: This isn't a set of either/or choices. I usually keep two or three "current" logos in rotation. The one above would be used more for something corporate/industrial. This one would be used more for personal event, or maybe weddings. Eventually I'll have an updated wedding variant, and a fourth for band and concerts.
Clones tracked in mocha... May as well make this a flare entry, too, since I don't think I'm going to have time to do the Timestop shot I wanted.
Alien Invasion fleet---ships, weapons fire and explosions all generated with particle sims.
Changed size of the planet just before render, forgot to change the explosion emitter to match, so it's a bit off, but proof-of-concept established.
I'll probably do a VFX breakdown for this soon. Also will render another pass of the particle fleet flying by, because I have the individual ships far enough away from the camera where it's hard to tell that the saucers are actually rotating.
Incidentally, this was about 7-8 hours to render the main 20 second animation:
There are 400 particle ships, each generated from a 30-second 720x360 texture source.
Each ship fires 5 times over the course of the animation.
Lasers are a duplicate of the saucer emitter using a spark streak texture. The lasers actually spawn with no velocity, and are drawn down by a gravity force. The saucers spawn with a ten second time shift, the lasers do not. Ships and lasers are from sphere emitters set to boundry. The laser emitter is about 150 pixels smaller in diameter. Because both emitters have the same seed, lasers spawn aligned with the ships. Several copies of the laser emitter are used to produce a constant barrage.
This means that there are 2000 explosions in the animation--each explosion generated from a 100x100, 7-second animation, which is just the Firey Explosion Quick 3D preset in it's own composite shot. The explosions are copies of the laser emitters with the gravity removed, the emitter shrunk to match the planet (I got that wrong) and shifted on the timeline to be 12 frames after the lasers. The explosions look a touch late, and probably should have been 4 frames earler.
The planet is a low-res model, and I should have replaced it.
To mix and mask the 3D model planet with the particle sims, I duplicated the fleet and explosions particle sims, set texture color to white, then added a second emitter. This second emitter is a plain black circle, sized to match the planet and set to billboard to camera. This gave me white particles with the background ones cut off by a black circle--I used this as a luma matte source for the main particle layers. As stated above, I ended up with a mismatch on the explosions, but the way the fleet occludes is close to dead on.
http://youtu.be/uEqsjD4T2jY
This looks like a great experiment - and with the changes you have suggested it would be a great scene. Are you going to do another version with the updated ideas because I'd love to see a VFX breakdown of that!
Actually, tonight I am going to try a simple "flyby" with the fleet, but I want to experiment with moving the lights in the composite shot generating the saucer texture as the camera pans with the fleet... I am seriously having way too much fun with particle cloning.
I think, eventually, I will totally do a pass at the planet bombardment again, along with 13 TARDIS's and Peter Capaldi's eyebrows.
Stand by--I am rendering the second of two new shots of these saucers made with the particle clones... Now that I have a couple of bugs worked out, I expect a jaw drop or two. ;-)
Yeah--So two shots in the next clip:
http://youtu.be/TlZV6iYXSfU
Shot one was an experiment in getting the saucers to fly over the camera. This was interesting, since it required me to figure out how to best match the camera move in the composite shot that generated the cloned texture.
Shot two is just a tons-of-light beauty shot getting up close and personal with two random saucers of the 400 in the fleet.
i.e. will they all point the same direction?
Keep up the great work!!!
Really clever work.