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View Full Version : first animation attempt--cant see anything

MitchieA
04-16-2005, 06:32 PM
I'm trying to animate a simple scene. I keyframed the camera at frames 1 and 60 so that it does a perimeter around my objects. When I preview within layout, everything looks cool. The problem comes in with the rendered output, in this case a simple AVI. It's completely pitch black. I tried playing the AVI in both Windows Media Player and Winamp with the same result. I also re-rendered with a different Codec (DIVX) but no luck. Attached is a screenshot of my render options in case I set something up incorrectly.:shrug:

Thanks for your help guys!
DaveW
04-16-2005, 07:26 PM
Did you ever do any F9 test renders? How about lighting? Or did you maybe accidentally set some render or lighting flags that might make the object invisibile or unaffected by lights?
MitchieA
04-16-2005, 08:53 PM
Hi Dave

I've done F9 renders of several frames just to make sure they look fine and they do. I'm stumped!
Steve Warner
04-16-2005, 09:13 PM
Try rendering to a frame sequence and then check the individual frames. If that works, you can import the frame sequence, use it as a background image, and re-render to an animation. Generally speaking, this is the best approach, as it ensures that you don't lose your entire render should LightWave crash, the power go out, or you simply need to stop the render for some unforseen reason.
Zarathustra
04-18-2005, 04:10 PM
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is true of regular quicktime or just quicktime pro (which is $30)...

The Qt player allows you to import an image sequence and then export it as mpg, QT, avi, whatever. QT is available for PC, and no doubt there are several other things for PC that will do this, too, aside from QT but as a Mac guy, I can't help but push QT. :D

Rule of thumb, never render animations. Render sequences for the reasons Steve gave plus so that you always have a pristine, uncompressed sequence that you can then export out as anything else. If you render an animation with a particular compression, you'd have to rerender if you needed something better later, like uncompressed.
zuzzabuzz
04-18-2005, 04:27 PM
Sorry, I'm not sure if this is true of regular quicktime or just quicktime pro (which is $30)...

QT Pro only. The price is nice but it's a pain that you need a different license for each platform. Anyway, yeah, I really like using QT Pro for basic stuff like this (plus Presentation mode).

But of course, you can use Lightwave too. Once rendered out as single frames, you can set those frames as the backdrop for an empty scene and render to whatever codec you like.

either way. :)
MitchieA
04-18-2005, 07:36 PM
Sorry guys, it was my mistake! Even though I had made frame renders using LW, I had since turned down Global Light Intensity to 0%. The FPrime window didn't seem affected by this setting, and I quickly forgot I had changed it.:argh: Sorry to have troubled you guys.
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