CGTalk - basic mechanical animation

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rikke

05-24-2005, 07:31 AM

I'm planning to make a 10 minute animation for TV screen to visualise activities in a harbour (loading of ships, moving of cranes and so on).. There's no fancy geometry or lighting needed. I assume it will all be basic rotation of cranes, ships moving, valves turning, switches flicking, etc...). No organics.

The problem is, I'm only used to doing stills and an occasional simple walkthrough. My humble experiments with keyframing left me with crappy results and frustrated feelings. I have zero experience with expresso and I do not have a lot of time to dig into it.

I do not have a renderfarm (just my trusty P4) and I'm a little overwhelmed by the length of the animation and my lack of experience. It's about 15000 frames in uncompressed tiff format.

Hints? Clues? Tips? Links to mechanical animation tutorials? Free plugins I could use? Any input is very welcome, especially the tutorials on this subject, they seem to be hard to find.

Srek

05-24-2005, 07:37 AM

If it come sto loading / unloading items you might have a look at this
http://www.maxoncomputer.com/tutorial_detail.asp?tutorialID=248&site=
It's the most simple Xpresso setup i ever did, so no worry ;)

Another thing is that you should set default interpolation to linear for this kind of animation.
Cheers
Björn

rikke

05-24-2005, 11:03 AM

Thanks Srek, I'll have a closer look at it. Is the use of expresso really necessary for this kind of stuff? Or can this be easily done with simple keyframing?

wuensch

05-24-2005, 12:23 PM

With a task that big life without Expresso wont make it any better---
I dont want to talk into your business, but if time is limited &payment allows it i would highly recommend to get someone into the boat with more animation/expresso knowledge.
So many things that can eat up sooo much production time when not being sure how to address a certain task--
OHM mechanics comes to mind as free plugin for mechanical stuff--

Olli

Cartesius

05-24-2005, 12:31 PM

Also check out http://www.base80.com/ for some very nifty XPresso and overall basic solutions.

/Anders

PetrolUk

05-24-2005, 12:45 PM

I'd keep the camera locked off for a start and I'd look at rendering it all in separate elements. Something like this.

Lets take a dock scene with a crane unloading the Ship.

1. I'd first render a still of the Ship and Dock and it's background (sky etc)
2. Then I'd render the crane as an animation unloading the containers.
3. I'd render a still frame of some foreground elements ie more containers just to give the scene depth.

Then take all these elements in to After Effects, Combustion or any compositing program. If you've never used these programs AfterEffects is not unlike photoshop and a simple layered comp is very easy to do. Cinema also has an export option which can take all your camera and lights in to After Effects.

Add all the layers and render the whole scene out as a movie. Finally edit all these separate scenes together in After Effects ( or whatever you have)

This way each bit is sorted into manageable chunks. Also each animation is easily tweaked as you won't need to re-render the whole scene.
Hope this helps

Nextor

05-24-2005, 01:07 PM

With the animation itself. This helped me a lot when i had to do some cranes and trucks.
3DKiwi's Expresso tuts... make it look a little less scary :)

C4D Cafe's Expresso tuts (http://www.c4dcafe.com/portal/article_showsub.asp?cat_id=11&Cat=XPresso+%26+C%2EO%2EF%2EF%2EE%2EE)

BTW, Very good time to thank the guys from C4D Cafe for making life a little easier and funny. Cheers mates.

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