Animation Lead Time

unimatrix · Post by **unimatrix** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:27 pm

Generally speaking, it takes about 1 month per minute of animation in terms of lead time for animation. This means storyboards to creating the scene, to rendering to post production work. About 80% of that time is typically rendering.

If story boards are given before and, typically I can get to work on the scenes rather quickly.

Also there is a definate quality vs. time difference. Raytracing engines, like 3D Studio, Lightwave, and Yafray takes a hell of a lot longer then say Blender's internal renderer. On the other hand, quality is so much better that's a no brainer... I can remember 3DS taking upto 9 hours a FRAME on a 500Mhz PC to render and some our work on Lighwave of 500 CPU hours per frame. Blender, I've done 2600 frames in 27 hours on a G4 500 tower and 16MB video card.

I can usually set up a scene in an afternoon, then it can take upwards of a week to get the animation "just right". Then comes basic test renderings (no OSA, no ray tracing, no textures, and 25% size).

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Thu Feb 17, 2005 11:45 pm

I got fprime, if you want I can render some frames.

CubOfJudahsLion · Post by **CubOfJudahsLion** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 5:34 am

Blender's is a hybrid scanline/raytrace/radiosity renderer, and a raytracer/photon mapper/GI if you render with Yafray, but this can be messy. Yafray support needs improvement, and Yafray still has room for optimization.

Until now, all discussions regarding FMV realization were more on the hypothetical and stylistic side. It's good to have someone who wants to bring ideas to the ground.

In terms of style, the existing recommendation is to be consistent with gameplay visuals for coherency which greatly helps player immersion. Vega Strike has an inherent hi-tech and noir look to it, realistic ship and space visuals and comic-style characters (not too much of a deal since virtually every 3d suite known to man now has cartoon shaders.) This style is also meant to be used in the upcoming comic (God willing!) as well as in any movieclips produced. Mood- or location-based color lighting is favored (often seen around stations.)

I read your recommendation on QuickTime/Sorenson as a distribution format, and my art/tech side goes 'yes'. You know your stuff (what would you recommend for production clips considering both bandwidth and quality?) Of course, we need the other side of the brain to speak as well--Devs are still to pronounce themselves regarding FMV playback. We need to consider deployment difficulty (from additional software installation) and API portability.

Post by **hellcatv** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 7:49 am

would be nice to get a nice promo video or intro video into the available downloads--would let people see what VS is really like without committing hard drive space and time...

same with the possibility of other cutscenes

the codecs at the xiph website are always good...because then it's assured that compiling in a codec will require no licensing fees

CubOfJudahsLion · Post by **CubOfJudahsLion** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 9:17 pm

Oooooh, and there's an app that transcodes final video to Theora+Ogg in one step. And you gotta love that free-for-all license. Additionally, it would be less trivial for those who skip ahead how to play the videos outside the game >:D

For promo videos, I'm still with QuickTime, although it'd probably be a good idea to have a separate AVI or WMV.

energyman76b · Post by **energyman76b** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 9:43 pm

Hi,

please do not forget, that quicktime is a mac/win only thingie.

What is wrong with xvid et al for this job?

Post by **hellcatv** » Fri Feb 18, 2005 10:23 pm

I never seem to have problems playing quicktime in linux

Post by **dandandaman** » Sat Feb 19, 2005 3:48 am

hellcatv wrote:I never seem to have problems playing quicktime in linux

ya, ite depends onteh media player. gstreamer and xine support a smaller subset of codecs than mplayer, so while mplayer will play almost any .mov, with the others you've got to hope the audio and video are in supported codecs (the star wars ep3 trailer plays with no sound in either for instance). Generally, really old ones (-1997) are not supported, and really new ones are not supported

Dan.a

pincushionman · Post by **pincushionman** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 4:59 pm

Quicktime player is offered as a free download for Windows. Apple was smart enough to figure out that they needed to provide a Win32 distro if they wanted their format to survive.

strangelet · Post by **strangelet** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 5:24 pm

btw, mac users can view most types of .avi via some excellent freeware players available at versiontracker.com -

my personal fave is VLC

charlieg · Post by **charlieg** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 1:20 pm

There should definitely be a theora version of the movie to support the free codec, even if it's just complimenting an avi or mpeg.

unimatrix · Post by **unimatrix** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 8:37 am

CubOfJudahsLion wrote:Oooooh, and there's an app that transcodes final video to Theora+Ogg in one step. And you gotta love that free-for-all license. Additionally, it would be less trivial for those who skip ahead how to play the videos outside the game >:D

For promo videos, I'm still with QuickTime, although it'd probably be a good idea to have a separate AVI or WMV.

Really want to get techical, look at how redvsblue releases content. WMV, QT, and DivX AVI. For promotional videos you want at least 2 formats. One of those things, Mpeg 4 *should* be an ideal standard, problem is MS did a fine job F$($%*&$ that codec to hell and back, but that's another story.

If you want an universal AVI (don't shoot me), Cinepak Codec by radius. Cinepak is old as dirt and considered legacy at this point. Supported by a number of Linux players as well. The other option that you know will work is offering an MPEG-1 file. Yes I said MPEG-1, not the greatest quality, large files size, but it will work on anything damn it including my cell phone (i think).

As far as authoring goes, I use Final Cut Pro 3 at home. I have acess to FCP 4HD/64-bit latest and greatest at work. However, iMovie will also work so long as your not doing a lot of sound editing. Currently iMovie supports only two sound tracks (unless its changed with iMovie HD which I'll have by then end of the year when I get a couple Mac Mini's). I used to use Adobe Premiere about 5 years ago. 5.2 was pretty good, especially on the PC, but 6.0 was a total peice of shit (forgive my frankness) and why we switched to FCP 3.

For conversions and to render final output for online we use Quicktime Pro. I even paid for QT pro out of pocket when I was in college it was that damn handy. Best $30 I ever spent. Its the media tool kit's swiss army knife. If QT pro can't convert it, you shouldn't be using it!

For in game delivery...that's something the developers need to give a lot more input into. For example, Falcon 4.0 uses Mpeg(it may have been AVI I can't remember) movies and calls to Windows Media player to play those cutscenses in a in-game wrapper. I remember you could watch the movies from Windows Media Player in windows 98 by exploring the CD and opening the files in the Movie folder. Independance War did something very similar if I remember. Other games have used Bink, but whole 'nother topic.

Again, if we were dealing with Windows & Macintosh I'd say quicktime, and we're good to go. Linux is the X-factor on the best way to handle this operation. VS is already a heft filesize. Intromovies and cut scenes maybe a good, "Buy the CD-ROM" trick to help support development.

I do video editing and some FX work freelance while going to grad school. I've done my fair share of programing in PERL and Visual Basic in the past, and I leave the floor open to those that are in there developing the guts of the game. That's their domain. Best I can do is give ideas and recomendations based on my experiences...which means I'm extremely baised towards what is known to work.

Someone had recommended Ogg as an audio wrapper. I'd stay away from it for the time being and still with standards. The audiophiles love Ogg, but go up to someone on the street and ask what an Ogg file is and then ask them what an MP3 file is and see what kind of response you get.
==============================================
Back to the orginial topic.

For Cinematic squences here is my $.02.

Planning:

Movieplanner
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Animation

Use Blender for animation and rendering. I just completed my first couple tests with Blender's new internal raytracing engine for mirroring textures and effects. Long over due, but it took about 6 days to render a 300 frame animation before crashing. Unfortunately, there is no version of Blender designed for the DEC ALPHA platform, so my big horsepower machine in my basement (Quad 500Mhz ALPHA Machine w/2GB ram picked up from a business forclosure auction for $1500 in 2001) is useless.

This is personal opinion, but some of the work I can do in Blender now is on Par with what I did in 3DS Max 2.5 a few years ago. Some things are better, others not quite as good, but it will do the job. I also suggest this because there is already some interopterablity between VS models and Blender already.

Thirdly, this is an OSS project, so is Blender, it will do the job and can provide some viral marketing efforts about VS by going to Elsyin and saying: look at the cool stuff we're doing with Blender...

Animation package of choice: Blender. (Oh and we can get it to work on every platform but ALPHA grumble, grumble)

Render output: AVI Raw (Final output/compression achieved in final step)
---------------------------------------------------------------
Post Production

Generally I use Adobe After Effects for retroscoping in weapon effects (yeah, I cheat and willfully admit to it too!) and some also for some explosions too.

I am going to try Mainvision/Axogon and AlamDV for effects work as well. From what I've read they offer some pretty inexpensive and quality results with pretty good ease of use. No having to retroscope every frame.

Output: AVI RAW
------------------------------------------------------------------
Editing

Personally I would use Final Cut *. Express will handle everything and then some, I just happen to have Pro.

For linux there is a nice little program called Cinelerra. Never have used it, but apparently needs one hell of a processor to run it, but will do just about anything FCP or Premiere will.

Final Output: QT/Sorenson 3 and QT Pro to covert as needed.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments, Suggestions, Problems?

Duality · Post by **Duality** » Fri Mar 04, 2005 7:06 pm

How about cinematic scenes that can be renderd real time besides having them renderd to a video file?

Plenty of games like Secret:Ops, and Babylon 5 IFH has this.

Well if someone has a super slow computer mabie the the video thing would be a good idea.

etheral walker · Post by **etheral walker** » Sat Mar 05, 2005 2:18 pm

for such things we need an ingame editor, like machimina, as example

unimatrix · Post by **unimatrix** » Sun Mar 06, 2005 3:48 am

Duality wrote:How about cinematic scenes that can be renderd real time besides having them renderd to a video file?

Plenty of games like Secret:Ops, and Babylon 5 IFH has this.

Well if someone has a super slow computer mabie the the video thing would be a good idea.

This has been popular in newer games especially on consoles like PS2 and X-Box (think Knights of the Old Republic). Problem is it takes a lot of horse power to do this.

CubOfJudahsLion · Post by **CubOfJudahsLion** » Mon Mar 07, 2005 10:12 pm

@All: unimatrix is offering professional, industrial-grade graphics here. This is an offer to be considered seriously.

@unimatrix: lessee, I did a quick search for blender3d for alpha. There seem to be a couple of sites on the subject, but I didn't find download links. Now, the sources are available and maybe it can be compiled. I agree that it'd probably be too much work though.

In the meantime, the promo video is what we can concentrate on now. One is being prepared as we speak. I'll go bugger someone and get back to you guys on that, possible in a new thread where I'd post the screenplay.

unimatrix · Post by **unimatrix** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:08 am

@Alpha - At one time a really old release (like 1.8, maybe 2.2) was actually ported to Alpha Linux. They dropped support in 2001 for the DEC Alpha version, however some of the 64-bit extentions survive and is in use d for the AMD64 version. However, its unlikely that the Alpha Processor would be of much use because Alpha's are designed for integer work like vector/matrix math calculations. Apps like Blender are heavy on floating point calcs. Also the machine only has 2GB of Ram, so the ablity of 64-bit systems to support more than 4GB of Ram do me any good either. The most important thing is its the one computer I have that is collecting dust meaning if it needed 5 days to render an animation, I could use it and it would remain untouched and undisturbed.

@Rendering -

I really, really need to read up on my Lightwave stuff. That's Paul's (business partner) area of expertise. He's the modelling and Lord God of Photoshop. I am attempting to learn how to model in Blender...okay that's really a lie. Its more like I take a plane, then extrude until I see something I like...

The best thing about blender is we can render sample shots extremely quick. That means no motion blur, 50% size, and no anti-aliasing [OSA] (but we can do ray trace) but you can see what's going to happen and make sure the action's correct. We're talking a couple minutes of video in less than 10 minutes.

It is the final rendering that will take few couple days. Then a saturday afternoon in FCP and two afternoons in After Effects adding lasers. I am starting to use Blender for Photon Torp effects and explosions with particle effects more and more. I do have some funny, any really bad, test renderings of some weapons effects. Granted 10 minute setups and such.

Bulk of our work is creating 3D Logos from 2D versions and doing broadcast animations of logos for businesses. A lot of it is sub-contracting work for smaller video production companies and local art studios. Mainly because that pays the bills. We'd like to do some other work and expand a little and we really don't have any good examples of what Blender can do in a broadcast arena. Thus far we've stuck with LightWave because we can say, "We use the Oscar and Emmy winning CGI application. Its the same one Hollywood uses for TV and movies".

Its also $1700 a seat too. We also need to check out the pricing for to set up a render farm. I know with 3DStudio MAx you could install the render engine on however machines you wanted that were to be used only for rendering with the purchased copy.

For that reason we are taking a serious look at blender mainly because I feel now Blender is up to the task, especially for web and animations for PowerPoint. We just need to prove it...

unimatrix · Post by **unimatrix** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 8:40 am

strangelet wrote:btw, mac users can view most types of .avi via some excellent freeware players available at versiontracker.com -

my personal fave is VLC

As a mac user I can say that Quick Time has no problem playing .avi's...it has a problem with some of the codecs used creating those Avi's. Most notably DivX....