Star Trek Animation

[evil_genius_180]

One of the reasons for building my newest Phase II ship is that I've decided I'm going to learn to animate and I wanted to do Phase II animations but I'm not happy with the old model. I tried animating once years ago on my old Compaq with the AMD K6-2 533 MHz processor with the whole 64 MB of RAM and tS 3 and it totally sucked. I've got the new PC (AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM) and tS 7, so I decided over the weekend that I was going to start animating.

So, I did a couple simple flybys with a planet rendered into the background instead of an actual mesh and some little sound FX I created in Audacity (I can upload it if you people really want to see it but it's not all that special.) It went well so I decided to try something more complex with camera turns and a modeled planet (modeled planets are over-rated, BTW ) Anywho, it was going well until I realized tS 7 has a major flaw (besides the frequent program crashes.) Not only can it only handle 4k textures, like every previous version of tS, but it can also apparently only load a certain amount of (what it considers to be) large textures before it refuses to render. This isn't the case in tS 4. So, I was dismayed but I moved the animation studio over to good ol' tS 4. I even managed to export my mesh to a tS 4 friendly .cob so that I didn't have to retexture and I only had to redo a few of the lights.

Sooo..... this was rendered in trueSpace 4.2 over the last couple days and the sound FX are done in Audacity. It's actually 2 sequences, the first ends just after the turn (allowing me to get rid of the planet and movable starfield in favor of a rendered background, speeding up my render times considerably.) I spliced them together and added the sound with Windows Movie Maker. Incidentally, before Saturday, I'd never used either Audacity or Windows Movie Maker.

Also, this animation is going to be part of a longer sequence, I have more animations to make for it. I also plan to do a "Phase II" 2 or 3 minute sort of mini-movie with different animations daisy chained together and some music. :evil:

[gmd3d]

nice first animation .. better than the one I did ..i am looking forward to the full vid..

and the model looks great

[evil_genius_180]

Thanks bro. I've got some changes in mind (including that crappy planet.) In the meantime, I got rid of that turn towards the end of the animation. (it looked like someone was drunk at the helm)

[evil_genius_180]

OK, new planet and a bonus "point of reference" planet because wjaspers thought there should be something visible in the background (besides the stars) before the ship turned and I didn't want to change the lighting by moving the sun over there. I also changed the camera setup completely.

And the fun with attempting to animate in trueSpace continues. I came up with the idea earlier to render the background first and then add that as a background for the ship animation. So, I redid the planet and added the red planet and animated my background. Well, it seems that tS 4 can't sync background animation and your rendered animation worth a damn. The background animation lags behind, even though it's the same number of frames and should work. So, I had to move back over to tS 7, re-rig my lights with the ones I like better anyway and render the scene.

On the plus side, rendering the background animation and using that as a background worked beautifully in tS 7 and was such a huge time saver that I went up to max AA for the final render (the previous version with the modeled planet was one notch below that.)

Anywho, this is the final pass at this sequence. I want to get on to the others.

[gmd3d]

big improvement .. what is your render time on this

[evil_genius_180]

Thanks bro.

I'm not sure, trueSpace doesn't give you a render summary when it's done, unfortunately, like some programs do. I know the background animation took around 1 1/2 to 2 hours to do. I think the frame average on the ship animation was around 1:46 at the end, so we'll call that 116 seconds. And there are 300 frames in the animation. So, that's about 580 seconds for the the ship animation, a little more than 9 1/2 hours, probably about 11 to 11 1/2 hours total when you add the background animation.

For the ship animation with the modeled planet, I only rendered 147 frames and the camera didn't get as close to the model (which slows down render time, of course) and it took a lot longer than 11 1/2 hours to do just 147 frames (after the 147th frame, I switched to a .jpg background and rendered the other 153 frames in just under an hour.) And that animation also wasn't at full AA. It was only at 3x AA, the latest one was at 4x AA (the maximum) and took a lot less time to render. So, doing the animated background really saved a lot of time.

[gmd3d]

ah I see .. good work on it ,, a new interest for you now