Depth of field

Depth of field

My third scene is a mid hight shot including the necron lord and the top left corner of the dreadnaught.
For these scene I want to have a depth of field effect. It starts with the camera focus on the necron lord waving his hand as he removes the dreadnaught lid and screws with telekinisis. Then the camera loses focus from the necron and focuses in the spining and raising screws and lid.

So after some reasearch I found how to do it and it was easier than I thought. I selected the camera and in properties I select and enable depth of field ( same way I would for motion blur).
I then add a key with the target of the camera onto the necron lord and render a still frame to check the result.

the image bellow is  without depth of field for reference:

You can see the dread is blured  and you can barely see a orange bit on the chest of the necron, which is the desired effect.

Then with the autokey on I move the bar further down.
and change the target distance in the camera setting to focus on the bolts.

And here is the final scene.

 Planning ahead.
 With the Depth of field and the Assinged renderer I think I have all the tools and technick's I need to complete my animation. At the very end IF i have time I will see if I can create the blood effect.

With one week left I will now skin and rig my necron models.
Until the end of Tuesday I hope to have scenes 1,2,3 done and rendered.
Next post on Monday.

Render setup.

Something covered rightly was the rendering option which are many.
I have encoutered some problem while rendering.

One of the many settings is assinging a renderer for the rending.
he default one was scanline renderer.

When I was working with the necron model I used materieals and object lighting that needed the mental ray rendeder,  the default renderer would let the object light to go through objects and come out the other side, or would nt render the metals properly.

When I created the dreadnaught and enviroment I  had the default renderer and that workd fine cause of the materials I used.
Then I added the necton to the scene to test. The necron would not render properly so I changed the renderer to mental ray.
The change in renderer would render the necron and the gold rim of the dreadnaught but all other textures (dread, walls, pipes) would be almost black.
Finaly after some searching I found that there are some presets for the mental ray. I tryed them all the one I liked the most was mental ray.no.gi.

Way of rendering and timeline.

I have given alot of thought for the way I will compose my final animation.
Should  I do it in segments or in one go?

I would like to mimic the way big computer firms like blizzard have hours of rending scenes and do alot of video editing, so it seems they prefer rending single scenes with diffrent angles and effects.

It also makes sence since i would like to add some sound and music which i wound need adobe premier for it anyway.

Nether the less, it is posible to create the whole animation, you just need to add an additional layer for each scene containing the camera the cameras target and 0-2 paths for the cameras motion if needed.






Timeline
For 30 seconds animation with 30fps I will need 900 keys.The default time line is set to 0-100. I increased that to 120 for my first scene, when I was happy with that i wanted to move on, then I decided to add the whole lenght into my timeline (0-900) that was fine too, but then the timeline is so big the area, individual keys are not visible or easy to access.
If found that with shift+alf+left/right mouse key  you can zoom in to the timeline to the section you want.


bellow the time line is set to 0-900, giving a great overview but hard to work with

In the picture above you can see I have zoomed the timeline for my second scene (5sec), the timeline is still 0-900 you just cant see it all now.

Rendering in sections
I have decided to render  the scenes indivudually for the following reasons:
1) I can start producing the scenes as they are done instead of waiting for the whole animation to be complete.
2) I can rework scenes if I decide i need a different angle or effect or need to change something.
3) I can render scenes before all my objects are created, for example my necrons have not been rigged or skined but I am still able to finish the first scene that does not have them.
4) The indistry follows this method.You could have multiple animators working on one project on different scenes
5) Better annd easier for the final editing.

Scene 1 Take 6. Motion Blur.

I am finaly happy with the first scene animation.

I like the movement of the claw breaking down.
I also added some motion to the camera, just a bit but i think its nicely noticable.

And I have now added motion blur.

Motion Blur
Motion blur increases the feeling of movement at high speads.
Motion blur can be atchieved in 3 diffrent ways:
1) go to the Objects  properties and set the motion blur to object.
2) go to the camera properties and select mental ray blur.
3) or go to the effects tab and add it from there.

I choose the first one. I seemed to render faster and I liked the result.
The motion blur in the camera settings renders Images in to your final frame. It is like rendering 12 scenes for 1 frame, making 1 sec animation need 30x12= 320 frames. Still I am willing to saqrifice speed for quality but I liked the blur by setting the motion blur within the object.

Scene 1 take 3

So this morning I have been animating the claw,
after twinking with the rotating piece (you can see the timeline)

I worked on the claws

Plaing the animation I found it looks unrealistic with the main arm remainning still so I add some minnor movement to represent  vibration.

I also made some vibrations for the tubes holding the main arm and and a small movement on the leg at bottom right corner.
 After some testing and tweeking this is take 3 of scene 1.

I am still not happy with it the claws are moving too fast so i will go back and change the time line.

Mentioning timeline, my first scene is to last 4 seconds, and since we want the animation to have 30fps I went to the time configuration and set the lenght to 120.

Linking and a minor problem.

While I was examining procedures of adding bones to mechanoids. I saw a video were bone parts were linked to each other insted of "attach bones". Then it hit me, that I could do the dreadnought claw animation by simply linking, no need for bones.
I went to my scene and linked the claws to the rotating part of the arm, then rotated the arm to be in the angle I wanted. This is when problems occured. While the arm was in the upright positiom the rotating part of the arm would rotate around the axis I wanted, when I repositioned the arm it would seem it spined on a diffrent axis.
So I selected the pivot point at  tryed repositioning it by hand and by "center to object" align to object" "align to world" with no effect, I must have spent 2-3 hours to fix it. It took so long that my computer needed restarting.
After the restard it seemed to behave normaly as expected and rotated perfectly in an angle.

So I did some animation of the rotating piece.

This first piece was my first attempt with bones on 2 basic shapes, notice how the long part twists when I roatated the bone. Not an effect desired when animating mechanical parts. Apologies sor the small sequences.

* At a previous post "Group,attach or boolean?" I sujested attach for animation completly forgeting about link. So I attached the claws to the rotatting part. What I did not take in mind is that when attached you can't not alter the pivot point even in element mode. Here is a render of it anyway.

The video bellow is a rendering on the upright position with link showing the claws and the rotators work fine.
this is in the upright position after this i spent half my day trying to figure why it would act the same when the arm was in a diffrent angle.

And my working video of the first scene (with the arm at an angle) working on the rotator.

Ready Set shoot!

Not so fast thought.

Today I sorted out the bitmap files for my dreadnaught, I also converted all the hoses to editble polys because the dread needs to by scaled to size with the scenery, why you may ask, the reason is because the hose diameter is set to a size in its settings that does not change when scaled. The result was having a masssive hose on a small dreadnought. If you convert the hoses into editable poly it loses its settings as a hose and now scales done to the rest of the model.



So with the terrain made to an extend and the models ready, I added the dreadnought to my scene.

And a render with the enviroment and the dread.

My Idea was to add the models and work from there.
But I need to add the bones to the models.
Still i am not sure if I needed to attach all the parts of the necron together before the skining it.
So i tested it.

I created 4 objects and then for each one I added a skin modifier and added the bone within it.
It seemed to work fine. It does seem I am creating more work for my self, I will just have to apply it to the model and see.
My plan is tomorrow to create the bones for the dreadnought and add it to the scene.
If  I am productive I will also start the necron lord Rigging and skinning.