bullet time

[Abigor]

ya... after seeing reloaded i wanted to tackle some tricky stuff, so i set out to try and figure out how to do a bullet time animation in LW.

the basic idea i started with was just to have a character, lets say walking, and then to have him freeze and have the camera circle 360 around him and have him continue walking... standard bullet time stuff. i noodled around with it for a while and only came up with 2 solutions that seemed kinda stupid and realy time consuming and difficult. 1 involved setting the frame step in the render panel to say 0.1 or 0.5, but i found out that LW cant do that, so that idea was out the window.

so if anyway knows a good way to work bullet time into animations, BOTH FOR FROZEN CHARACTER ACTION (eg, someone jumps and freezes in mid air) AND SUPER SLOWED DOWN BUT STILL MOVING ACTION (eg, moving around an explosion as its expanding very slowly). i saw a thread on this ages ago in the old forum i think, but as i recall it seemed exceedingly difficult. so input would b most appreciated, and im sure it will help out everyone in the forums here, not just me! thanx!

[Rei]

I am working on a short which has bullet time in it. To create the effect I made a copy of the scene, took out all the keyframes appart from the one I wanted to have the bullet time bit in. I then moved this to 0 and gave myself 100 frames (20fps) to spin the camera around, using standard method, the objects and camera position change by one frame, done by copying and pasting in the values. Render the full movie up to and from the point with the bullet time, and threw them together in Vegas. Result is ok'ish.

[Craiglet]

Why not just use the scene editor to select all your moving objects and "scale keyframes for selected objects" using the low frame value to specify where the bullet time will start. Scale it up by a factor of 10 or 20 or 50... Experiment to get the degree of slowdown you want.

Then all you need to do, once you're happy with that, is keyframe your camera (starting at that same frame where bullet time begins) making a big fancy circling camera move... Voila!

If you want regular time to kick back in just reverse the process, using an increment to scale down the keyframes by the same degree you scaled them up (.1 or .05 or .02 for the numbers above) with the low frame value being where you want normal time to resume.

This should work great for you and emulate the effect exactly. The only drawback I can forsee is that this wouldn't work for scenes with FX objects... particles and etc.

[Red_Oddity]

Why not use the search button on the top of this forum page...

This has been asked about a hundred times now since the release of the original matrix...

[Abigor]

no such luck Oddity. i did a search and got nothing... maybe all the old bullet time talk was on the old LW forum.

rei, that was one of the methods i thought up, its a pretty easy solution... but im still lookin for the more complicated solution of havin things still moving.

craiglet has a good answer for that, but im still open to more suggestions.

so again, i ask, anyone have any good techniques for bullet time? both stand still and slow motion? anyone at all... dont b shy! :)

[Craiglet]

I didn't find much either...

is there a way to search the 'old forum'?... didn't see any options to do so.

(Although scaling keyframes should give you exactly what you're after...)

[electroNIX]

didnt they do the original bullettime by taking hundreds of pictures with still cameras located around the actor and later "stiching" them together by a compositing soft?
I also rember they used a kind of "morphing" to get from picture to picture... its actually a old technique from some french photographer... I will look up his name sometime...

So, If you want to have it complicated then place 130 cams around your object, render with each of them, then composite them together with some morphing...

[merlinux]

it's not a bullet time but i hope it can help you...
http://www.worley.com/polk/polk_tut_freezetime.html

[Abigor]

thanx for the continued tips guys. so far i think the stretched frames is the best, most realistic, suggestion.

i checked out that polk plugin, and thats all fine n good... but withouht the plugin, it realy wont help =] but it did bring up a good question. how to do motion blur!! is this a standard feature in frozen bullet time? i cant recall off the top of my head if iv ever noticed motion blur in such effects.

but please keep the suggestions comin folks, together maybe we can crack this one and come up with some techniques for all to use!

[meshmaster]

or does that Trinity bullet time shot in Reloaded look an awful lot like the bullet time in Max Payne?!?

[toby]

to "freeze" motion blur, reverse the movement every other frame, then render every other frame (frame step set to 2), starting with a frame that it's moving forward. Motion blur calculates the difference between the current frame and the previous frame.

viola!
http://tmonster.greatnow.com/CarCommercial.mov

[Red_Oddity]

http://www.premdesign.com/relativ.html
Does bullet time aswell

Hmmmm...the bullet-time tutorial fromTaurus Film seems to be down...

Here's another
http://mysite.freeserve.com/agentgonzo/shatter.html
with movie:
http://mysite.freeserve.com/agentgonzo/shatter.avi

[Chimera]

Originally posted by meshmaster
or does that Trinity bullet time shot in Reloaded look an awful lot like the bullet time in Max Payne?!?

All bullet time looks like max payne. It just happens that they did it, and they called it "bullet time." I guess it just kinda stuck.

[Dangerman]

Doesn't Motion Mixer have a non-linear time function??? Just a question of capturing the actors in the time of interest and stretching it or something ... I've never tried it, and I lost the little book ......... Might be worth a look.

[Red_Oddity]

I've not tried this yet, but maybe it is possible to just change the frame rate and render the whole lot like you would really do with bullet-time (300 fps or even just still photography with differnt sources (cameras))
Then import both rendered sequences (the 25, 24 or 30 fps material and the 300fps or still sequence) and then time stretch the whole lot to fit over each other seamlessly in a composite package (AfterFX or Combustion)

Might try this later

*edit*
Come to think, this does mean losing Motion Blur....darnit...

[meshmaster]

Possible Bullet Time Solution http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5426

[Lamont]

What's with this sudden "rush" of questions on Bullet Time?

[toby]

we're just intrigued, havin' fun -

I really think that just keyframing things to slow down the way you want is the easiest - unless MotionMixer does have a function to do it -
I know the application "Motion Builder" does

[shockeddesign]

check this thread (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=63692&)

be sure to watch the killer bean movie, its actually another link on this thread that leads you to the killer bean. awesome stuff