Playing With Morphing & Hypervoxels

[adrian]

Hi all,

This is the result of some playing around with HV's and morphing.

Any comments/suggestions?

BTW if you look at the background, you'll see it flickering which is very annoying - why is this happening? It's not the compression as it happens even if I render uncompressed.

The background is 4 layers (each an image map).

It took around 6 hours to render on a P4 with 1Gig RAM.

I've attached a sample pic, and here is the link:

http://www.adrianskingdom.com/LiquidMetal.avi

(DivX5.0.2, 1.6mb)

[Carbon71]

I do see what looks a lot like compression artifacts around the the borders of the droplets and the "total travel" text.

If by "flickering" you mean the blurry jumpy looking texturing under the "equity" (and not above it), then I dont have a clue. Wonder why it's only happening underneath? I would isolate what the problem is by taking out one thing at a time until the prob doesn't show up. Start with the ground texture (or just layers of the texture). You see the blurriness when you render just one frame in the middle of your anim right? The you only need to render 1 frame to find out when it's gone. So do some trial and error.

Crits of the animation:
The morph form the particles to the "equity" word works great and looks cool. The spread of the particles at the beginnning of the anim is a little slow and regular. In fact make the animation half as long at most. It needs to be snappier. The "total travel" electricity looking transition is great, but needs to happen a lot quicker.
When the particals first hit they look like rain drops hitting and slowly spreading. It might be cool to have them hit and spread out a lot quicker in comparison to them morphing into the word. also maybe have them hit at different times or in order after each other to mix it up.
Last thing is that the ground. though a great color map, it is a little flat. Do you also have it applied as a bump map? If not, do so, so that the crevices and cracks have more depth and are convincing.
Nice job! Looks cool. :)

Carbon

[adrian]

Hey Carbon, thanks for the crit.

Actually I forgot to apply the texture maps as a bump map which is why it looks flat!

I will speed up the first bit (the spreading out of the particles) and the spark particles at the end.

I was debating whether to have them appear uniformly or at random - I'll try the random way now...

Adrian.

[adrian]

Okay, how about this one:

http://www.adrianskingdom.com/LiquidMetal.avi

(1.4mb)

I have speeded up the part where the liquid metal first starts to appear on the table and splodges out, and the "total travel" bit at the end.

The splodges also start more randomly so it's not so uniform.

I also managed to get rid of most of the flickering of the background by switching off pixel blending and texture antialising on 3 of the texture layers, plus going up to enhanced low for antialiasing.

A bump map has been applied as well which makes the surface much better I think.

I'm really happy with this now, but can anyone suggest a way of making individual particles move at a faster/slower rate than the others?

Adrian.

[Carbon71]

Looks great to me! I think you're finished. If you feel like messing with it some more though, here's what I'd do.

Make the whole animation time 6seconds (maybe 8) instead of 12. DO it as a test and see what you think.

Animate drops (balls) coming down that create the particle explotions. I say this because they look like rain drops, but you dont see the partical hit the ground. This of is if you want "drop hitting ground effect"

Try to fix that last little bit of flickering

This is nitpicky addon stuff. I also think it's great like it is.

P.S. Is this for a client? If so my question is: does this animation fit the theme of the client's company?

[adrian]

Yes it's for a client - they're mainly a ski company but I have put together a wide variety of stuff for them - this is the only one that doesn't really fit in with what they do - but I'm going to do another one with their logo morphing out of some snow.

One that they really like (and so do I even if I say so myself!) is this one:

http://www.adrianskingdom.com/EquityFlag.avi

(732kb, DivX again)

They will use it for an animated screensaver.

It's a very simple bit of compositing but sometimes the simple things are the best. Here's another question: How can you make it so an MD animation can loop seamlessly?

As for the last bit of flickering I don't know how to get rid of that - I've tried lots of different codecs but it still happens on each.

I will play around some more to see if I can get a good droplet effect that you suggested.

Adrian.

[Carbon71]

Nice job on the composite. I bet they do like that. As far as the loop goes, have you tried messing with the graph editor? Change the post behavior to "Oscillate" and have the anim run twice as long (or change orginal to half as long then you could keep same time when it oscillates). Also you might want to play with the tension on the points to get "smooth in, smooth out" so it does jerk so much at the point where it oscillates.

Heh, I cheap way I've done it before is just to bring it into an video editor (premiere) and put a copy of the clip after the original that runs backwards. Course then you have the text writing backwards.

Good luck and good job.

Carbon

[Doobywho]

How was this effect achieved?

[adrian]

The morphing effect or compositing?

If you mean the morphing, then these were the steps:
1. Create model (I used the pen tool) - or if you're doing standard letters you can just use the type tool.
2. Use the knife tool to make lots of subdivisions - you need lots of fairly evenly spaced points on the object
3. Triple the object, then subdivide (Shift+D) - faceted is fine. This will increase the number of points further still.
4. Make a "splatter" endomorph of the base object by using Jitter (Modify --> Deform -->Jitter).
5. (K)ill the polygons to leave the points only.
6. Save object - in Layout apply mercury hypervoxel preset.
7. Make the HV's reflect the Tinfoil reflection image that came with LW. Add a bluey-procedural crumple texture to add a bit of tint.
8. Create a size envelope for the HV's to increase as they spread out.
9. Over a period of 150 frames or so, morph the object from it's jitter version back to base object.
10. Turn on raytrace reflections plus shadow and render!

That's it in a nutshell - I could make an in-depth tutorial if anyone's interested?

Hope this helps anyway,

Adrian.

[Doobywho]

A tutorial would be great! (i dont know what else you could say tho, u explained it well) .. thanks!