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Topic: [[CGI for UQM]] - Please send model files. // Submit your animation idea. (Read 50226 times)
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Valaggar
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By the way Amiga, a cool effect for the Chmmr Avatar's ZapStats would be to have them dynamically circle the Avatar (basically make them "patrol" around the ship spherical). An idea is to make the Chmmr animation like the Androsynth bubble test, having the camera move from one side of the ship to the other (back lower left to top front right for example), only to have it fire its laser -> overlay kicks in -> last two seconds the camera moves further in its trajectory as the Chmmr flies off into the unknown. For a variant of ZapSats circling an Avatar without getting in the laser's way, see Slylendro's movie 1283571629.
Then a one-ship-only Nemesis video follows:
0-8.5 -- A Nemesis circles around the camera, shooting at it (moving its turret accordingly); the camera is stationary, but rotates to keep focus on the Nemesis.
8.5-10 -- Suddenly, the Nemesis turns downwards and from what was, a few moments before, its back, three Marines emerge and thrust towards the camera
10 -- AT THIS POINT, OVERLAY ENSUES, pointing towards a Marine - "*GO! GO!* Marine" -, the Nemesis' turret - "Manual Targeting 360<sup>o</sup> Turret" - and a shell - "Shock Wave Howitzer Shell" - just launched by the aforementioned ship
10-13 -- The three Marines near the camera, getting really close (on the verge of entering the ship that the camera represents)
13 -- The screen goes static just like in the Mycon video.
Ah, a Shofixti Scout vessel video has just slipped into my mind.
0-10 -- We see a Scout being shot at by unseen Dreadnoughts from different direction; the camera remains stationary and watches the skillful pilot evade ALL the dozens of Fusion Bolts trying to hit him, while shooting with Mendokusai darts of its own
10 -- (AT THIS POINT, OVERLAY ENSUES, pointing towards the various items shown here, except the Divine Wind, as we can only have one ship in one video, per Amiga_Nut's directives)
10-11 -- The Scout evades the camera through the right (that is, ->) part
11-12 -- A moment of silence ensues
12-13 -- A huge explosion occurs in the right (->) part (the Glory Device's explosion).
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« Last Edit: August 08, 2007, 04:39:47 pm by Valaggar the Wackrazy One »
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Valaggar
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Hmm... when the Druuge shoots for the first time, shouldn't there be some smoke or something similar to show that it's shooting? As it is now, it looks like it used the Blade's special ability.
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« Last Edit: August 06, 2007, 12:03:12 pm by Valaggar the Wackrazy One »
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guesst
Enlightened
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Posts: 692
Ancient Shofixti Warrior
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Ah, good ol' Amiga Nut. Throwing off the screen width with his over sized WIP shots. (Insert smiley to show I mean no malice)
Amiga Nut, what do you know about animation? Your Druuge needs a take, a few frames that anticipates quick action that is to follow. In the case of the Druuge, the take can be a round puff of smoke followed by a flash of light even before the streak of the shot is seen, and backwards jerk needs to be a bigger initial jump, traditionally accomplished by actually deleting the frame with the initial movement. You don't see this sort of thing, but you feel it.
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Galactic
*Many bubbles*
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That looks cool.
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Eth
Zebranky food
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Shipwrecked and comatose.
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This looks fun. I wanna make one. Has anyone done (or is planning to do soon) the Earthling Cruiser? That would be easy for me to model (as they have top and side orthographic views in SC1) and it's one of my favorite ships. Can I call dibs?
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Novus
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Fot or not?
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As I've mentioned earlier, Amiga_Nut, high-definition versions of the videos would be very cool, if you can spare the time and space to rerender the animations (and still have all the necessary files; how much of the Mycon animation stuff can be salvaged?). 640x480 would integrate well with UQM, and the HD versions are just too cool to not use.
Right now, I'm encoding the videos using ffmpeg to ISO MPEG-4 Part 2 (with an Xvid FourCC identification code to get compatible codecs like Xvid and DivX to accept it). With the quality settings I'm using, the file size is about 1 MB per ship (down from 2 MB for the 3DO videos) and the video quality is as good as it gets, more or less, at this resolution; the worst problem is the chroma downsampling. I've noticed that the Mycon video in particular depends a lot on the equipment and software it's played on (mostly due to differences in chroma upsampling). On an old nVidia Riva TNT's video acceleration, the Podship degenerates into a mass of red and orange Lego bricks (essentially 160x120 resolution naively upsampled back to 320x240). Newer hardware and software fares a lot better; on a newer but cheap Intel 855GM, there's some slight blockiness around the edges of the red areas, but the actual reddish (lava?) areas are quite smooth.
Of course, this is me looking for problems with my nose only a few cm from a fullscreen video on a 15-17 inch display. For most cases, the current video quality is adequate. However, I think doubling the resolution would allow noticeably greater quality without affecting download size much.
I suppose a change of codec would be possible, but MPEG-4 Part 2 has the advantages of being very widely supported (as in I've seen cheap DVD players handle this stuff without a hitch) and not too resource-intensive (MPEG-4 Part 10, a.k.a. H.264, may have better quality but it is slow, at least with decoders we could use in UQM).
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Jaenis
Zebranky food
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Beautiful videos, great work there 
I thought to join with idea of Pkunk Fury animation:
Fury flies across the screen and fires few pellets (trying to hit ship offscreen). The other ship fires (only bullet is shown) and Fury is destroyed. Few seconds pass, while camera zooms out and pans a bit, and then Pkunk resurrects. Info screen. Fury spins and shoots pellets at the end.
Rough timing (in seconds):
0-3: flies across the screen
3-6: fires few pellets while flying
6-7: destroyed
7-8: camera zooms out and pans a bit
8-10: resurrection
10: info, rebirth trails still showing on screen
10-13: spins and shoots
Tried to make it quite simple and manageable - but destroying the ship might cause trouble.
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Is there a higher resolution version of that?
