MIRROR EFFECTS

[wageslave]

far enough, but home spun cgi effects tend to look exactly like that - home spun cgi effects.
I firmly beleive that you can acheive brilliant effects very simply, and hide the whole lot under the guise of low budget - thus making them fit in with the rest of the film.

By the way your script looks good, but you are crazy to post it on the internet...

[Curtin-Parloe]

Your script might well be original, but you shot yourself in the foot when you said, "like in the matrix", "like in the abyss"

watch the Hollow Man DVD for some (admittedly limited) advice on CG (i only mention it because I saw it at the weekend)

cheers

Paul

[deanl]

That is some great advice there thanks alot. Its one of the best replies Ive ever seen On this board. I am totaly with you and understand up to the point

To create the Ripple effect, use the
Ripple modifier, and animate the plane
as morph states in time with the live BG
footage.


Ive never used the ripple modifier and am not sure how to animate the morph.

It may be somthing I should no but I dont.

Could you go into more detail there please mate.

Thanks alot this is great.

[Ideasman]

First off, what you describe(as some of the
others have pointed out) is a tad similar
to the Matrix. I would avoid it like the
plague, myself...

You'll need to be fairly au fait with
3dsMAX and it's terminology to understand
any of the following. Secondly, MAX does
not hold your hand and do everything for
you like ILM might if you were paying them...
It can be unpredictable and is not a
particularly stable piece of software.
Apart from that, your system sounds up to
the job- it's just a matter of you learning
several years of MAX experience in a number
of days(titter...)

You'd start off by filming your background
plate of live footage i.e.- the character
pretending to touch sufface of the mirror.
The Cam must be locked down, otherwise
you'll be faced with the pain of
camera tracking. Also the area where the
mirror is supposed to be in the frame
should be blanked out by some kind of marker,
a bright blue piece of cardboard will do
the job(although any colour will do, just
as long as you have a fairly accurate shape
to line your CG mirror up with in MAX.

Now you need to film a POV from the Mirror.
This will act as the relection in the CG
mirror later on.

Import all your footage on to your PC.

Make a new MAX scene, setup a Target Camera.
Set the animation frame rate to PAL 25fps,
Set the render res to 720x576 and pixel
aspect to 1.0

Switch to Camera01 in a viewport and set
The Live BG plate(the shot with the marker
and your actor going through the motions)
as the viewport background. Tick the little
box that says "Use Environment Background"
in the viewport menu.

Use the grid overlayed on the background
in the camera viewport, to align the CG
camera to the same perspective as the camera
that you shot the BG footage with
This is mainly trial and error, although with
practice you learn to do this in a matter of
seconds. Use youreyes to pick out converging
lines in the footage that give away the
position and FOV of the real camera...
The easiest way is to line the grid up
with the floor in the original footage.

Once this is achieved you need to create
some geometry to cast, and distort your
reflection footage on...

Make a plane, and subdivde it in all axis
between about 70-100 units.
Line the plane up so it's level the
world axis grid, and move it in front
of the CG cam. Resize to whatever shape
you mirror marker board is in the viewport
background. make sure that it cover the
entirety of the marker, otherwise you'll
get nasty blue edges to you finished mirror
which will look cack.
Go to the Material Editor, and select a
blank material. Set the POV Reflection
footage as a refelction map.
Set the time menu to "loop"
Apply this material to the plane, and
apply Planar UVW mapping co-ordinates to the
in the Z axis.

To create the Ripple effect, use the
Ripple modifier, and animate the plane
as morph states in time with the live BG
footage.

For the tenticle, use the same setup except
create the morph states from distorting
the mesh with the soft-selection tool in
the Vertex Sub-Object menu.

Easy, eh?

Fancy doing a swarm of "totaly original
CG insects fighting a thousand space
marines in a desert" scenario, next then?

Wageslave,

Home Brew FX can look good if you know
what your doing. But for most of the
poeple on this board, I find it very
unlikely that they'd have the skills
or knowledge to achieve anything of
worth.




[This message has been edited by Ideasman (edited July 16, 2001).]

[Ideasman]

The ripple bit is easy.

It's in the modifiers menu, under
the sub-heading of Parametric Modifiers.

Simply play around with it, you'll get
the jist of it pretty quick.

Forget the Morph States bit, just keyframe
it over time.
http://www.maxforums.org

and
http://www.3dcafe.com

These sites have tons of good tutorials on
just about every technique used in MAX.
Although the MAX help files have more
detailed info on somethings.

A little tip:
Just about every parameter in MAX can be
Keyframed and animated. This includes
Material properties such as noise,
bumpmapping opacity etc etc.


[This message has been edited by Ideasman (edited July 17, 2001).]

[foolmaster]

Here Ill help you out

[foolmaster]

By making it

[foolmaster]

An open thread

[no_one119]

Check http://www.405themovie.com for a great example of what can be acheived with digital effects on a home PC.