[pgill]

hi all

what about something similar to what i have seen on some 3d sites such as a competition where the source footage is made available for download and a set objective has to be fulfilled. It is stipulated that the winner must agree to provide a tutorial on exactly what was done (the thought process behind approaching the shot follwed by actual realisation) before they receive their prize (supplied by a sponsor…of course!). Upon entry the artist must also submit a brief version of this tutorial such as a simple bullet point text file. This way the judging can work out that the winner has been efficient/inventive/etc rather than just the quality of results.

maybe a little ambitious but i have seen it work really well before.

cheers

paul

[pgill]

hi

i think the idea is to get boujou to track the footage and then export this track as a flame action (which will bring in the camera move)…you can help it by doing a render from maya using the camera move, with nice equally placed geometry in the scene for boujou to use as tracking markers.

also try tracking in flames 3d auto tracker…works well in some shots..oh its only in flame 9 though!

cheers

paul

[pgill]

hi

i’m certainly not saying there is no r&d left to do…but simple economics dictate what autodesk can do. As you say you can get things like furnace made by smaller companies with smaller r&d outlay and it will run on desktops eg furnace for after effects for 10% of the cost of the discreet spark!!!! so autodesk throwing big sums of money at r&d is harder to justify as previously the hardware is what kept tools like this exclusive to highend workstations but now this isn’t the case. Even if they come up with a new technology, chances are this technology will be able to perform just as well on a desktop machine and so someone somewhere will release a rival product at a much lower cost.

At the end of the day, unless they improve the hardware to a point where again it is years ahead of the desktops, they are not going to have the chance to make exclusive tools. You said it yourself…it’s the otherway round and thats down to simple economics, price per unit of computing power!

anyway its all just my opinion.

[pgill]

i reckon this is the way to further address the shake market…alot of people using maya comp in shake…if they could integrate the pipeline between maya and toxik/flame then they can attack that market.

also the issue of r&d…i think that apart from people like debevec, there has been a saturation point in what defines the highend simply because of the technology advances in recent times have rendered highend as less essential, how much r&d can you do to differentiate from the lower end market?

i think now its more about usability and workflow rather than big new features…this seems to be the same in alot of the technology industries at the moment…

just my twopennies

paul

[pgill]

ok cool

is the reflection map made spherical by flame…if so we can use the old offset..polar…trick to make it seemless.

ps

using the reflect texture as a lighting source is looking pretty damn good!!!

have a look … simple test with a torus …

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/pgill.rm/detail?.dir=f221&.dnm=5c1b.jpg&.src=ph

[pgill]

thanks for the reply

ok..that is exactly what i am doing but i wish to be more accurate than doing it by eye.

could i have some sort of expression set up going on…?

i.e

two camera track nodes: axis_track_a and axis_track_b (both 3 down in the hierarchy from a master axis)
two dummy nodes: axis_dummy_a and axis_dummy_b

so i have similar expressions in the transY values of both dummy nodes which produce the world space tansY values of axis_track_a and axis_track_b

by world space i mean relative to the flame origin 0,0,0 and not relative to the parent in its hierarchy. i guess this is done by traversing up the hierarchy, whilst adding together any of the translations of parents and doing something with the rotations (no idea what…trig maybe!!!) to give you a real transY value relative to the origin (0,0,0)

then have an expression which translates and rotates the master axis until the transY values of axis_dummy_a and axis_dummy_b are = 0.

well…i have no idea about expressions so is this at all possible???if so it would be so great if someone could get me going with this!

if not i can just bring it into 3dsmax and do it here before bringing it back into flame although i’mworried about conversion issues!
cheers

paul

[pgill]

…or hdcam straight to disk is said to work well

paul

[pgill]

hi all

no replies??? i bet its because i said i was a junior…hehe

you all want me to have to work my ass off before i can tap into all of your knowledge!!!

please help out, someone…

cheers

paul

[pgill]

hi

just be aware that there are/were a couple if issues with the mask workflow between flame and combustion.

yes the setups from combustion can be loaded in flame with keyframes. however there was a bug when i last tried…cv3…fv8.5…where it would crash upon loading the mask if you don’t already have a mask created in flame…so just create any old spline and import then delete the original.

also be aware that when creating masks in combustion you can have uneven bezier handles which arent supported in flame. if you do this they come in as broken bezier handles. the work around is whilst adjusing handles in combustion hold down alt (windows) and it will ensure the handles stay equally weighted.

the last thing i found is advanced gradient comes into flame twisted inside and out which i never worked out a fix for…

other than these things i think combustion is great for doing the job of providing a flame project with masks.

paul

[pgill]

how weird

only an hour before reading this thread we had some of the developers in and a product manager and i mentioned this exact thing, which they didn’t seem to be aware of but took on board…i think!

cheers

paul

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