[BuddyB309]

doing this method does work, but it is very difficult to get anything good out of it. Lets say you want a steam, powered, clanking robot walking around. You would have to have Hissing for when his release valves go off, metal clank when his foot hits the floor, squeaking of his joints, and maybe a soft hum of the interworkings. Thats just one character, combining all those sound effect layers into curve editor is just not gonna happen, especially when curve editor only allows one layer at a time. Sound in curve editor is only good for lip sync, or finding the beat of the music. If you add a short "meow" sound to the curve editor, the sound effect is going to loop when its done playing. (who wants to watch a animation when the only audio is "MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW!.....")

So what if you do it in video post? I have never attempted this strategy but i know how video post works. Lets say in your sound effect layer you are off but a half of second in the timing. Now your animation looks like a badly dubed japan film. Sound effects only need to be off a couple of frames for this effect to happen. Now you have to rerender your entire project just to fix the timing of the sound effect. And lets face it, most of you out there only leave time for one render. (I'm guilty of it too, my first year i just made the deadline by a couple of hours.)

What about video post pulling from already rendered video files?
Well, Im my expirence video post is really good at slaughtering the quality of the video files when it does it this way. It'll will look like you pulled something off of youtube. But if your team is fine by that, by all means go for it.

In short you are far better off getting a trial version of adobe premier, or some other video compositing program and putting sound, music, and annoying cats meowing into the animation after its done rendering.

The problem is that under the constraints of the Autodesk Visualization award you are not allowed to use other companies programs, (yes boys and girls not even photoshop is allowed in the competition). There are many ways around this. Autodesk LOVES if you use their products in the creation of the animation. Cruise around on their website and see if any products come to interest. If anything comes to fancy, lets say a video compositing program (combustion), pick up the phone and dial autodesk. Explain the situation like "hi my name is so and so and I'm from on the animation team in team so and so. We are making a animation for the 2008 Autodesk Vizualization award but we would like a video compositing program to complete our animation. Since we can only use Autodesk programs we were wondering if you would allow us to have a 30 day trail of so and so even though you dont have it on the website."

Or you can ask autodesk if they could donate a student copy of the program to your team. Believe me if you keep trying and ask the right person, they are more than happy to help you. (for those of you really into making an awesome "Pixar look" animation WITHOUT a ridiculous render time, look into Combustion and then contact me)