I just wanted to say hi..

[Kat the Scawy]

I'm new at the whole animation thing. Its a bit scary ( ) I guess, but I'm getting better at it. My team is also new to FIRST (team 1011) and I just wanted to say hello to everyone and wonder if you had any advice for a rookie animation team.

[Ryan Dognaux]

Advice - Since it's your first year , depending on how many people you have working on your animation and such, keep it simple. I can't stress this enough. Don't spend all 6 weeks working on one scene, just keep the idea simple enough that you will be able to do it and still have time to Render and such. This is our team's 3rd year, but we only have 2 people this year working on Animation, so we have to keep it simple... we're going to be cutting really close too. Good Luck.

[Kat the Scawy]

Thank you, I'll keep that in mind. We already have most of it done, at least the basic parts of our storyline. I hope we can just get it all together and running soon.

[rbayer]

Leave yourself at least a full week to do the rendering. Last year, we put together an animation, started it rendering and then found out it would finish 3-4 days after the deadline. This is especially important if your computer isn't state-of-the-art. For example, if you look through ChiefDelphi, you'll run accros a scene from a field that the creator said took 4 minutes to render. That scene is fairly simple (bridge, tubs, field, etc). At four minutes/frame with 30fps and and 30s animation, it would take almost 2.5 days just to render a full animation!

[sanddrag]

Originally posted by rbayer
For example, if you look through ChiefDelphi, you'll run accros a scene from a field that the creator said took 4 minutes to render. That scene is fairly simple (bridge, tubs, field, etc

And that was on a dual P3 1 GHz with 1 gig of RAM

[Kat the Scawy]

okay, thank you for that too. I'll have to keep that in mind as well. Thank you everyone.^

[Soukup]

one more thing...

sticking to the keep it simple idea...you have to stick to your storyboard. Last year we kept coming up with cool ideas that would have won technical excellence and we worked on those ideas instead of the actual animtion. What we found was that those idesa were really impossible for us to do and we were screwed about 3 nights before the deadline because we didn't have any substance to the animation.

[Specialagentjim]

Originally posted by sanddrag
And that was on a dual P3 1 GHz with 1 gig of RAM

Noo! Really?


Wow..Well, yeah. Remember, if you've got time to kill, raytracing is your friend!

If its a week before deadline and you've got multi-million poly scenes, RAYTRACE BAD! I'd have to recommand looking for an alternate method. Im looking at the Render to texture this year as an alternative.

Essentially, the render to texture lets you render an object with all its shadows, reflections and everything, and "Bake" that texture into the object. Thus, you do one rendering of it all nice, THEN you bake it on the object, and it wont have to compute the lights/reflections/etc. on future renders. Its pretty good BUT your relections wont be updated to look correctly, so on moving objects its not THAT great....

If ya need help and wanna use the bake to texture, IM me @ AIM S/N: specialagentjim