It all started with FIRST....

[Cyberphil]

I just have one question: How did you make that completely white background look so good? I can't get the shadows to work the way I want them. And I also wanted to know if you used the Vray renderer. I wish we could get that.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by Cyberphil

I just have one question: How did you make that completely white background look so good? I can't get the shadows to work the way I want them. And I also wanted to know if you used the Vray renderer. I wish we could get that.

I assume your talking about "The Most Extravagant Credits Ever." I don't use V-ray, I believe its highly overrated. Its actually very simple. Create a skylight, turn on mental ray, then turn on final gather. Set the environment background to 242,242,255 to match the color of the sky light. Create a white plane as the ground. Then create a dancing ted boardmen.

[Cyberphil]

Originally Posted by BuddyB309

I assume your talking about "The Most Extravagant Credits Ever." I don't use V-ray, I believe its highly overrated. Its actually very simple. Create a skylight, turn on mental ray, then turn on final gather. Set the environment background to 242,242,255 to match the color of the sky light. Create a white plane as the ground. Then create a dancing ted boardmen.

I can just never get it to look that good. Do you need to use exterior daylight? Im guessing you do with the skylight.

[BuddyB309]

Originally Posted by Cyberphil

I can just never get it to look that good. Do you need to use exterior daylight? Im guessing you do with the skylight.

Bwah ha! ok, you're more experienced with max. This dabbles into the realm of Layer Rendering With this technique, you need a third party program such as After Effects or Combustion. Its more complex there and I really dont want to type that much so......

Tutorials!!!!

Don't be afraid to rip out your textures on your model to fit your layer that you are currently rendering out.

Learn Backburner and set up backburner on your computer to run as a master and a slave. That way it can go through all the layers as you sleep.

render out in .tga or .png files so you have an alpha channel.

[Cyberphil]

Ok, thank you. I knew you were leaving out some key information.

Ive never used combustion, but we do have it. Our lead animator last year was trying to use it, but all that did for him was give him a huge headache. Maybe we'll try harder with it this year.

And we only use backburner when we are rendering final whole scenes. Il try to use it more often.

And i don't think we ever rendered in .tga or .png files. But it sorta makes sense.

Thanks for the info. You really do know what you're taking about. I'l see what we can do with this new found info this year.

[Jreed129]

well to explain what Phil can not...

Chris, our lead animator last year, did attempt to use combustion with .png files along with alpha channels to layer render our animation last year. The trouble we ran into last year is we would have had to render everything 4 times for each frame, alpha of front/back and color of front/back (were front and back refer to different layers and distance from camera), if I remember correctly. This also was the first time that we used combustion so we were not sure what we were doing.

Seeing as this process was taking so long we looked into why our animation could not render as each full frame with all layers turned on. In the end when a former team member came back to help us, we used a raytrace material that was overloading all the computers, so we replaced the material with another and rendering was smooth again. and did not take 2 hours on 1 frame.

Why it was over loading them I do not know.

[MadeAtMidnight]

Time to update this thread....
Last night the animation team took a road trip to see Artimation 2009 from the Illionis Institute of Art. Saw BuddyB309 -- he won 3 awards -- best 2D animation, best 3D animation and best Animation Performance! Congrats Pete! We're proud of you.

[BuddyB309]

Whoo!! thanks. I guess being a shut in, animating 24/7 pays off.