Quick question: Animation rules?

[Yov]

Where could I find the rules for the animation contest?
If it changes every year then where could I find last year's?
Thanks

[Marc P.]

There's some basic information on the Autodesk site that gives an overview of the animation award, the Autodesk Award for Visualization. There's also some more specific criteria in section 8.6 of the awards part of last year's competition manual.

[Yov]

Thanks, I have a great idea for an animation, hope I can pull it off

[Yov]

Why oh why do they limit us to 30 seconds?
*shakes fist*

Limiting time = limiting creativity

[rowe]

Originally Posted by Yov

Why oh why do they limit us to 30 seconds?
*shakes fist*

Limiting time = limiting creativity

Not really, you'd be surprised with how much you can fit in 30 seconds. That and part of being creative is knowing how to fit everything you want into that 30 seconds. Just from a purely objective standpoint, you would need a good sized render farm for anything above about a minute if you wanted to finish in time, remember that 30 seconds of video is 900 frames the computer has to render or at about 2/3 minutes a frame (for a decently complex scene) thats around 2 days.
Just my $0.02.

[Baden3DMAX13]

Originally Posted by rowe

Not really, you'd be surprised with how much you can fit in 30 seconds. That and part of being creative is knowing how to fit everything you want into that 30 seconds. Just from a purely objective standpoint, you would need a good sized render farm for anything above about a minute if you wanted to finish in time, remember that 30 seconds of video is 900 frames the computer has to render or at about 2/3 minutes a frame (for a decently complex scene) thats around 2 days.
Just my $0.02.

Depending on what all you've got in the scene and what computer your running the software on too. If you've got a pretty simple scene with either radiosity or global illumination going on, you're going to need a hand computer to be able to render it in time. Or if your seen is REALLY simple, but you have a crap load of particles in the scene, that would bog it down alot too because of the calculation time there. But with the 30 seconds thing, I agree and I disagree. It does put a limit on what you can do. But, if you can do what you want to do in 30 seconds then that's awsome. I know that is the past couple of years, we've had some good ideas that would fill alot of time, but with 30 seconds we had to limit ourselves to the bare minimum of what we wanted to do in the first place. In the past couple of years we have also had trouble planning it out accordingly because we really only have 2 people on our team and we don't have ANY budget money(0 money to spend). The best computer we have right now is a dell pentium 4 with 3.0, 512mb memory, and an ati 9200(maybe....im not even sure about any of those specs.. just a guess...). It's like that for alot of schools, and isn't fair for them, but it's nothing that can be helped. Animation is normally one of the most overlooked parts to a team as it is. People are normally too concerned with either chairmans or manufacturing and it sucks. But puting a 30 second limit, limits the things that a small school has to do. that's just my 2 cents

[Yov]

We have a few computers on a network in our workshop.
Too bad the best one is a 600mhz celeron with a riva tnt2 I brought from home...

[White_Orpheus]

2 to 3 minutes? For a modestly complex scene? Wow, you must have an odd definition of complex, or a real beast of a computer. For the animation last year, we were averaging around 14 minutes a frame.

[rowe]

Originally Posted by White_Orpheus

2 to 3 minutes? For a modestly complex scene? Wow, you must have an odd definition of complex, or a real beast of a computer. For the animation last year, we were averaging around 14 minutes a frame.

OK, what I meant by that is something a little more than a primitive scene with default lighting. Last year i think we were getting about 8-10 minutes to the frame and it took us around 1 day with a 12 computer render farm.

[Yov]

what computers do you use for the animation?
CPU/RAM/video card

[Baden3DMAX13]

Currently I'm working on a computer of my own to work on the animation with... Ok here it is.... still in the working... An ASUS dual processor server board with 2 intel xeon 2.4ghz processors with HT. 2 sticks of ultra 512mb memory, an ati radeon x800 pro and an 80gb western digital hd.... Still in the working process to get the money for it... but once it's done... yah.... I'm crossing my fingers and hoping and yah.... so if nobody will fund us... we have to fund ourselves...

[kcy88]

anyone know what format the animation has to be in?
cinepak?

[Yov]

Well, I did a safety animation in 24 hours.
I call it: "The uncautious Tomato cronicles"
coming this build season.


kyc: it says what codecs are allowed in the documentation Mark P. gave, I think it's Cinepak, MOV, and something else, no good codecs though...

[kcy88]

Originally Posted by Yov

kyc: it says what codecs are allowed in the documentation Mark P. gave, I think it's Cinepak, MOV, and something else, no good codecs though...

Thanks.
What's the naming convention though?
I don't think it'll be: team#_AVA2005.mov

[Yov]

We'll only know exactly when they send this years animation rules at kickoff, the name doesn't really matter though... at all...