Hey guys, Who did the ignition animation? Can you please tell me how you achieved the electricity flowing around the antanna of the control board at the begining of the animation. And for the text did you do it in flash and just inserted it into the animation with video software editor ?
The electricity at the beginning of ignition was achieved using a sphere following a spline. A video post glow effect using the “electricity” style was applied. If you are familiar with the video post, then it should be fairly simple. It is just a matter of tweaking motion and such.
All text effects were produced in 3ds max 4.3 as well. That is animated text using leading and scale. There are lens flares and glows in the video post that control the lighting effects you see. Basically, all of the effects in that piece are achieved in the video post.
Let me know if you have any additional questions.
-Brandon
This is kinda dumb but how do you make custom textures, eveytime i try to drop it onto the object it won’t go on it.
uhh how did u get the text only… its really confusing to me.
what do u mean the texture wont go onto the object?
Explain in detail please.
I think s/he meant that the custom image file won’t drop onto the object, I’ve had this problem before. Just pick a blank material and go down to the maps rolldown, then drop your image onto the difuse map and make it 100%
Now you’re ready to drop the material onto the object
[edited for grammar and logic]
Text only…
The process was one of looking at font after font on the web. When we finally found one we liked, we downloaded it and installed it to windows by adding it to the font folder. We also added it to the font folder in the MAX directory.
Using a text spline in MAX, we extruded the words we wanted for the animation.
I am not really sure what you are asking so I am trying this response. Please clarify.
-Brandon
i mean like how did you get the text to show up on the screen by itself? was it located at different co-ordinates in the max file and then u just renderd a camera onto it, then edited it in the video ? and how did u make that lightning effect over it… Thanks for all your help.
oh ok ima c if this works ty… (i’m ‘he’ lol)
You guys had a great animation last year… everything was good in it. I’m also curious as to how you made your text “appear” in max, there’s some effect applied to it that makes it look like something flies by and then Voila! awesome looking text.
The text shows up by itself because it is the only item in the scene. Actually, I rigged up black planes to move past each other and reveal the text. Linked also to the leading edge of the planes was a light. On that light I placed a lens flare effect. That is the leading effect you see. The text is just the extruded spline i mentioned earlier. Lastly, the electric “fizz” left on the letters is just a lens effect glow in the video post that is set to electric style.
Is that what you were wondering?
-Brandon
Attached is the original scene file. They all are done in the same fashion.
Become Electrified.zip (49.8 KB)
Become Electrified.zip (49.8 KB)
Did you do all the words in different scenes and then put them in sequence with video editing software… and btw what at those blue things at the end of each of the slides, like what type of object are they ?
Haha…
I laugh because the blue things are named “schwing01” and such.
Those are just twisted and skewed chamfer boxes. You can see that in the heirarchy of modifiers if you look in the modify panel.
The word scenes are spearate. We render to frames and then compile in Adobe Premiere. Premiere is a hot piece of software. You should pick up a copy. It is very easy to use.
-Good luck.
I agree, Premiere is hot 
Thanks for posting that on there, I’ll take a look at it tonight and post any other questions I have.
Again, your animation was awesome last year.
When i try to render with video post its looking for breakthrough.tga, which isn’t in the zip, so ya might want to add that to get the full effect, as now all I see is some lense flairs.
Breakthrough.tga is on the output event. It is the file name that the sequence is saved to. The reason it gives the error is because that scene is currently set to render to a network path. Just remove the last event in the sequence, “breakthrough.tga”, to remove the output event and stop getting the error. You may also want to replace the output event with a new one that renders to an avi on your computer so that you may view the completed effect.
oh! oops! Its been a long day and i didn’t look at it that close. It just popped up and error. My bad 