Topic awaiting preservation: Damn its hard

ok I was trying out to make a horozontal rotating logo like this....

the problem is I have so little knowledge in MAX that I basicly am stuck....
well ok the animation turned out pretty good.....heck I spend adjusting it frame by frame until 100th I think I was stupid, but I didnt know how to do it other way....well its pretty big I just need to know how to shrink it, render the animation and save into .gif format
so I could use it on the site well I really dont know, just playing around trying to make something happen...HELP!!!....

Ruski: What exactly is your question?

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Emps

FAQs: Emperor

umm its....how can I render the animated shape? and save it as .gif so that I could use it for a site......by the way I think its hella big, and I dont know how to shrink it

Why not import it into PS?

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Well that logo is easy to do in something like imageready. But if your are simply learing MAX it shouldn't be to hard. Now I haven't used MAX, my would guess it uses some kind of keyframes, most 3d programs do. What you need to do set up your total frames to 100 or 99 if you want to produce a loop, then depending on how your softwhere handles rotation set up a keyframe at 50 setting the rotation at 180deg. So application you need to also set-up a keyframe at 99 to complete the rotation setting it to 359deg.

Some programs such as Raydream and Image also have animation method that can be applied to objects in the scene for rotation etc..., as I have not used MAX so I don't know if such a function exits or not.

or just do it in Imageready and photoshop, just make 5 frames or more for smoothness as needed simple.




jstuartj



[This message has been edited by jstuartj (edited 01-04-2003).]

Then, open image ready, go File > Import > Frames from folder - and select the folder you rendered all the .jpg too. Save the file > Done.

A better way to do simple rotation is with a script controller.

Assuming your object is created flat in the front viewport:
- Select your object
- Go to the Motion tab (looks like a rolling wheel)
- Open the Assign Controller subpane
- Click on Rotation
- Click the Assign Controller button just above the controller list (green triangle and right-facing arrow)
- Double-click Rotation Script
- Change what's displayed in the script box to:
eulerAngles 90 0 (currentTime * 360 / 100)
- Click Close
- Hit play - you should get perfectly smooth rotation

Note that the number 100 in the equation above should be the number of frames in your animation. You can also alter from the number of frames as you wish (a number equal to half the number of frames in your animation would cause two full rotations).

If the rotation isn't in the right direction, put in different values and hit evaluate a lot until you figure out what your object's axis is (eulerAngles 90 0 0, eulerAngles 45 0 0, etc)

This is a very useful technique for any type of 'mechanical' rotations. Gears, clock hands (with the second hand moving 60 times faster than the minute hand), etc.



[This message has been edited by Das (edited 01-04-2003).]

thanks alot jeez I cants thank you enough for all your time!!!!



[This message has been edited by Ruski (edited 01-05-2003).]

ok wait Dan what do I save it as at the end...IR doesnt have .gif

You have to use 'Save Optimized As...', and GIF only appears as a choice if you choose GIF as the optimization type in the optimization window.

I'd also suggest rendering to TGA files instead of JPG. JPG can have artifacts on each frame that will cause flickering in the final animation. TGA files don't have artifacts, but will take up more disk space. It's a trade-off.

ok thanks again...
it came out pretty good, sorry I cant show you there is no place to host...the image is pretty big in size




[This message has been edited by Ruski (edited 01-05-2003).]

I recommend you render it to a quicktime
movie using millions+ colors than
just open up the movie in IR!

/OlssonE

You can also import the animation into Adobe Premiere and edit down the size there. I-m not sure if you can save it out as a gif though.

IR was recommended because the request was to generate an animated GIF, OlssonE.

If a video file were the goal, I'd still suggest rendering to TGA, and building the video file in Premiere or After Effects. Quicktime or DivX AVI are popular.

Rendering directly to Quicktime would require you to re-render the whole animation for any change. That's okay for a really short simple animation, but there's a big benefit in larger animations to rendering frames. You can re-render just a small subset of the animation, and rebuild the video quickly. Also, video editors tend to make better video files than Max.

Das:

Yeah, but I have tried the method i mentioned and it works fine. And my final goal was to make a GIF.
I think the real ultimate method is to use Dan's method but instead of jpg use png then you get
the transparancy for free... Yes, if I was rendering to a movie I think youre way is the best but
TGA files is pretty big so my little 80 gigger would chunk.

quote:

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Rendering directly to Quicktime would require you to re-render the whole animation for any change.

---

If you used max to render the final result this would be the fact.
But you probably will do some editing in Premiere so rendering some new frames and anding that clip wouldn't be so hard!

But if you do repeated edits in Premiere, you'll degrade the video with every edit/save cycle. If you always go from the original video instead of the latest edit, you get less degradation, but you have to apply all the edits you've ever done every time you do another one.

It can also be kind of a hassle to find the right splice points in Premiere if you re-rendered frames 638-675 of a 2000 frame animation (for example). If you render to numbered files, you can re-render frames 638-675, re-import the sequence into Premiere/After Effects, and generate the video in a few minutes.

As far as using Quicktime and Premiere as a mid-step in generating an animated GIF, you'll be introducing degradation for no reason I can see (due to the compression in whichever Quicktime codec you choose - uncompressed Quicktime is freakin huge).

I think the easiest way to go from Max to animated GIF would be to render frames in a lossless small format (compressed TGA, PNG, maybe GIF), at a low framerate (certainly not the default 30fps), load in ImageReady, and Save Optimized.

Ruski, that's probably the reason for the large file size, come to think of it. If you rendered at 30fps and made an animated GIF, it would be quite large. Animated gifs are usually very low fps, like 2-10. 15 tops. Also make sure you mess around with the optimization settings in IR. Dropping the colors from 256 to 32 is usually quite acceptable, and much smaller.

*nods*


edit: Spelling baaad... *ulrich movement*

[This message has been edited by OlssonE (edited 01-15-2003).]