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http://indecisive.jusunlee.com/dark_fox/pr...ect_opening.zip


this is just the first 3 mins....no real racing yet

CONSTRUCTIVE criticism is welcome.

Sweet!

This is pretty good . . . Good, good.

Keep up the good work

ammm....ammmm...ammmazing!!!!!!!!!!!! me love it! new favorite movie and i havnt seen it yet! mwuahah! awesome! love it when Kenta drifts through the tunnel! w00t!

coolio, reminds me of one of the opennings for ID

Okay, I thought it was cool, just one thing tho, when the guy with the blue hair is talking to the other guys, it seems the light is too bright, his face looks white, his clothes look white and his car looks white, it just looks a little bit 'washed out'. Other than that, I thought it kicked ass, I like the wireframe parts, they rocked, and the parts with the cars fading in and out.

NICE INDY !! I can only say that it's better than what I expected. Good job ! On a side note, I think you can maybe make it so when the car drift in the tunnel, put some sudden slow motion effect, like from normal timing to 1/4 slow motion. That'd be great!

lol....holy shit...that was amazing...i wanna watch more dammit...stop teasing me!!

Nice, that was great. Though I thought it was alittle dark though the movie.

what SW are you using ? depending on the SW you can apply an affector to the center rear and center front axel and assign then to a spline path, change your key point ease in/out to add some more dynamic flow, give it some gravity. IF you can't do that then add a single spline to the road fit the front end axel center to it and key frame the back end then apply ease in/out curves. I hope you plan to take the texture quality up a few notches with todays computers and the use of simple phong shading, and creative use of ray traced lights.. Try not to use diffused lighting everywhere, it flattens the image, at night you have almost 100% directional lighting..

this first one is useing cinema 4D XL's grilliant ray traceing and effects renderer.. see the way the top down lights look like high beans on a night time mountian road. and the textures give just enought back to know where you are...



or

This one was done using 3D max version 3 using a glow and raytrace lighting plug in thier are 5 lights in that scene, 4 of them are instanced 25 times... plus the compositing.. the textures were basic but they were sclose enought to give us what we wanted..


or

This can be done with Mental ray, but I happened to be a tester for renderdrive at the time so it was done using that, a machine with 16 RISC processors and 1 gig of RAM at the time.. when 3DS max was in version 2.5 that was some serious power..



you'll notice how lighting plays a major role in how the 'feel' of the scene is created.

When you create a scene story board it first, then go out a shoot pictures of a locale and time of day to work from. it helps you to have an idea of what to try and psh for. You may not want realistic, but if you look at the way initalD was done, they used real video of drifting to create the dynamics of the actual drift.. watch some ALMS, or touring car racing on speedvision or the like, take a look at the camra angles they use.. they are the best in the business at showing you a race.

All in all not too bad, I've had VHS and CD demos come to me at that level and they were in post secondary courses .. I'd love to see how it turns out, and if you have or this is done in MAX then maybe i could help you with the lighting if you wanted to send me a basic .scn file.. good work on the character design, I would take the south park example and create 4 or 5 different mouth shapes, then key frame the shots, or better yet do a running animation key frame where each mouth shape is a keystroke and as you play you hit the keys to change the shape.. it's a trick we used to do with combustion and fire effects.. once we had the right effect we'd assign keys and go nuts..

wow...that's all awesome but I can't incorperate anything you suggested in anymore. I'm already in post production, doing sound. my project is due at the end of June so I'm working as fast as I can. In my next animation that I plan to do outside of skool I'll try to work on texturing and lighting more(with your consultance hopefully). I'm glad you think my work is decent...do you think I have a future in 3d animation or games??

I really wish you replied to this last month, oh well. thanks again for your great advice.

your mistakes are the same as most early animators, cut scenes are too fast, and motion gets lost... this has more to do with the teachers not taking the time to 'teach' the students how to do it right. But next one will be better, build upon this one. one trick is to watch the battle stage, and time the cuts. then match it up against yours, you'll find yours is a bit quicker.. this is sometimes good fror pace but not always... like I said, if you want help with an animation let me know. I used to be a professional animator.

you don't ned to be a film director, I've gone to some of the best schools for animation, all were sponsored by softimage, alias, houdini or MAX. in any combination of the last. In most cases , the 'teachers' were just TA's that were filling a spot, teachers don't make the $100G a year, in fact they make very little and the job is very boring if your a creative person, most do it to use the AV facilities to polish their own demo tape. THe demo guys from the companies that would come around every month or so were where the learning really came from.. and most of the teachers could not show you how to do a proper story board, develop your characters, design a set.. most are very limited in thier field, some would know mostly modeling but had no clue about effects and lighting.. Go to a school that makes you take traditional animation courses first, like Sheridan in Toronto, it's where most of the original high end animators came from. ILM at one time was 75% Canadian.. straight out of the schools I went to. I chose not to go to the states as I don't get along well with most americans..

I was thinking about Sheridan but I have to stay in BC. I applied to Simon Fraser University's TechOne Program. Interactive Arts, Information Technology, Business and Math in first year and then you can branch off into something else after that. The Interactive Arts instructors are from Electronic Arts here in BC so I think it'll be good and I think they also teach us some traditional drawing. I'm just waiting for an acceptance letter.

as a sidenote...my high school animation teacher rite now was originally a history/PE teacher heh.


anyways..do you have any other tips for my next animation? I'm thinking of completely re-doing this one. just have better transitions and maybe do a cell shading effect...I Don't know..but I know that this WILL be re-done if I get my new computer.

cel shading will reduce render time by a tonne. but you still need to do the lighting correctly and the textures, if you watch gundam seed, the gundams and the ships are all cell shaded but becuse they were well lit , they look hand drawn.

My first tip, do a storyboard, get some paper and make a few key frames on each one with a description of the scene, the effects and the motions. Do that for every scene you plan to do.

2nd. add multiple cameras and render simultaneously that way when you go to edit you can cut in and out as you please, it will take longer to render but a cel shaded scene with 4 camera rendering on a 1+ gighz P III will render in no time at all..

3rd lear to composite or get some good compositing SW, this is different then editing SW, compositing SW will allow you to make miltipass renderings and put them together while adding effects to a specific level. it also makes overall rendering faster.

4th study the cars you want to do animation for and their drifting style, grokster has most of the option 2 D1 videos and their are lots of jap. drifitng videos to DL..

you said that you used to be a professional animator. if you wouldn't mind sharing..how did you get into it? and from what little you've seen of my work so far do you think I'd be able to be moderately successful?

and finally, wut are you doing now? are you still into animation??

living in Toronto makes it easy to get into animation, at the time , back @ 8 years ago, I was doing some soryboard work for a TV production company, I was also into animation, ( I used the very first version of 3DS when it was DOS based..) I went to Sheridan's summr shcool program , a 3 month course, then did Seneca courses in power animator , the predecessor to MAYA and Softimage 3.5 whenit was IRIX Silicon graphics based.

I worked on things like the original 4 parts of THE LEXX and stuff like that.. but I found that , if you live in Toronto, you'd best own your own company or you'll make nothing and be a slave.. So I did my wn thing for awhile..
Now I have a company that builds high performance cars and race cars. I an incorporate my 3D modeling skills into making CNC drawings and parts for everying from caster camber kits to CF moulds..

Personally , unless your REALLY REALLY good , I'd stay away from animation and getninto engineering cad work.. more money and more secure..

now I'm scared...


would you like to hook me up with a job at your new job? lols j/k

I'm doing sound on this animation right now and it's horrible..hahah. ai...


when this animation is done would you mind showing some of your contacts my work and seeing what they say? I realize I'm surely not one of the better animators out there but I'd like to improve. if you can't or don't want to then that's fine too. you've provided me with lots of help already.

oh..and I have a question about texturing. how do I make good textures? what techniques and stuff do you use? texturing is one of my weaker points.

I don't have contacts really anymore, one thing about the animation business is that it's VERY fluid, you have to be willing to pack up and go where the jobs are.. Your teacher is obviously not in the animation field so he woundl't know what goes on or how it works.. 90% of all animators work on a contract to contract basis. meaning that you can be working like a dog for 3 months only to be let go after that contract is done.. now you've got to find another job.. which means moving possibly, most likely actually and the whle process starts over again.

Do yourself a favor, i know that being GOOD at everything to do with animation is the goal of all but in reality you need to specialize.. pick ONE or TWO areas of animation that you really love and have an affinity for, then work on those to become as good as possible, also what SW do you use? being able to use at least 3 different SW apps is a big plus, most of the time it's 3DSMAX, MAYA,SOFTIMAGE or Lightwave..

textures are very easy actually, you can DL 1000's of tectures and sufaces form IRC and websites.. but for your purpose id' say do it like they did in inital D they did every panel of the car seperately then added the 'stickers' to each panel that had them. i don't knwo what SW your suing so I can really tell you how to add a texture.. but a good way to do tectures is in photoshop, start with the background and start to layer.. becareful with blacks and whites as if you have trasparency turned on then anything black will be see through.. also lighting, that's a bigger one then textures, a plain red car will look better in the right light then a perfctly textured car in poor light. Buy a few books on advanced aniamtion techniques, also buy a bi monthly mag called Cinefex it's the bible of animators all ovber the place.. you can get it at Chapters or Indigo online or Amazon.

this is a model with textures done in MAX. It's vey simple and has only 3 layers of imaging..




this was rendered with mental ray for MAX3.0 becuse this renders differently then the normal MAX renderer some things have to be done differently, youn can see on the whing tips the plack decal , it's suppose to look like the one on the tail but it was put on upside down.. so it came out all black.. as a bench mark this was rendered on a dual P3 500 ( so 1gigHz ) in 15 min. using mental ray , if you have more then one computer then you can install mental ray on those machines over a network and use those processors to render your work as well..

wow... what wicked 3D...
and from what i've heard... sheridan is made for the greatest artists... they have the best art programs in it...

oh, sorry I thot I told you wut program I was using. I use Lightwave. I've never really used anything else.


I've modelled a futuristic fighter jet but it looks horrible because I'm bad with texturing. I think I wanna get into modelling because for my past projects I had to model weapons and I've modelled my own gundam on my free time and I really enjoyed myself. do you have any tips with modelling? do modellers do their own texturing usually?



EDIT: I don't know if you've used lightwave before but if you have...how can I make an object look smooth without metaforming it? *pressing tab* whenever I want a more rounded look I have to metaform it but the models I've downloaded that have smooth curves and what not are not metaformed.

.. I was just about to say.. get away from light wave if you plan to model, it's the WRONG program .. really wrong program. at minimum you want to use MAX but you should learn MAYA , and some other form of NURBS SW, that model , in fact ALL my models are made with Rhino 3D, it's a modeling specific program that used 98% nurbs. nurbs are not that easy to learn but once you've got the hang of it , you never need to worry about smooth edges.. that trans space aircraft/ space plane, was made in an hr. and is @ 65k in size.

lightwave is a very good renderer and does some nice animation.. but as a modeling SW .. nope. no one uses it in the industry for modeling, and the companies that DO use lightwave are generally advertizing houses, so you'd end up doing dancing soap or some such.. and MAX is a part of that as well.. not sure what grade your in, but if your in grade 12 or so.. then your already behind the curve.. i know quite a few kids locally that know three SW apps and car run circles around me in a few aspects of it as .. also it would be a good idea to do math and physics as well, since allot of the newer SW that you see requires you to know a little bit about calc and physics..

well, when I get my new computer I'll try to get maya. what about bryce? is that good?

I've taken physics 11 and did fairly well and I'm in math 12 right now and I'll be taking more math in post secondary so that's not really a problem. I tried bezier splines in lightwave and had trouble with it.