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Colonel Barker
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« Reply #1 on: March 05, 2008, 03:21:37 PM » |
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Hey, are you still about man? I completly missed this post.
I can't tell you about Max, as I use Maya, but I think the procsess should be the same kind of thing.
The easiest way is to firstly, make a big curve, snaking about the place for ever, so it looks like cursive handwriting from the top, but not dropping down on the Y axis.
Then, I dont know if you can do this in Max, but I make a circle, just out of a line and use that circle to 'extrude' a tube out of the long line, so what you end up with is something that looks like a long pile of toothpaste. But hollow.
Then create a camera, and animate it, using the origional curve as a motion path, and then check to make sure your getting the right view from the camera, and your not going the wrong way down the tunnel, or sideways! Now, what you should have, is a camera that keeps going down a tunnel, looking left and right.. not very exciting. oh, make the sequance perhaps 1500 frames, depending on the lengh of your tube and the speed you want the tunnel to fly at.
But, here is the trick, in Maya, you can go into the motion path settings of the camera, and tell it to 'tilt' as it turns, I am sure Max would have something for this, set the number to around 90 degrees. Then when your going left and right the camera will 'swurve' down the corridor and look very cool. But there's more.
What's wrong? It isn't going up or down, so get the "tilt" of the camera, and write an expression for it, in maya it would look like
roatate z = time*4;
or something like that, depending on the scale of your scene and the origional orientation of the scene you made up. If you dont know how to write code, simlpy animate that roate, go forward every few 100 frames and rotate back and forth, if you know any random scripting, or can connect the animation into the colour channel of a cloud texture, the results can be fantastic from just two or three button pushes.
I am not sure about max, but Maya automatically maps an object just extruded like that, so you dont need to worry about UV mapping. So just find some cloud texture, bring it into photoshop, make it very, very long. Clean up the repeats, make sure it has lots of noise. Then tint the whole thing using the colourize tool. make it blue or red, or whatever you want. Save that, throw it on the tunnel.
Okay, lighting can be the fun part. Grab a point light, or some small intense light, parent it to the camera. Then look through your camera view, take a test render. Ajust your light, so things look nice and bright here, and you get things darkening towards then end of the tunnel. if you like, colour the light, or put a random script on the light.. something, in maya like:
intensity = rand(.8,1.2);
I hope these scripts work, I am just making them up, but you get the idea. Or bring the ".8" and "1.2" closer together like ".95,1.1" if it's too random for you.
And There you have. A cool looking Dr Who style tunnel. Putting in a police box is easy, as are some text. Make the words, animate them to your curve. BUT in order for your camera to see them at any point, make their start point later / earlier than the main camera, and again, have them finish before after. make sure you animate a spin on the Police Box. You can do that again with just a time script.
The advantage with animating along motion paths and using scripts is no keyframes is needed at all. So if you want to change the speed/ spin etc, you just need to change the motion path or your script. So no more f**ka*sing around using keyframes or the dope sheet.
I hope your still here to read this, or that it helped someone else!
Colonel Barker, who was a little late...
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