It's about 6 seconds long, and it took about 2 hours to render.
It's in the bink exe video format, as bink gives the best quality for rendered work.

EagleA1.exe - 4.56 MB (4,785,664 bytes).
EagleA2.exe - 5.76 MB (6,041,088 bytes)

That's cool I'm thinking of doing a little animation myself soon, it just takes so much time to render.
Who knows, we'll have an animate my skin thread here

thats awesome

Thanks. We, I could do an animation my skin thread if ya really want it.
It's not really all that hard.

START : X, Y, Z = 0, 400, 25
FINASH : X, Y, Z = 0, -400, 25
FRAMES : 240 @ 24fps.

Oh, and I really need to get ahold of the full version of brizil r/s.
I really want to do 1280x720 renders of the cars. That would be SWEET.

That is kick@$$ Dygear, looks realy nice.. Now you got to do a 360 view :P!

Can anyone quickly explain how to do a rendered video?

I have access to 3ds Max and the full version of Brazil r/s at work and can render the LFS models easily but have no idea where to start on video?

Just a few tips/directions...I can probably learn as I go along once someone get me started...

Is there a non-exe link anywhere available?

I haven't looked in to it deeply yet, but i did a simple preview animation. Got impatient while making the rendered version It's quite simple really. You use the timeframe bar at the bottom of the screen. On frame 1 for instance you position the camera in front of the car, you move the slider on the timeframe to the right, position the car in a different way, make another keyframe and 3DS will calculate the position of the car for the frames in between.

You can make a preview by going to animation-->make/view preview. to make the final rendered animation go to rendering-->video post

It's similar to the use of Flash for instance, maybe you have experience with that.


Hope this helps.

Quick & Dirty way to do it >

1) load your MAX file

2) Draw a camera "path" spline (circle,elipse,line etc)

3) Add a new camera, set view to this new camera

4) Motion / Tracectory, convert from, pick path spline

5) Render frames 0-100, render to file.

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?p=122186#post122186

I posted a simple animation of my car in 3ds max on a different thread before. This one took about 3-4 hours to render, I done them in sequential Taga files and then import them in Adobe Premiere to create an avi

Quote from danowat :

Quick & Dirty way to do it >

1) load your MAX file

2) Draw a camera "path" spline (circle,elipse,line etc)

3) Add a new camera, set view to this new camera

4) Motion / Tracectory, convert from, pick path spline

5) Render frames 0-100, render to file.

Hmm, that's the better advice

@Samyip: that animation is really nice

Just a very short little one I did using the above technique, beware it takes AGES to render these little animations.

Dan,

its not easy to make it real, i will tell you that right now, and making a spline and having it on a path constraint.. wont look real, its alot harder than that lol

just saw video

oh.. you didnt do any motions, you just had the camera follow a path constraint.. ya.. thats simple stuff, thats as basic as it gets when going into animation

the only thing i dont like about that though is the way the camera works.. how it 'flips' instantly when directly above the car, that.. doesnt look right, its best if it rotated around the whole way, which you can do that just by using autokey functions.. if you know what that is :/

as for render time, it doesnt take that long if done properly, if you have a skylight for one.. get rid of it, that will shatter render times, 2, check your render settings, they are probably for single shots and take a while to render.. and.. there you are, a quick intro to how to render animations

What XCNuse said about the rendering is quite right. For a still image, you normally render it to over 1000s pixels and all the details are crisp and sharp, because the image is still, any imperfection will shown if it is not set to the highest quality. But for video, a standard TV/video resolution is no more than 720 x 576 (except HDTV) therefore you don't have to set your renderer to the highest sampling rate, because those extra quality will not be seen in this resolution. Also because it is moving, each frame of render will not stay in your vision for more than 1/30 of a second.
By lowering the quality sampling, you can speed up each frame's rendering time.

I have a vary sharp eye when it comes to video, and I do notice alot of the imperfections in movies. It's quite sad to see a huge production be let down to save time. I hold the Film industry to these standards so I would hold myself to the same standards. I will not tone down the image quality to save time. I hate doing that. The compressor is loseing most of the weight of the file, and I do think that if you gave it all of the prices the compressor would do better. That and what if some one wants to make a wallpaper out of the video file. Would you not want it to look the best it could? Yes, I could release images of the full render. But why? It's not really needed, just do the job the way it should be done the first time.

I think a lot of people have sharp eye too, but when you watch a movie, you don't pause every frame to view for a minute, then forward to the next frame and do the same, do you? you don't break the flow of the motion.
What I meant was if you render an image in 4000 x 3000 pixels, of course you can see all the details, but try resampling that image in photoshop to 720 x 576 pixels, will you still see those details? Nope! they became a blob in a larger pixel. What I was trying to say is you can find the right visual balance to fit the TV/video resolutions which means you don't have to waste any unneccesary time for some details which are not going to hold anyway.
Also, capturing stills from TV/video will never give you a good quality to print, most TV/video are interlaced (which means two images, e.g. frame 1 and frame 2 combined together with lines between them), again, they are only 720 x 576 resoultions, will that be good for wallpaper?
I have done many animations at work which time is always against you depending on client's budget as well. I have done exactly what you said before, create every 3d objects in highest resolutions (even the objects are only in the background) with loads of fine details, and took weeks to render, but the result is alot of the work I put to the finest details do not show up in the 720 x 576 resolutions.
By learning from the experience, you will know how to plan you animation before hand such as will the object be seen in close up or not? (close up will require higher res modeling) if not, you could cut the modeling time by half, and if some objects can be texture map rather then real models or bake the GI textures to objects could save alot of time, which the end result still be as good as the original GI scene. There are a lot of tricks can help you cut the time and still render in good result.
It may be I am in the trade where delivering the good is more important than not delivered at all, where time and quality got to be compromised. Who don't want to have a large render farm and ultra powerful machines to do 3D? When you don't want to or can't wait for the slow renders, you will have to seek alternatives. This is only my experience, of course you don't have to agree.

Quote from Dygear :

...The compressor is loseing most of the weight of the file, and I do think that if you gave it all of the prices the compressor would do better...

BTW, Compression in video codec is different issue.
The quality lost in video compression has got nothing to do with your scene set up.
What I mentioned on the above post was pure raw renders(image has not compressed), As I said before, I render animation in a sequence of still images(uncompressed) and then import them to a video editing software to stitch them together.

To awanser someone's question, no I don't offer non Bink Compressed Files. I can give the .bik file, but that's about it.

Back to the thread at hand, I'm talking HD+ levels, not TV. I don't deal with anything other then pure digital. 444 all of the way, and progressive only. This is the content I do, I am not a TV Boardcaster. If I were, I would do as you do. Keep the time down. To each his own really.

2 hours to render?! wow... it's sweet... soooo gloosssyyyyy

Yea, I don't know If I've said this but I'm running a Windows XP x64 on a AMD X2 4400+ 2MB L2. 1GB of PC-3200 RAM.

Nice spec there.

I tried to render a vid using the camera trajectory converted from a spline. At 720x576, rendering the 100 frames using the same settings as I use for single renders took almost 24 hours!! I think i will need to try it using my draft settings for the renderer.

And btw - I use an Athlon XP+ 2000, 1Gb DDR400 RAM - so its not a great system - might need to setup my spare PC to render things for me.

like i said, get rid of the skylight, thats whats taking so long if your using scanline

Quote from Dygear :

It's about 6 seconds long, and it took about 2 hours to render.
It's in the bink exe video format, as bink gives the best quality for rendered work.

EagleA1.exe - 4.56 MB (4,785,664 bytes).

Weird ass format. Do I really have the player embedded in the video, especially when it's poo and offers no controls? No major problems with quality though although the compression is still quite obvious (in places).

What frame-rate was used as the clip jerks badly on my machine? Only looks about 15fps or so.

Bob,
That certainly doesn't look like a full HDTV quality. (may be the file size would be too big to be attach to this forum if it was in HDTV size)
The jerks probably caused by the slowest of refreshing each frame, the codec's quality setting may be too high which it has not compressed to run smoothly.
DivX or Mpeg are not bad for compressing and at the same time hold good enough quality. I personally perfer AVI/mpeg format because they can be played on a larger range of media.
Bink is quite often seen in Games, which it captures the real time 3D (not pre-rendered) animations. Anyway, I could be wrong.

Quote from XCNuse :

like i said, get rid of the skylight, thats whats taking so long if your using scanline

If using skylight and default scanline renderer, it will take ages to render.
But I've noticed if you switch to Mental Ray renderer, it renders much quicker. Probably Skylight in Max isn't really for scanline renderer to use.