Monday 21st April 2003
Built my car....
Go ahead and click on that for a 4MBish flashfile of a rotation. It's essentially an animgif made out of sixty targa frames; I don't like the way Crash5 compresses images to make them smaller. And I don't much like CrashMX at all.
Click on that to help pay for this thing >:)
That's clickable too, in case the 640*480 shot is too small to see anything in.
Anyway: I've been playing mostly with stuff like this lately. Cars and planes and guns and things. The easier, static elements. Stuff you don't have to worry much about animating; you just send it in a certain direction and, maybe, have the wheels spin as it moves along. Not difficult stuff.
Difficult stuff is people. Animals aren't real static. So they require additional elements. Like skeletons and muscles. Which, in CG, are about the same things.
For those who don't know this yet [id est: haven't seen any of the Behind the Scenes content on a Star Wars DVD] things are a bit backwards in programmes like LightWave. You're building hollow people, and then sticking skeletons in them. Moving the skeletons moves the skin around them [except for the cases in which things don't work, which only happen about half the time] and you get little bendy people. There's technically no muscle in them; although you can add extra little bones to work like muscles by bending the skin the right way. It's hard to explain. And even harder to do.
That said, here's the prototype for the Superchick:
There's a lot subject to change here. I'm not sure about the hair yet. I guess there's nothing aesthetically wrong with it; it's the same colour and length as mine. But it might cause problems in animation. I'm thinking about dropping back to that sort of Lara Croft look, since braided ponytails are a hell of a lot easier to control. Which is probably why they used it for the TombRaider games in the first place.
In any case, there's nearly enough done now to put together something to actually watch. I've still got most of the town to build, of course. And most of the characters. But I've got most of the props done now. Which doesn't sound like a lot, I suppose; but...I think we've got enough guns, cars, chairs, tables, trees, laptops, cuppaccino machines, and so on. The rest is just boxes put together to look like buildings and stuff. And, of course, slight modifications to the animals to make them all look a little different. Which includes the homosapiens. Although those things wear clothes, too. Which is a hassle.
Of course, the final show will be a bit more simplistic than the prototype of the Superchick up there. It took about ninety minutes to render that at 5250*2953 [16:9 at 150dpi on a poster thirty-five inches wide], so, again, I can take a few shortcuts. Right now, I'm rendering things at a higher quality than the prerendered stuff in Resident Evil Zero. The plan is to render stuff at the LiveAction gameplay level of Resident Evil Three or so. Which brings us back to the Formula up at the top, rendered at three frames a second at four times the size we need for the show; rendering at 320*180 brings us pretty close to realtime: 12fps.
Or, it would, if I were just rendering a sort of remake of KnightRider. An endearing show about a single Knight Arsenals Rendered Robot driving around at 12fps. Which sounds nearly as boring as any show containing David Hasselhoff. So there will be other elements, each of which will add a few tenths of a second to the rendering time.
Which also relies heavily on things like camera angles. I'm building the whole town, of course; but I haven't quite decided whether to have any motion to it. Which means that I could just render a single frame of the backdrop and then rotoscope in the moving elements over it, cutting down a lot on rendering times. If the camera moves, though, then the backgrounds move, and we're back to rendering everything in the shot for every frame.
I'll know more about that once I have enough built to see how long it will take to render a frame containing that many different objects.
More Later....
--Gremlin