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Is there an easier way to render ship spins in Strata 3Dbase 3.0.2 than manually rotating the ship 10 degrees at a time and rendering it? Is there a way to animate the ship to spin 360 degrees and the program render each frame itself? This is taking forever!!!!!
Thanks
------------------ "It's time for the human race to enter the solar system!" -- Dan Quayle, on the concept of a manned mission to Mars "I do not like this word 'bomb.' It is not a bomb. It is a device that is exploding." -- Jacques le Blanc, French ambassador on nuclear weapons "If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten." -- Bounty Hunters Motto
I don't use strata 3d base, but if there is a timeline used to animate I'd try that. Create keyframes and use them to spin the ship. Make sure you do it from the facing up position and rotate clockwise!
(This message has been edited by polystatic (edited 10-30-2002).)
(url="http://"http://homepage.mac.com/ewanc/tutorial.html")Here is my ship spinning tutorial.(/url) Hope this helps.
ewan
------------------ may contain nuts
And, for all you Infini-D 4.5 users, there's a plugin that comes with it called "Spin 2.0." It'll do rotations and things on whatever axis you want, and how often to spin it per second. It speeds things up no end.
But keyframes are the way to go without this handydandy plugin. put 1 keyframe at these time slots (measured in tenths of a second): .1, .5, 1.0, 2.0, 3.5
Edit: Also, for Nova developers, banking ships use about 15 degree angle differences while they're banking, and they bank to the left first in spďns. so, go back to the beginning of your animation, set the ship to angle at 10-15ş on the z rotation field. Then you can do the same (with negative numbers) for banking to the right.
------------------ Real witches ride vacuum cleaners.
(This message has been edited by Mantaray (edited 10-30-2002).)
Using Strata 3D, go to the Windows > Pallets menu and select the "Timeline" pallet. If it wasn't already there it will appear. Then you set the animation to go for 36 frames. At frame 1 put the ship facing upwards, at frame 18 set the ship to 180 degrees right from it's previous position. At frame 36 put the ship 10 degrees off it's origonal faceing. (-10 degrees or 350 depending on your settings). Preview it to make sure the ship actually turns around in a circle and doesn't turn halfway, then turn back again. Render the animation at the desired quality with the correct compression codec. open the animation in Quicktime player and use the right and left arrows to advance frame by frame through. From there you can take several appreaches to extracting the frames. You could take screenshots of each frame (painstaking and long). There is probably a utility that extracts QT movie frames into a file. I believe you can actually just press command + C to copy the frame right out of QT player. and paste it into Photoshop, or whatever you might use to assemble the frames. If your program supports it you could also render out an alpha channel in a similar fashion. If not, you could put intensive lighting on the ship so that it appeared white, or use a texture with a very high glow setting to keep the shadows from appearing.
Hope this helps.
Clean Air System
------------------ All hail the Clean Air System
Thanks for the help, I got the spin animation to work in Strata (a whole lot easier than by hand!).
I have a question about banking: does nova move the weapon exit points to compensate for the orientation change of the ship? And if so, can you specify the how much to compensate? If not, then what degree bank does Nova use to calculate the new exit point (if it compensates at all)?
(P.S. Yes I did a search, but nothing mentioned anything about compensation.)
Quote
Originally posted by Pougan: **I have a question about banking: does nova move the weapon exit points to compensate for the orientation change of the ship? And if so, can you specify the how much to compensate? If not, then what degree bank does Nova use to calculate the new exit point (if it compensates at all)? **
There's no way to manually type in the compensation doobies.
and I don't think Nova moves them. 10 degrees doesn't make too much of a difference when you're careful with the exit points.
If you haven't figured out how to do the banking graphics yet. The previous method is a good guide for that to. Just do the same thing Clean Air System said, but tilt the ship 10 degrees from rear view. Then follow the same procedure. Really Easy.
About the weapon exit ports. I think the same thing as Mantaray.
------------------ The Evil Spoonman Albatross!!! "Life is to important to be taken seriously."
So 20 degrees is probably too much, huh. Well, I'll try it and find out.
Thanks again
Originally posted by Pougan: **So 20 degrees is probably too much, huh. Well, I'll try it and find out.
**
actually, 10ş is a bigger than you think, especially for small ships. so small fighters and things should tip at 10ş and bigger ships should tip at 15ş.
20 degrees is okay, if you make a really fast ship with extremley acute turning. 20 degrees actually does work okay. As long as there is no way to make the ships slower it would work. Otherwise 10, degrees would be okay.
I see your back Evil_Spoonman, eh. You thought you where insane eh. Now the truly insane person is back with a new name... You know of whom I speak.
Mantaray, has there been any developments with your new web badge?
No god. Tis my insanely evil master. I grovel at your feet master, I pick your nose, I kiss your feet. And spit in your face. ha ha ha.
As for spining ships. Here's a cool idea I just thought of. In Strata there's a replicate command. Make your current ship into a shape and import it. Zoom out. Make the ship faceing up. Then go into the replicate command, and have the ship move an incriamental amount to the X axis and rotate 10 degrees to the X axis. Make it duplicate 6 times. Presto chango, there's a line of perfectly rotated ships. Do it again on the next line. It's more painstaking then the other method. But you get the result in a single render. And you can make much faster masks. Simply make the image render with an Alpha Channel and presto chango, you get a perfect mask as well. (I like that word, Presto Chango). Just an idea.
/me lookes at Clean Air System and smiles, then says Presto Chango, and Clean Air System burns up and goes to hell. Muhahahahaha...