Progress : Animation

Project 3. Producing an animated video with a minimum length of 60 secs. Rendered in 3ds Max 2013. Stitched & edited in Adobe Premier Pro CS6.

First, begin with a story line.




I let the music inspire my story. Every rhythm of the song gives life to a scene. From there, I divided the  minutes of the song into 'scenes' or 'segments' to form the video. I wanted an 'Alice in Wonderland' feel. A little bit of the quirky, whimsical, dark, & beautiful. Am a big fan of anime & Studio Ghibli films so I went with a background song used in The Cat Returns.

Song used :
Waltz (Katzen Blut) by Nomi Yuuji (Studio Ghibli Inc copyright)
Hardware :
Asus N56, Intel Core i7, Nvidia GeForce GT 650M, 8gb RAM
Render time :
100 frames (3 secs of video), 15 minutes
500 frames (16 secs of video), 2 hours +

Once the story line has been decided, the painstaking rendering process begins.

Render (apply daylighting, materials) as you would a still image, but save the render with these settings.

F10

Time Output - select Active Time Segment or Range if you want to render your video in scene batches
*scroll down*
Save File - select File (like a Save As) & create a new name for scene > save in AVI

Remember to change the file name for every Save File before rendering if not you'll be very sad.

Play with key frames & the time key. Once you're familiar with these 'tool's you're free to manipulate you camera view & motion however you want. Oh wait the camera part!

To make your camera 'move' you have to :

Add Camera > Target or Free
*then*
Draw a path > Line, Helix, Circle..depends how what kind of 'path' you want your camera to move in
*then*

Go to Motion > +Assign Controller > Path Constraint > OK
*then scroll down the same Motion tab*
Pick Add Path > Select the Camera you created & the Path & they shall UNITE!

Set one of the Viewports > Camera View. If you move the time bar you'll notice the scene moving, as if you're the one holding the camera. To 'record' every camera movement, click AUTO and it'll be red.

Time Configuration settings.

Render Output, Camera Path, Time Configuration all set? RENDER TAIM

Cameras for different scenes

Daylighting test. To simulate sun set & sun rise, apply the Camera Path settings to Daylight instead of Camera.

Test renders. 

bitmap > avi file to simulate moving sky

Final scenes

Adobe Premier Pro CS6 to stitch & edit videos. I'd like to thank a Sam, Adrian & Youtube sensei for teaching me what I needed to know! Such a noob when it comes to video-editing.

Be prepared to sleep at rendering hours depending on your hardware. In my case every 2 hours over the course of 2 days. 3ds Max should really think about incorporating an alarm system once a render is done.