Some advice BSG zoom in effect

[Deleted User]

Hi I need a little help with the tv pilot im working on...

One of the guys who did some work on BSG if you could bring some input that would be really great...

Well First problem. The episode im working on they want me to give the camera movement the Documentry like BSG feeling camera effect...

While i got the animation and zoom controls sorted I do have one undesired effect.

Im using a inverted normal sphear with a starmap on for the background.
But when i zoom in on the ship model the starmap gets blown too large...

How did you guys who did the work with BSG get around the starmap zooming problem?

Did you just edit the animation when you renderd the Starmap layer of the animation... removing the zoom in effect?

Or some thing else? ,
Al3d or anyone... Any tips there would be great...

Also Any Vray guys around? Is there any way to use the quick max motion blur with the Vray. The only motion blur i can see with Vray is a hell of alot slower to get a more grainy effect.

Any ideas?

Nutsy

lennier1

IIRC nuBSG´s scenes are usually done using LW and there the usual procedure for stars is to use single-point polygons. Therefore the stars behave differently from a map where you simply zoom in and at the same time also enlarge the section of the visible map.
[edit]Unless you´re required to use a certain star background you could just try the Milky Way plugin for Max. It´s a free easy-to-use plugin with extremely powerful customizeable parameters and even though the download page is in Russian the plugin´s interface itself uses plain old English.[/edit]

citizen

Theres a starfield plugin in video post process, could that be of any use?

lennier1

The built-in starfield effect isn´t bad but it reaches its limits far too son. Hence the recommendation up there. It´s perfect if you only want to do test renders or if you´re planning extensive post-work anyway ant it´s also a lot faster because there aren´t as many parameters to influence the calculation.

Alec Trevelyan

I would guess no image map for the stars as well. Probably either single-point polys as already suggested, or simply adding stars in post ought to do the trick.

al3d

nutsy, yo generate starfeilds like in BSG or Trek, if your in LW, then use this, it's cheap..and the best there is...

Ficatech plugins for Lightwave 3D

If you're in Max, hum, don't know any plug-ins personnaly, but usualy a large sphere or either particles of 1 point polygones with around 100 000 point of poylgines will do the trick as a starfeild. make sure it's realy random doh

[Deleted User]

Ok ill give those a try.
Though i tryed that milyway plugin i thought the effect looks really... dull Tbh i really like teh image map i made... Ill try to see if i could some how use it to build some sort of map generated partical system...

lennier1

Nutsy, you have to play around with the Milkyway plugin´s values a bit. It allows you to add color variation, size variation and even twinkling effects along with motion blur integration. The only thing not supported so far is clustering. Usually it´s only possible to distribute the stars at random or to gather them closer along a ring shape (similar to the band of the milky way on our nightly sky) depending on an adjustable value. It´s one of those plugins which really reward the users who play around with the different values. And if you want more diversity you can always use a black sphere with a noise map in the opacity slot to create the stellar groups manually (by simply hiding some of the plugin´s stars behind the semi-opaque sections.

[Deleted User]

It was the clustering i really liked with my texture map... Anyway i decided to not bother with zoom,ing.. ANd just move the camera in quickly

Guerrilla

You can do some primitive clustering with milkyway by playing with the Material IDs. Essentially you have a blend (or mix map, whichever one isn't the material) map with a material ID and you tell Milky Way to only draw stars on that Materia l ID. Doesn't work quite right everytime, but you should get some neat clusters with a bit of tweaking.

Of course, if you're not in a terrible hurry, you could always do a separate background pass.

Also worth noting, if you use a environment map instead of an actual sphere you shouldn't really have to deal with any blowing out problems.

[Deleted User]

trouble is the envioment map isnt rotating when the camera does

biotech

Can you not just use a much bigger sphere?

Pic-A-Card

Nutsy wrote: »

Did you just edit the animation when you renderd the Starmap layer of the animation... removing the zoom in effect?

That's what I would do. You should be rendering it in a separate pass anyway

[Deleted User]

Yeah I will be rendering them in seporate passes... But while im still building and setting up the scene iv done a few tet renders with everything in there.

citizen

Nutsy wrote: »

trouble is the envioment map isnt rotating when the camera does

Use a bitmap map with an enviroment setting like spherical. Doing that I got this little test using a bitmapped starfield and zooming in and out:

al3d

Guys..when posting request like this..first..we have a section for that...second..always mentionned the soft used.

MODS....wake up and move the thread please

Viper

Yeah, twas the wrong section. Anyway, I'd just map the bitmap in the enviroment slot with spherical mapping. It works very well that way. It'll be on infinite distance though, so if you have a nebula cluster and you want it larger, it won't happen...but then I'd probably do that with particles anyway.

DAve

I've no idea if this would work...
But could you add an expression to scale the sphere up as you zoom?

The other methods suggested are probably better, I'm just thinking out loud.

DAve

Doble

Can someone explain what single-point polygons are? I'm guessing they're some kind of particle effect?

I use Max 8 ... so contextual explanations would be appreciated

- Doble

[Deleted User]

Doble wrote: »

Can someone explain what single-point polygons are? I'm guessing they're some kind of particle effect?

I use Max 8 ... so contextual explanations would be appreciated

- Doble

i think its just a renderable glowing vertex maybe?

Charles Oines

Lightwave allows for n-gons, polygons with any number of points. Single point polygons are exactly what they sound like - polygons consisting of a single point. In the LW renderer, you can set a pixel size for 1 and 2 point polygons on a per-object basis. It's a cheap and easy way to do a starfield if you don't want to pony up for one of the starfield plugins that are available.

Does this help?

[Deleted User]

Charles Oines wrote: »

Lightwave allows for n-gons, polygons with any number of points. Single point polygons are exactly what they sound like - polygons consisting of a single point. In the LW renderer, you can set a pixel size for 1 and 2 point polygons on a per-object basis. It's a cheap and easy way to do a starfield if you don't want to pony up for one of the starfield plugins that are available.

Does this help?

so was i close?

Charles Oines

Yeah, pretty much

Zardoz

Making a star field which a sphere and maps, have a big problem. You should have a resolution in the piece that can you see, similar to the final render resolution. For example, if you camera have a vision angle of 90º and you desire resolution is 800x600, the starmap must have a size of 800*4X600*4 --> 32000x24000 ! So if you make a zoom it will be come blurry if you not apply this simple rule (that show that you need very big maps for it). The problem was never in the size of the sphere, because you starmap will come always blurry if you zoom and your starmap isn't enough big.

If you use any type of procedural mapping, you not will have this problem (aka noise maps, plugins, etc...) but have more trouble to get the exact desire starfield that you have in mind.

I'm using Milky Way for doing starfields, and i get very nice effects (but i'm not doing clustering) playing which the values of the plug-in, and applying it in the scene two or three times to create a more variate luminosity stars, color ranges, etc...

I don't used particles yet to create starfields backgrounds, but i used it to create the typical effect of moving across the stars (in conjunction which a back star map which a milky way) but in the same fashion that are showed in Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan.