Static camera animation

[Brolloks]

I'm trying to get my head around this problem.

 

Scenario:

I have a model of a building with three static cameras at different angles.

The client wants an animation of each with the camera in a static position. The parts that get animated are all material animations and consists of signage panels in a mix of video panels, Rotovision scroller signage and rolling signage. If time permits I'd like to animate a car going by etc, but that's if I have time.

 

My question is the following: I assume it possible to use Premiere to layer different parts of the animation since the foreground won't change. Is there a way to render a single alpha masked still of the foreground and overlay it over the changing building? Even better - can I render 2 stills (one foreground and one building) and then the animation of the signage panels and merge this in Premiere? I don't have combustion so that's not going to help me.

 

Thanks

 

 

Edit: If I have to composite what other program will do it apart from combustion?

[mfured20]

im about to be in the same boat, so im watching this thread with great interest.

 

i know that after effects works instead of combustion, and nuke, but i dont know anything about any of them. the only thing i know how to do in premiere is to paste together my stills, basically. Good luck!

[JamesTaylor]

My 1st suggestions would have been After Effects or Combustion, but i'm getting the feeling you don't want to spend your fee on software!

 

I don't use premiere so can't really help with the ins and outs you can create your alpha mask simply by applying a black material to the background and a white one the foreground them render from the same cam and output size, obvisouly turn of any GI / shadows etc. you only flat colours

 

Off the top of my head i'm wondering if you could fudge the animated signage / scrolling text on signage by using Image Ready (its shipped as part of photoshop for the last few editions i think).

 

Although i've haven't used it for years i seem to remember being able to animate with it... if you were essentially photomatch the angle of your scrolling text to your base renders you can probably then animate it with image ready and then comp it back over the original image in premiere??

[Christopher Nichols]

Premier is not a compositor, it is an editor, you are asking for a lot of headaches. You really need a minimum of After Effects.

[Brolloks]

Hi Christopher

 

I've used Premier a lot in the past, but never for something like this. You're right it's really only for editing. I will see if I can get hold of After Effects or Combustion for the next round. It's not a matter of not wanting to spend the money on software, but I don't have the money at the moment, only when the job finishes. It's a sideline pj and I'm allowed to use the office network to render so what will happen is the following.

 

I'm rendering a single frame for the light cache and irradiance map on very high. All the moving signage is excluded from GI. The light cache and irradiance map gets saved and then the whole thing goes to backburner to render the rest as single frames with no compositing.

 

@James: Animating the Rotavision (some call it Tri-Lateral) scrolling signage was the fun part to animate and took some time to figure out but actually works quite well. It's constructed of 100x100x100 extruded triangles with different mat ID's and then mapped with multi/sub object material. The other signage scrolls vertically and is printed on canvas that scrolls forwards and backwards. For the animation it just a plane with an animated UVW map 3 times the vertical size and moving in thirds.

[Tim Saunders]

It works in premeir. Depending on what version, getting the alpha masks to work may vary in steps. I did this non-architectural video a few weeks ago, and the background was removed and the other stuff was put in behind the animated ball. http://media.putfile.com/Media-Reel-3 (sorry for the over-compressed version, putfile scales it down a ton)

 

In premier pro 2.0, It automatically subtracted my alpha. I rendered the balls as tiff frames. In older versions I believe you have to tell premier to subtract alphas.

[Brolloks]

Thanks for the replies. I had a quick look at the try-out of premiere 2, but due to time constraint and because I found a better? way of doing it I just rendered the whole thing.

 

My solution in case somebody else has a similar problem was as follows.

I rendered the first frame, minus rpc's, with high settings in Light Cache and Irr. map since I only wanted the first frame. That image was saved and used as background. The whole model was given a shadow/matte material except for the signage panels. I then rendered the first frame with the RPC etc turned back on.

 

For the rest of the frames I rendered region and used the VFB to save the images. Since the whole image was in the VFB anyway it saved it with the part that changed for every frame.