Animated fade transition

[berliner]

Hi,

I am trying to fade a white 3-d object set on a black background that over a 1-minute time will fade slowly out to black. It's a simple geometric form that I added a standard white material to, so there are no lights or anything else involved. I used key frames and lowered the opacity of the object over the time-length period in order to achieve this. The problem I'm having though is, the animation (when played in QuickTime) flickers, especially when the opacity gets lower. I'm hoping to have a very smooth transition. I set the fps at 60 in hopes that increasing it would solve this problem but no luck. Any suggestions/ better ideas would be great.

[alias_marks]

just to clarify. Did you key frame the opacity of the material or add a visibility key in the dope sheet editor?

 

depending on which one you did, I might try the alternate to see if it works better.

 

Another option is to render two different passes and animate the opacity fade in post, ideally this is the best and will give you the most flexibility, but then also requires some more scene setup and compositing software.

 

cheers and good luck, those are just my suggestions

[berliner]

I key framed the opacity...I'm not so keen on using the Video Post just yet. In order to use that, don't I have to first save it as a jpg or something? I couldn't figure out how to load the sequence onto video post, or does it just need to be a still image that I then add a Fader filter to in video post?

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I would learn to do it in post as Michael suggests. It will be easier to make changes, and fine tune it on the fly without having to re-render everything.

[alias_marks]

yea, if your camera isn't moving, the easies solution would be to render out two jpg's/png's/tif's whatever and fade the one over the other in something as simple as movie maker if you don't have anything else. It varies depending on your scene setup, so maybe upload a screen shot and you might get some more relavent feedback

 

welcome to the boards!

[berliner]

Hey Michael, regarding your first suggestion- how do I add a visibility key in the dope sheet editor? I uploaded a rendered animation of this into video post and now am in the dope sheet editor...trying to figure things out...

[Tommy L]

Just render two images and fade in post. Its going to be way easier. Saying that, there is not really a clear reason for the flickering you are experiencing either./ Most likely is its a compression/encoding issue in post anyway.

[alias_marks]

I don't have a good link to something breaking it down in more detail but I do believe there should be some good info in your max help files if you search for dope sheet + visibility track or something of the sorts.

 

-basically you want right click anywhere and open up the dope sheet. then add to add a visibility track to the object you're trying to fade and set the key frames animating your values from 0 to 1 or whatever.

 

I believe it's like Edit>add visibility track or something like that (I'm currently re-installing windows and am on my laptop so I can't open anything up to check out specifics).

 

Good luck and maybe someone else can chime in if they have more specifics/ideas.

[alias_marks]

and yea, for this specific case I'd definitely say this is probably overkill and fading in post is way better. but regardless, it's probably a good opportunity to familiarize yourself with the visibility key/dope sheet key editing process for when you do more complex animations down the line

[berliner]

thanks for your suggestions. I need to play with the dope sheet and video post a bit more. I tried the suggestion of reducing the visibility key, and I did try adding a jpg of a frame into video post, added a fader, but the quality is much worse than what I've been doing, which is change the opacity of the object on the auto key down to 0 once it gets to the end of the animation sequence. I added a Catmull-Rom filter to it and bumped it up to 60 fps, this was giving me more of a crisp rendering and with nice transition, it's just till the object loses most of it's opacity that it starts to flicker (when played in QuickTime).

[berliner]

As far as rendering out two passes- should I render one at the beginning of the sequence (in full color) then the last one (in full black- at the end of the fade out) and then adjust the opacity between them both in Post, as you mentioned earlier?

[Tommy L]

What post production program are you using?

[berliner]

I'm not using a post-production program. I'm simply just trying to animate a basic geometric shape that over a 1-minute time will fade completely out into a black background...I've tried rendering it with the output to .mov, as this will be part of a video-art project and will be best viewed in QuickTime or the like. Like I said before though, the main problem has been that the image flickers a bit when viewed in QT, mostly near the end when it loses most of it's opacity. I'm looking for a smooth transition. Any further suggestions would be great!

[Tommy L]

It is not a 3d problem, its an encoding problem. Max creates a bunch of frames. You dont need to do 60 fps.

You need to feed an uncompressed format into QT. I think an image sequence is one option, if not you need to assemble an uncompressed .avi and use that as the input. I've never output a movie format from Max, but its probably best to use dedicated software.

[alias_marks]

might be helpful if you can at least upload your test to vimeo or youtube or attach here...

 

kinda shootin in the dark if we don't know what were lookin at. It kinda smells like an anti aliasing problem, might play with those settings a bit.

 

Posting your setting might help us give more advice as well