Animation mixing wireframe and shaded

[Ricardo Eloy]

Hi, folks!

One of my clients asked me to do an animation where the site first appears in wireframe, spinning, and slowly turns into the shaded version, with textures and all. I thought I might do it using an animated material, probably Blend. Does anyone know a better way to do it?

Thanks!

[Jeff Mottle]

You could render out two seperate animations and compostite them in post. One as a wireframe and the other as the fully textured model. In fact it may even be quicker this way as only half the animation would need to be rendered with full textures and lighting. Not really sure how you wanted to do it, so maybe this does not work.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Thanks for the quick reply, Jeff, but I'm afraid the thing is a bit more complicated. The site should change gradually, and since it's spinning during the change, using post would be not an option (that's why I first thought of the Blend material, I could animate it to go from a wireframed shader to a full textured one painted in PS).

[ch83575]

You absolutly can do it in post. In fact you dont even need anything fancy. I recently did an animation of a shock absorber with an orbiting camera which went from wireframe to ambient occlusion to shaded to photoreal rendered (it actualy showed the shock opperating as the camera orbited, but you probably dont get to do that with a building). I did a lot of compositing in shake bacause I wanted the wire-frame to be over ambient occlusion and shaded passes, but didn't want the extra render time of contour shaders in each shading group, but all of the blending i found to be easier to control in premire! I just lined things up and used basic disolves from each pass to the other! Looks great. If you don't need multi-pass frames, you just need the dissolves, then you can skip comp phase entirely and jump into premire (you could also do it in after effects i think, but i dont use that program). Good luck.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Makes sense... Just one question: did the transition go in a single direction? I'm asking because in this case I need the transition to spin along with the site.

[anvaraziz]

hey, do as Jeff mottle say,, do it in compositing softs like after effects.. or so...

i do one animation like this,,, i renderd two out put(one wire frame n one shaded) n composited it ,, ... it give more control in after effects,, ..

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

hey, do as Jeff mottle say,, do it in compositing softs like after effects.. or so...

i do one animation like this,,, i renderd two out put(one wire frame n one shaded) n composited it ,, ... it give more control in after effects,, ..

not to mention you will be able to do it 10 times faster this way.

[Ernest Burden III]

You could render out two seperate animations and compostite them in post. One as a wireframe and the other as the fully textured model. In fact it may even be quicker this way as only half the animation would need to be rendered with full textures and lighting..

 

You would probably need to render mora than half of each, but you still save time. You would first want to figure out the area that will overlap (blend). It could be hard to find the exact frames to match, meaning frame 1605 of wireframe = frame 0000 of full render. Think about this before you render it. Can you do that match by frame number, visually in the animation compositing software? The EASIEST way is, of course, to just render both versions fully. But you need to figure all the time to render.

 

Would your 'wireframe' be a true wireframe (open, seeing all lines including mesh lines) or are you looking to do a HLR sort of wireframe? If a true wireframe, can you use depth cuing so farther stuff is faded? That helps a lot in readability.

[abicalho]

I'd do it in post. You may want to render 3 animations:

 

- Wireframe

- Shaded

- Mask

 

The Mask animation is just a black & white animation where you animate the opacity map or something like that so that you can generate a mask for Post.

 

Or, if you're brave, you can just add an opacity map to everybody in the scene and animate it, making the transition.

 

One important thing to know is that no material in MAX supports 2 wireframe modes - if you enable wireframe in one sub-material in Blend, all materials are considered as wireframe.

 

Alexander

[Ernest Burden III]

I'd do it in post. You may want to render 3 animations:

- Wireframe

- Shaded

- Mask

 

If the idea is to simply have an animation start out as wireframe, and then dissolve into full rendered, then there is no need for masks. A simple cross'fade dissolve will do that.

[Christopher Nichols]

I'd do it in post. You may want to render 3 animations:

 

- Wireframe

- Shaded

- Mask

 

The Mask animation is just a black & white animation where you animate the opacity map or something like that so that you can generate a mask for Post.

 

Or, if you're brave, you can just add an opacity map to everybody in the scene and animate it, making the transition.

 

One important thing to know is that no material in MAX supports 2 wireframe modes - if you enable wireframe in one sub-material in Blend, all materials are considered as wireframe.

 

Alexander

 

Alex's method is the best... keep in mind that the mask (also called a matte in come cases), does not need to be very complex. Creating a lo res proxy of the scene would be easy enough. Lets say that you want to camera to spin around the site with the reveal to happen from the west to the east. What I would do is take the proxy object and assign a ramp as color (usualy done with a self-illum. map in max so that you don't deal with shading tints). The ramp would go from white to black from east to west. Then you can contol how it is revealed as well as when it is revealed all in post. The matte pass should render really quick, as in a few sec's per frame.

[abicalho]

If the idea is to simply have an animation start out as wireframe, and then dissolve into full rendered, then there is no need for masks. A simple cross'fade dissolve will do that.

 

The reason why I'd render a mask is because sometimes you want to make a "building" grow up effect. If you do that, your view will not allow for a linear mask because the building is also in perspective view. Hence the need for a non-linear (rendered) mask.

 

I personally use Combustion and render everything in RPF with Z-Buffer for these things. Maybe even Material Channels. Makes it a hell lot easier to do anything in post, since you can select based on Z or on Material ID, you can composite in real 3D, and you can overlay 2 renders also in 3D very easily.

 

Hope it makes sense.

 

Alexander

[Ricardo Eloy]

It does make sense, Alex. And it's nice to see so many different ideas for the same issue. Thanks guys for the replies!I'm now actually convinced to do it in post with an opacity mask. That will definetly gimme more control over how the transition happens. Thank you so much! As soon as I have it done, I'll post the animation!

[jlpena]

If the idea is to simply have an animation start out as wireframe, and then dissolve into full rendered, then there is no need for masks. A simple cross'fade dissolve will do that.

 

Ernest, could you expand on this? I'm doing the same thing for a client, how do you do a cross fade dissolve in VIZ/MAX?

[ecastillor]

you cant....but is easy as hell in premier or any other video editing program...

 

First render each version of the anim. (wire and shaded) and then just overlap them and do a crossfade between them....at least thats how ive done it.