Fake an Animation???

[M V]

Is it possible to fake an animation using only stills? What I am looking to do is make an animation starting zoomed in on a single house and then quickly zoom out with motion bluring to reveal 1000 of the same. I would like to accomplish this using only a few rendered stills which seems totally possible using some video editing software. I just dont know which. Oh yea, my budget is like no dollars and I dont have a lot of time. Something that never happens in arch/viz, I know.

 

Would Premiere Elements be able to do this?

[Tommy L]

How long is the animation?

I think you could test it very quickly just with boxes.

[Stephen Thomas]

After Effects would allow you to set up a series of layers that would give you the illusion of depth/parallax as you zoomed out. You could set up seperate background, midground and foreground groups. I'm not sure you could do anything more than a zoom on a single still image with Premiere.

[Stephen Thomas]

Actually, thinking about it you could do the same with 3ds Max. Render out your layers/individual houses/whatever and then apply them to a series of opacity-mapped planes that are self-lluminated. Should rattle through it in no time just using the scanline renderer after that.

[Tommy L]

That said, if its only a short animation and you have to model everything anyway......seems like extra work to do this in post when you are just animating a single camera track.

[Stephen Thomas]

That said, if its only a short animation and you have to model everything anyway......seems like extra work to do this in post when you are just animating a single camera track.

Agreed, it all comes down to available time and processing power.

[M V]

How long is the animation?

I think you could test it very quickly just with boxes.

 

Short, like 5-6 seconds.

[M V]

I would like to accomplish this as simple and as inexpensive as possible. I do not have After Effects but I could get a demo, but I have never used it, so theres some time loss there in just figuring it out. Also, I am a SketchUp / Vray user. I have Max on my machine, but dont know enough to do anything special, like what step.thomas is proposing. I know, I know, LEARN MAX!!! I am in the infancy of getting into it more and getting away from SU, but this is what I have to work with. I have seen animations put together using just 2D images, utlizing pans and zooms with blur effects. Is this After Effects doing this? I assume so.

[Bwana Kahawa]

 

This is something we were part of a few years ago (the animation is near the end). Put together in Final Cut from just stills. Took a bit of time to get the people incorporated, but seemed to pay off in the end.

[Dave Buckley]

the cheapest way.

 

render out one huge image big enough so that when you are zoomed in on one object it maintains a good resolution.

 

then in you video editing package of choice (windows movie maker may do it)

 

scale the image as large as it needs to be to fit what you want in the frame at the start of the shot. then overtime scale the image down.

 

it will look crude but could work depending on the angles of the camera.

 

i've done it before for a corridor where the camera didn't change height, it simply went in a straight line down the corridor. it worked for me.

[Nic H]

nothing worse than a zoom on a image in place of a 3d/2d-3d move

i would render in layers then bring back into max on planes with opacity maps if you cant use after effects etc. it will be qucik to render and easy to adjust

 

you need some parallax to make it at all believable

[Dave Buckley]

nothing worse than a zoom on a image in place of a 3d/2d-3d move

i would render in layers then bring back into max on planes with opacity maps if you cant use after effects etc. it will be qucik to render and easy to adjust

 

you need some parallax to make it at all believable

 

for sure, I don't dispute this at all. Was simply stating the cheapest way (which just so happens to produce the cheapest looking results

[PuffinViz]

 

This is something we were part of a few years ago (the animation is near the end). Put together in Final Cut from just stills. Took a bit of time to get the people incorporated, but seemed to pay off in the end.

 

I really like this method, very interesting way of getting more mileage out of stills. Can I ask where you got the animated people from?

[Bwana Kahawa]

I really like this method, very interesting way of getting more mileage out of stills. Can I ask where you got the animated people from?

 

They were from Marlin Studios. The pain with this approach was that they're designed to be placed on animated planes, so played on their own, they look like they're on a treadmill. I had to pull all the files into one Photshop document and line them up based on their feet position, before I could dump the group of layers into the still and save out the frames. Once they're set up, then you can re-use them easily enough though. (I used them again to save rendering time on my animation entry for the 2008 AVC - can't find the link though).

[PuffinViz]

interesting, personally i would just animate them in after effects using a null object, thanks for the info tho!

[Roodogg]

A method I'm using to do panning shots is rendering a single image in 360degree panorama (In mental ray - lens effects, in Vray, camera, sperical / FOV 360). Then save as a HDRI. Set up new scene with hdri as environment and render a camera's pan across it. Good cheat to get 3D panning effect very very quickly.

[kurumada]

A method I'm using to do panning shots is rendering a single image in 360degree panorama (In mental ray - lens effects, in Vray, camera, sperical / FOV 360). Then save as a HDRI. Set up new scene with hdri as environment and render a camera's pan across it. Good cheat to get 3D panning effect very very quickly.

 

It's a good method, but this way you can't have parallex.. I like to bake the illumination, this way you can render 30secs per frame with all the options that mental ray and vray have to offer. Depth of Field, camera lens distortion... FlatIron it's a great plugin to do that!

[kurumada]

haa.. one more thing, you can render moving objects separately with GI turned on and compose the channels that you want to make depth of field an so on... everything in post production.. it's flexible and fast, but that way you are not faking, you are actually rendering the animation but it's a way..

[bobmorgan]

Hi

 

Have a look as this it might help

 

http://www.scottonstott.com/vodcast/Episode024.html

 

Regards

 

BobM