January 07, 2005
Swift3D v4 Tutorials translated to Japanese
This is especially good information to the Japanese Swift3D community out there I think. I've translated over 3 tutorials that Jim Foley of Erain put together a little while back concerning the advanced modeler. I'm sure anybody that has touched Swift3D v4 and wandered into the advanced modeler that it is pretty tough to get the hang of. With Jim's tutes though, it was a nice window to be able to see what can be done and how it was done.
Just in case, I'll stick the English tutorials link up too (to the blog entry on Erain's site):
Japanese
Swift3D v4でチューブとワイヤーを作る方法
Swift3D v4とFlashを使ってインタラクティブなツアーを作る方法
July 12, 2004
Swift3D v4 is live!!
Ahhhh finally! I've been waiting for this day for too long that's for sure. If you got v3 when they started their campaign to give you v4 for free, nows the time to run over there and DL it, and if you didn't, then you should have! Either way, the erain site has been completely redone and it's looking great! Go check it out. Congrats to the whole Erain team and beta testers alike.
June 08, 2004
Electric Rain blog is live!
Yes folks, if you're interested in Swift3D then this is the blog for you. The famous Rainwriter, if you've read the manual and liked it, I think this blog is for you ;) Check it out here.
December 08, 2003
Swift 3D "particle" effect (Part 2)
Well, I have finished up the project I mentioned in my previous post. The programs used included Swift 3D, Flash and Photoshop. If you want to view an excerpt which contains just the effect I was talking about, you can download an avi from here. While it is half the actual size and compressed, it still weighs in at around 4mb. The original was 500mb.
For more information and some suggestions, read on.
The animation and modeling were not really difficult, although a little time consuming. The BIG time eater was rendering in Swift. For those of you that do not know, the Swift 3D EMO (raster) rendering engine, relies on a software based rendering and not hardware.
A few suggestions should you decide you want to try something like this.
1. I do not suggest trying something on this scale with Swift if your workstation is running less than a 2ghz processor and 1gig of ram. While you could still do it on less, the delay in moving objects on the stage and horrendous rendering times would make it frustrating. On a system with a 1.8ghz P4 and 524mb of ram, rendering crawled. When I say crawled, I am talking in the area of grinding through only 30 frames in 7 hours. (Time can increase/decrease depending on if there is a lot of transparency and/or reflections used). On a 3.04 ghz Xeon and 1.5ghz of ram, I managed 200 frames in about the same time.
2. Planning is crucial. The amount of objects being moved around the stage, coupled with Swifts rather unforgiving Undo system, can make fixing small animation errors a disaster. Storyboard your animation and while working, do a lot of test renders, which leads into my next point.
3.With the rendering times mentioned above, you DO NOT want to have to re-re-render due to problems that could have easily been caught in a test that takes a wee fraction of the time. When testing, do not rely on the scanline renderer within the Scene Editor for all comping. Switch over to the Rendering and Export editor to make sure you are getting a clear view of what things will REALLY look like.
4. If you are working against the clock, make sure you have figured in rendering time (and re-rendering time in case of error) into the project schedule. Setting up your production schedule so that you can render overnight helps.
5. Finally, if you do not have the option to render overnight, having an extra puter to play Halo (Multiplayer online) helps to waste ti....errr, helps you wait patiently, while anticipating seeing the final rendering of your masterpiece. (An ample supply of your favorite alcoholic (if you partake) beverage doesn't hurt either.)
BUG ALERT
While working though this project, I came across an apparent rendering bug in Swift that had crossed my path once before. This was extremely frustrating, as it DID happen while rendering overnight and test renders had not shown it.
If you have a light source that is set so that it does not create shadows and are working with transparent materials, occasionally those objects with transparency will show up as black (or a lot darker) when exported in a raster format that does not support alpha transparency (JPG in my case). This DOES NOT show up during rendering, only after exporting and is not consistant. The first five frames could look fine and POW, the sixth has your beautiful transparent model looking like a lump of obsidian.
That said, make sure to check your exported files BEFORE closing the Render and Export editor, as Swift will allow you to change the raster export format without having to re-render.
If you have any question regarding this effect please feel free to email me or post a comment.
December 04, 2003
Swift 3D "particle" effect
I am currently working on a broadcast motion graphics piece using Swift as the primary 3D modeling and animation tool, with post-production in Flash and finally converted into a broadcast video format. I wanted a particle like effect, however since Swift lacks a scripting language, it had to be done the old fashion way...by hand. The below shots give an example of the effect. The actual piece is 720x540 and will be approx. 400 frames at 30fps, so is too large to put online, however I will see about getting a web friendly version once the deadline has been met.
While it looks pretty busy, the scene is actually only composed of around 88,443 edges (55,193 polygons).
