#growing a glow
19 messages in this thread
to my fellow glowworms,
sometimes the easiest things become tough. the glow.ixp description in my ipas
manual does not seem to indicate how to make a glow either grow or recede.
i've sort of worked through how to make one from the somewhat difficult to
understand directions but am unable to find any reference as to how to grow a
glow save manually adding a scanline and re-rendering several frames. has
anyone discovered an easier way to do this?
many thanks,
michael
Michael,
Video Post rules, OK? <G>
>> the glow.ixp description in my ipas manual does not seem to indicate how to
make a glow either grow or recede. <<
I don't think there is a one step process, but glows will naturally grow and
recede when the are dissolved or faded in and out – it's there nature. They
can't help it. Here's what I do:
1) render the scene *without* the glow
2) render the scene *with* glow in video post (VP)
3) composite in VP as follows:
layer 1: the full animated scene
layer 2: the glowed frame with fadeIN over n frames (2-5 looks good)
layer 3: the glowed frame with fadeOUT over n frames (10 looks good)
Try it and see. The above example would be an almost instant, burn-on type glow
which slowly dies out – standard logo fare <g>. Make sure the fadeOUT layer
starts after the fadeIN is complete. Looks like this:
scen*.tga o——————————-o
glow.tga fadeIN o–o
glow.tga fadeOUT o——–o
I hope this overblown example helps 🙂
martin,
helps? i'll say it does. it's pretty much as i suspected and your observation
of glow on/off phenomenon is right on the mark. i was just hopeful that there
was a little routine to do it a little less manually (a la sdl in say, alias)
on the other hand, the glows look much better than most of their ilk, and as we
know, you never outglow your need for ilk.
thanks for the solution, i'm much obliged.
michael
Michael,
I'm always looking for shortcuts, but I've found many of these effects need a
multi-layered approach for the best results. Gary's tip was neat and I'm going
to give it a try at home – maybe that will work in a one step video post
render.
In addition to Martin's excellent response, one of our techniques for doing
pulsing glows is to morph the self-illuminated object that's producing the
glow.
– G
Gary,
>> pulsing glows is to morph the self-illuminated object that's producing the
glow.<<
Good tip. I like it 🙂
gary,
quite so. the particularly good example included in the exercises with the
halo of octogons produced an especially beautiful effect. by increasing the
decreasing the size of the octogons and a few fade in/outs it's a stunning
look. thanks for the tip.
michael
My pleasure. Enjoy,
– G
What's wrong with scaling the object for the glow? That's the way I've been
doing it
That's effectively the same thing as morphing… changing the shape in any way
will affect the size of the glow. Scaling is a nice simple way of doing it.
(Typical of me to think of the more-difficult case.)
– G
I know that this should be in "wishlist" but it's part of this thread….
Make fade in/outs part of an upgrade to Yost Disk 1, plus (for R.5?)… assign
the layers an effect affects (?)
Just dreamin'
-David
BTW Having a ball with my very own copy of R.4 my compliments to the chef
(effect affects…. oh brother)
There is one advantage to not having FI/FO in the IPAS. By having to
incorporate several layers in VP to accomplish the same thing the VP layout
gets very impressively complicated and technical looking. Recently when one of
my more savy video clients saw the VP with 30 some layers of FI/FO for IPAS
routines and graphics files he was so impressed that in addition to feeling
sorry for having to create such a monstrosity for him wrote the check pronto!
🙂
>> Recently when one of my more savy video clients saw the VP with 30 some
layers of FI/FO for IPAS routines and graphics files he was so impressed that
in addition to feeling sorry for having to create such a monstrosity for him
wrote the check pronto! 🙂 <<
I might be doing a whole bunch of work for a client who's also a neighbor.
One of the nice things for him is he can stop by my house to see how things are
progressing. To _really_ impress him (in addition to complex VP entries), I'm
thinking of running a few extra hundred feet of video cables around the room.
Then maybe get a machine that goes "ping" (from Monty Python's "The Meaning of
Life"). Maybe I'll rig up a board with a bunch of lights, and meters that are
red-lining… Will need to generate an overworked machine noise, like in the
Castrol GTX commercial…
This is going to be great! (bg)
Paul
Paul:
Gotta get some dry ice placed behind your CPU to get that burning silicon
effect, very impressive. <G>
Bob
>>(Typical of me to think of the more-difficult case.)
Funny, I was thinking the same thing. <BG>
My simple mind is always seeking the simple cheapo approach.
PMJI –
When ever I hit a thread like this, it justifies the next 3 months CIS budget,
thank you guys, all. I was just getting ready to buy glow to animate
electrical activity pulsing on and off around a dozen molecular receptors, all
activity staggered in time – I almost had a coronary when I read Martin's
recipe! NO way would that have worked in my scene. Fortunately I only had to
suffer 24 hours, till Don's post came on, 'cause I was sure "glow" was the
effect I needed. I love this place!
I can't recall what it was exactly you were trying to do but the way to get a
glow to grow as in the title of the thread is to scale the "glow" object. This
would still necessitate using the glow IPAS on this object. If you absolutely
want to create glows around objects without the glow IPAS I recently figured a
way to do it here when creating a neon sign that would light up and blink on
and off as the sign was being turned on to sound effects. What I did was loft
a circle along a path for the neon sign glass tube and assigned it a neon
orange material that I created in the mat ed. Next I took the same path and
lofted a circle at twice the diameter as the first so it was a concentric tube
on the neon sign. You can then assign the same material only this time give it
some transparency with fall-off to the outside for the larger tube. I also
used an animated texture map on the glass tube so it would change from solid
neon orange to solid white glass. I was also working on an animated opacity
map to make the glass clear when the sign was turned off. Then the project was
cancelled. Those things happen sometimes. <G> Anyway the turned on neon sign
looked authentic and had a nice uniform glow that the glow IPAS was incapable
of creating. To be honest, I have found the IPAS glow very hard to control and
have resorted to either the lens flare or objects for real controlable glows.
Thanks for your response, Don.
As it happens, I just got back from visiting my dealer to pick
up R4 and try out glow, and noted the very problems you mentioned
<<uniform glow that the glow IPAS was incapable of creating>> and
<<hard to control>>. It turns out that a luridly self-illuminated
material with additive transparency, (50% transp), and 100% outside
falloff, and shadow casting and receiving turned off for the glowing
object, worked well for my purposes, although the edges were still
not as soft as I would have wished. I morphed between the pulse "on"
and "off" shapes.
Also, this was actually the first .AXP process I have tried …
I much prefer having these things be specific object attributes
rather than something that is layered onto the scene. My dealer said
Digimation is supposedly re-doing the special effects IPAS disc, such
that the attributes glow, lens flare etc will be redone as object
attributes, and that this is supposed to be out in January. Know
anything about this?
>> Know anything about this?
No, I'm just one of their satisfied customers. Not on the inside with them.