Work in progress image from a music video I’m working on. It’s Modeled in 3dsMax , with a very simple realtime toon shader.
I’m partway through look development and the animatic. It’s a personal project , so I’m grabbing bits of time while I pitch for new work. Hopefully I can put up a few more images next week.
I’m working on an animated music video. I thought I’d share a bit of simple maths to help get footsteps on the beat.
bpm / 60 = beats per second FPS / beats per second = frames per Beat
So if the song is at 150 bpm this would would be
150 / 60 = 2.5 beats per second
PAL is 25 fps so…
25 / 2.5 = 10 frames per Beat
Bear in mind that whilst most dance tunes have a computerized fixed tempo. Folk and jazz will mostly likely vary in tempo.
I have a tap tempo app for my iPhone that I’m using to calculate Bpm. I just tap along to the song and watch the bpm display. For the tune I’m working on there is a slow but steady increase from 150 bpm at the start to 160 bpm at the end.
For more complex interactions or changes in tempo you might try and use the motion capture utility. This allows you to wire MIDI inputs to a Motion Capture animation controller.
Motion capture is great but it almost never quite fits the location or the character rig. Often it requires a little tweaking or, worse still ,modifications are needed that take the data further and further from the source file ( Rifles are changed to pistols etc).
Animation layers are useful but only get you so far until your simply fighting the data trying to figure out when and where things are happening.
Eventually we have to dismantle that wall of motion captured key frames into something more manageable.
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Screen real estate is important. By resizing the Max toolbar buttons you can squeeze 50% more on screen without adding another row.
I’ve been doing some tests to create a monster made of particles for a short film. I’ve been very impressed be the speed of rendering Motion Blur in iRay. It’s smooth and high quality with very little performance overhead.
