Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage



And Motion Tools addon for ICE.

I am starting to really like ICE. It's like the LE on steroids.

With particles.

Very fast processing, and some great compounds out there.... so.. learning it.

Here is the insert I put to the video.
My first.. analysis and study of motion graphics with Motion Tools addon done in Softimage. The node based workflow is extremely powerful, if only I knew how it worked. I think it's a fine balance with visual art and programming.. so I think I will learn it. I exported this to Mach Studio Pro 2 and rendered it. I was testing out the DOF, realized I can render it out, but it doesn't look great. If I want cimeatic Bokeh DOF, I'd best do it in post with Blender or something. I am also still trying to figure out it's motion vectors, but now I know Natron does it nicely, and you can do it also with Blender with some hard tweaking.. but I have yet to try make it work with Natron.. so.. getting there!

I really want to get more into motion graphics, because I think it will help me get better work and better wages for my freelance work.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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I saw something like that after i ate a tiny piece of paper. :shock:
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Hahahahhahahahaha :D :P
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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I think I will enter this into the challenge.



Since the launch of the event, I have finished studying a Pluralsight course on Procedural modeling in ICE, Softimage.. it's like the Animation Nodes in Blender, but faster and.. a little bit more complicated and flexible.

So I followed the tutorial and made this spiral and it is.. fully dynamic. I was using it to try make a procedural pinecone animation thing for a secret animation for myself.

I hope.. to make more things like this, and.. maybe finish my secret animation for myself and the competition.

Video Caption:
Just followerd a Pluralsight tutorial on Procedural modeling in ICE with Softimage - using visual programming. This could also probably be replicated in Fabric Engine, Houdini or other systems with visual programming. I like the idea of building things like this.

I have realized I can get some really cool renders using Mach Studio Pro 2, if the cloned geometry doesn't spawn any new vertices. With that I can export the vertex cache to the GPU renderer and get quick results.

I added motion blur with Vector Blur in Blender compositing.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Here I am, having done a rather extensive tutorial for procedural modeling and I finally managed to make what I wanted to make - a pinecone thing with flexibility to grow and morph.

ICE in Softimage is hard, but it's empowering learning it.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Image

Working on a little experimental animation for a friend of mine, it’s his birthday and I wanted to practice. This will be my entry for the experimentation challenge. I have been working on it this month little by little.

I am loving Softimage ICE, though currently I dont have a great particle renderer for it - so slow progress.. but I can do amazing things with it really easily, programming things visually is really beautifully fun. I hate programming in general, but visually it is fun. It can get slow sometimes, concerning crunching huge data sets.. but it is so very powerful. And fast relatively.

I love how it can be used to drive almost everything.

So.. for you, here is a sneak peak of my plan.. I have used Blender to bake audio data from a song I frequency crunched with High and Low pass filters to a song of a friend of mine. I then applied that animation to some cubes to import via FBX to Softimage. Now in Softimage, I have built a procedural system that makes the pinecone and drives the shaders. I have roughly setup a stage for it and now soon I will take the audio driven animation to drive certain things from the scene - make it really interesting. Hopefully it will look awesome! I will then later render it out on my minifarm, two machines.

I spent most of my evening today working on the translucent shaders, a way to blend into that glowing effect I have. It should look really nice animated to the audio.

I love learning visual programming - one day I will be going to Fabric Engine.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Image
Frickin finally!

This little animation - that I will soon publish with a song compliments to Gabriel Lucien - will be my first of hopefully a series of techniques that will open doors.

I did it totally on my own accord to study a number of topics, probably a couple of weeks of manuels, tutorials and blood, sweat and tear mainly focused on two topics. One is procedurally created and animated geometry in ICE, Softimage; and the other is GPU rendering with Alembic inside Unreal Engine. None of these things I knew at all before starting the project.

So far... Unreal Engine is still in development, but holy cow can you do potentially a lot in there.

But by far ICE is way simpler to use than Blueprint......

This has been a long experiment. I spent a long time trying to render out this thing. Once I followed a tutorial on how to make procedural stairs, I perfected it and made a pinecone. After that I learnt how to import sound from sound files into Blender, cook it to geometry, and isolate frequencies in Audacity. Once I got that done, learnt how to export animation from Blender through FBX, then got that into SI to drive my pinecone in a somewhat procedural and creative way. Then I learnt how to use Alembic files in Unreal Engine, which is free, to then try render it out. I learnt that I can't cache large files, or have all the material clusters dissappear, it will crash UE. Later I learnt a lot about Blueprint, shading, and how to render realtime - also.. how to render a sequence with the textures. UE has a feature missing where media player texures will not render with the frame count, but with a timer - and if your card is rendering NOT at real time, they textures render really quickly meanwhile everything else doesn't. I also figured out that Motion Blur does not apply to Alembic Cache files. I also learnt that Virtual Dub with Avisynth with MV Tools, what I use for post motion blur, also finds it tricky for fast moving chunks. Also, Helix YV12 codec kinda sucks. Anyone know of any other yv12 codecs out there? I spent all day today, well afternoon, trying to find a way around the texture issue with UE, finally opting out of the new Media Player system for a Flipbook system.. Which was alright. In the process I rendered it in the dark, and thought.. HEY! That looks great. May as well splice it in.

I finally edited and did a little post in Blender and viola!

I'll be publishing the video soon.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Lucien Maguel - Mami te extraño - Promo Video Study



Here is a bit on my workflow to do this:
1. Use High and Low pass and frequency analysis in Audacity to isolate frequencies.
2. Import the sound files into Blender and bake them to a translation axis on a cube to export to FBX
3. Export the animation with FBX into Softimage
4. Build the ICE system to clone the shards onto curves. Think about what to do, what to hook up to what.. that is the tricky part haha.
5. Build the color beat system in ICE. Build the pen shape in Blender and drive a push deformer in Softimage.
6. Hook up the input from the cubes to set values, some animated, on what I wanted to drive in ICE
7. Export Alembic files. I did them in chunks as I had one bad chunk - realising that Unreal Engines needs all material ID's present, and will crash if one dissappears.
8. Render the color beat system from Softimage to create sprites for Unreal Engine.
9. Import the sprites to Unreal and hook them up with Blueprint.
10. Setup the shaders, the lighting, the Matinee and Sequencer relationship, the camera and due to the Alembic chunks: animate the visibility
11. Render - which is ridiculously fast in Unreal.
12. Post effects with Virtual Dub, Avisynth and MVtools for motion blur (Unreal won't put motion blur on Alembic Cache files) and Blender Composites - though you can get a really decent image from Unreal right away.
13. Edit in Blender

Tadaa!

All this... is the broken down version as I did a lot of experrimentation and trial and error learning the relationships between softwares, limits of Unreal Engine and playing video and rendering with the Sequencer, and the way Softimage handles data with ICE - which ultimately is really fun and easy. I had to also learn the basics of Unreal Engine practically from scratch, including building translucent shaders, Blueprint and hooking up parameters to Blueprint, and playing stuff with Blueprint for the rendering.

Notes to keep in mine.. I can render out to 4K without problem with UE, and then use Virtual Dub to give me that added AA sharpness for 1080p HD quality that my Video Card was lacking with. Work more on the artistic concept more. Have shards with the exported alembic file that contain the materials so that the particles can dissappear without crashing Unreal Engine. Still not sure how.... Learn more Unreal Engine and ICE. It is powerful.
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Re: Studying Motion Graphics with Softimage

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Ha! Don't think that 80's porn music will help you win! Neither will that well crafted video where you researched things, learned stuff, and experimented with several programs and techniques. Wait. Well it will be good to see your imagination in the theme for the next challenge ... unless Mikom ...
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