Forum

Scary video, getting near a black hole gives me the creeps!  Haven't seen this movie in ages.  You did a good job animating this and building suspense.   I'm just beginning animation, and I'm wondering, did you render the animation is pieces and then edit them together?  

Hi KatLady!

Yes, I rendered individual scenes and edited them together. There's far more control that way.

I also rendered many of the scenes in layers. Basically I set up the full scene with lighting and animation, then used the Save As function to save different "layers" of the scene. So for instance, the star field will be the background layer, the black hole will be another layer and the cygnus will be the third layer. Each iteration has a common name with a number attached to it, so as an example, the background scene is saved as, black hole01, the black hole scene would be, black hole02, etc.

The Cygnus model is extremely high geometry and was a PITA to animate sometimes, so it helped to render some static images and a spherical render of the ship and animate against that instead of loading the actual model. I still rendered an alpha channel for the foreground action in case I had not planned the background image well enough, and needed to replace it.

Hope I've helped, and not over-explained.

Hmmm.... I don't recall putting that large gap between paragraphs....

Anyway, here's an example video I did where I demonstrate comnpositing an animated asteroid field with a dust cloud.