Today, Campbell ‘Ideasman’ Barton showed me a very cool .blend file he made to demonstrate Blender’s Array Modifier, new in the upcoming Blender version 2.42. I thought I’d light, comp and render it to make a nice demo movie to use in the 2.42 release documentation. The white 3D axes are the controller objects. Check it out:
This is an insanely impressive demo. I love the array modifier a lot, but the presentation here is marvelous!
I wonder how you animated the camera. in the end it just feel like it’s following a path and not simply keyframed, but maybe you know some black IPO magic? 😉
Hi Jakub!
Campbell did a great job with the animation of it, and I did the camera for this file to make something that would look nice rendered, and in a size for the web. I don’t really think there was any black magic.. Going through the thought processes, I think I just looked through the animation to find the shapes that I liked most, then at those points in time found compositions for those shapes that I liked, and then transitioned between those compositions trying to get the camera to follow the smoothest and shortest path I could (to prevent things swishing around too much), and adding a few more keys, to try and keep it all in frame as much as possible. Of course, also a bit of trial and error, tweaking things until it worked nicely.
I also tried to not keep the camera moving at all times, but also provide a few little pauses (even if it’s only just in some of the animation curves), to prevent things from getting too overwhelming – especially with all the movement in the animation, it doesn’t really feel like anything has completely stopped. Oh yeah, and at the end, the spinning effect is because the camera is parented to an empty in the centre that starts rotating.
cheers and thanks! 🙂
Hey there, just tried this file with the new ffmpeg H264 export and here is the result:
http://www.ruicampos.com/fl_tmp/movies/arraydemo-h264.avi
It has a similar size to xvid, a bit bigger, but quality seems a bit better.
Cheerz,
— Rui —
Rui: Ah, very nice. The motion blurred parts come out much nicer than the xvid version, too.
Thanks a lot for the tut! concise and well explained. Thanks for your time and effort put into capturing it.
Very neat feature indeed. And cool demo. This means we can save ourselves 379 Euros for that new tool from Maxon that just came out ( http://maxon.de/pages/products/c4d/modules/mograph/mograph_d.html ). I feel sorry for them allready. Now all we need is proper measurements, true displacement maps and a neat body paint feature and they can close up their business. 🙂
Honestly now: Checking out the Demoreel of MoGraph from Maxon (see link above) – does this array feature cover all that which Mograph can do or are there still some things unmatched in comparsion?
I got shot 🙂 Tools don’t mind when there is an artist behind them 🙂
Brilliant a[euro] A,A- you guys make it look so easy! Its like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie! Is their any chance that someone could add sound to it?
Brilliant a[euro] A,A- you guys make it look so easy! Its like something out of a Steven Spielberg movie! Is their any chance that someone could add sound to it?
Beautiful… very nice work…
Thanks, all!
Phillip: Well I’m sure it does things differently to that mograph package. I think many of the things that are shown in the c4d video are possible with the array modifier though (barring things like audio visualisation etc)
I am not a professional, or even novice, 3D user, but I love Blender. I love messing with it, and seeing this demo I know that I’m going to be on this for a while. Thank you.
Excellent, This brings Blender to the world of special effects for motion graphic artists.
About a month or two ago C4D introduced simmilar tool, and now Blender will have the same. Difference is that this is opensource!! GR8
Two thumbs up.
reminds me of the gantz graf clip alex rutterford did for autechre, very cool.
sea: ooh, I love that video, I have the CD single/DVD here 🙂
Hey there, I was interested in looking at the blend file but the link no longer seems to be there. Is there another link floating around?
Hi Matt!
I was playing around with the blend file of the array demo and I don’t get where the halo around the cubes comes from, and where the background sphere gets its colors from.
Would be nice to get a short answer on that.
And congrats that you are a full dev now!
Oh wait I found it!
The Material nodes button was pressed instead of the composite nodes.
I think it is absolutely awesome in HD!! How did you create the clouds?