more 3d!
 

This is a 3d animation i did to show someone how to animate...
ENJOY!

http://p357.web1000.com/tube.avi <--right click, save target as...

(at the end, the sphere is suposed to come crashing into the screen but the speed is too fast... i'll fix it and repost once i'm done)

Very nice! :D

It's 3D Studio Max right? I'ver never tried the program before so I was wondering; is it difficult to master? And what about the graphic details, is it limitless or?

yep... that 3dsmax.
depends what you want to do... that took me about 20min to do. but doing a high poly mesh could take 1hour to 1 month.

I'm not a Max user, I'm a Maya monkey, but why does a higher poly mesh take so much longer?

In Maya I would have drawn a curve defining the path of the tube, then extruded a circular curve over that path. Then depending on the situation, I could either start with a high tessellation or use a smooth proxy for tweaking the tube.

For what you did with the animation I probably would have used the original curve used to extrude the cube and attach the camera to that.

Or are you talking about render times?

i was talking about general stuff(not just this animation)... and the render of this animation took my computer 12hours to do,,, and i have a good computer.

How many frames? What resolution? Did you use the Max render engine or a third party package? What are the specs on your comp (CPU/RAM)?

I'm curious just to see how the different softwares compare in rendering.

My last animation was about 1000 frames, rendered in two layers (so 2000 frames total). The bottom scene was about 40000 polys, with 4 lights, minimal raytracing, and production quality anti-aliasing. The second layer was a 125000 dense fur map with the same rendering quality and lights as the first layer.

Total render time on a dual 2.8Ghz P4 Xeon machine with 2GB RAM was about 55 hours.

With the high amount of reflections on those metallic surfaces I'd imagine that really upped your render times.

Sorry about all the questions, hope I'm not being a pest :)

Yes please.. I'd like to see some stats too :D

Very awesome...:)

Good lord, I knew it took a while to render 3D like that, but I didnt know it took that long... Now I know why it took so much to render the scenes in LOTR--it apparently took 48 hours to render one frame of the treebeard sequences, and that is running on WETA's ginormous render farm :eek:

Heh, they had to add another 1000 processors to meet the deadline!

animation:
========
400 frames
640x480
i used 3dstudiomax5's renderer at max capacity, production and all... then i compressed it with divx5 so that i could post.
the textures are raytrace reflection to max and transparency to 60% on the tube.

i have a:
=======
512mb ram.
1800xp athlon cpu.
radeon 7500 video card.
120gb 20gb HD.
fortissimo 2 sound card.
400w powersuply.

i started at 920pm and by about 720, it was at frames 280.
so i guessed it took about 12-15hours to complete.

i'll repost a more complete version with sounds and more scenes.
any more questions?