Let's join Mick rocking out in his cockpit:
Speaking of joining, The Gratuitous Lens Flare Club is now accepting applications:
Setting up another scaling perspective scene:
Working big again because Vero & Sig's ship has to start there in the foreground and fly off into the vanishing point. The rectangle slightly off-center around the vanishing point represents the border of what will be in the final animation (had to scale this way down so it would fit on the news page :).
I suppose there are all kinds of fancy ways to do perspective, I just use a stupid brute-force method involving the basic Windows calculator and a simple linear equation (aka banging on the "=" button repeatedly). For instance, here, the ship just butting into the lower-right corner of the frame is my start position, 100% scale. After some experimentation, I found that I want it to scale down to 1% of its starting size by the end of the shot, so it will just be a tiny dot in the vanishing point (if you look closely you might be able to make out the experimental 1% and 5% versions way back there).
Consulting my script, I see that this shot needs to last for...3 seconds. A* runs at 10 frames per second, so I need to find a scale factor which, multiplied against 100 29 times, gets me down to about 1. Banging away with some experimental multiples on the calculator (100 * x, then press = 29 times :P), I find that .855 gets pretty close (close enough for 2D rocket science!).
So, I'll copy my 100% ship layer 29 times, enter 100 * .855 in the calculator, and press "=" once for each of the 29 copy layers, scaling that layer by the result with Photoshop' 4's "Numeric Transform" function (looks like later Photoshops sort of broke that up into separate icky UI for each individual type of transform function, bleh!): frame 2 is scaled to 85.5%, frame 3 is scaled to 73.1%, etc.
Since this shot is straight single-point perspective, I won't have to nudge the scaled layers around, since the scaling operation will put them in a nice tidy line toward the vanishing point for me (I had to put little black dots at the corners of the image to get it to scale toward the canvas center—I'll have to remember to go in and delete those from each layer so they don't get in the way of stars or meteoroids). When I have to move something in perspective along a more complicated path/angle, like the escape capsule moving away from the ship in an arcing path like I showed yesterday, that can involve a lot of onion-skinning layers and trial and error animation tests until I get something that looks like smooth curving movement in perspective.
After the ship, I'll also have to scale the three separate layers of meteoroids, with their own scale factors appropriate to their speed/distance, and in reverse layer order since they'll be going the opposite direction (toward the camera). Composite the 120 scaled layers into 30 frames, add in some gas puffing out of the ship's ruptured reactor, and I'll be all done with another 3 seconds of episode 4!
... I think I won't have this many complicated scaling shots in another episode for a while. :p
~~~~
Whipped up a shorter version of the opening title sequence for episode 4: this speeds the animation up from 21 seconds to 6, so you won't have so long to wait to get into the episode; hopefully it's enough to establish the title and mood, but not so much that you get sick of it on repeat viewings. Sample:
https://smbhax.com/stuff/0004wip090604shortintro.swf
The blank time as the music winds up after the animation is where the "Episode X" captions and things will go.
~~~~
Also uploaded a couple high-res compositions starring the ever-lovin' Mick to deviantART.
|
