Very short chase animation

Hello all,

this evening I felt like putting something together with Softimage XSI. I created two little space ships based off the blueprints that come with the old Wing Commander game box (Hornet & Dralthi) and had them chase each other along a chasm. I need to learn how to use the camera better, and I may go back and improve on this at some point.

Anyway here it is:


http://home.people.net.au/~Matthew.Lloyd/lloyd/Stuff/ChasmMovie.wmv


EDIT - Thanks Gabriel for showing me how to put this link in so that it is clickable.

http://home.people.net.au/%7eMatthew.Lloyd/lloyd/Stuff/ChasmMovie.wmv




you may have to copy and paste the link as the blitzbasic forum does not seem to like "~" characters in urls.

Or Click here And Hopefully This Works!
EDIT - no it does not like that either....

(800 kb file - Windows Movie Maker really lower the picture quality when going from a 110MB file to an 800kb file but to be expected...)

Some of the sharp turns are a bit unnatural, but I figure you knew that already.

Regardless, it's neat. How long did it take to render?

About 1hr to render 500 frames at 320x240.

If you URL encode your URL, the forum should let you link to it. Try :

http://home.people.net.au/%7eMatthew.Lloyd/lloyd/Stuff/ChasmMovie.wmv

Try slowing the whole thing down... If you watch movies where there are chase scenes like this, jerky movements and extremely fast camera travel speed aren't the way they try and pull off a convincing chase.

Motion blur helps a lot to get the speed effect. Some of the camera movements that you do are great, just slow it all down.

Other than that fantastic.

I would agree about toning down the camera movement, but I like the movement of the vehicles themselves. For the spaceship certainly, the fact that it is moving in a manner that no earthly vehicle can makes it look cool and alien.

My favorite camera moves are near the end; note that it is slow panning. If you pay attention to the camera moves in movies, you'll note that it rarely moves (only in very specific situations for specific shots.) Most of the time the camera is actually still and the view travels across the scene via several shots edited together with simple cuts.

Thanks for the tips. I might go and read up a little on movie camera stuff should be done. I think I find this more enjoyable to do than writing games.