NIN music video with 100% vray

[throb]

how did you animate the pins moving in and out? Was it a script, perhaps a position constraint linked to an animated greyscale image or something?

Very impressive stuff. Seriously.

those pins are done with a 128x96 (i could be wrong on the res) image sequence/avi that was converted via a maxscript to each pin.
so yeah, each pin is it's own piece of geo that was moving where the keyframes were driven by an avi.

[DaForce]

Can you give any more details on the maxscript?

[room217]

Excellent! Thats how I thought yall went about it.

So does the script write a keyframe per pin per frame or did you use some keyframe reduction?

And can you show some frames of the input video please?

I wrote a 3d studio dos script extent that keyframed lights from an image sequence (think las vegas lights). It would create so many keyframes it would bog 3ds down.

Great work throb!!

-randy

[Da_elf]

isnt there the pin script on scriptspot.com ? i used it ages ago with vray back in the beta testing days

[Syclone1]

isnt there the pin script on scriptspot.com ? i used it ages ago with vray back in the beta testing days

I thought that Richard Rosenman did that a while back?

-dave

[KVMaster]

Duration?

Great STUFF!

So how long did it take?
How many guys working on it?

[Jason Jacobs]

Absolutely stunning. I may get reamed for this, but this was the first time I'd heard NIN....but I liked the sound. I think the camera moves are absolutely brilliant and realistic. The subtle imperfections and shakes in movement make the scale seem true-to-life. Thanks for sharing.

[Greg3D]

isnt there the pin script on scriptspot.com ? i used it ages ago with vray back in the beta testing days

The guys at D2 wrote their own script. The one on scriptspot uses a linear grid array for the pins. The actual pin toy has the holes in a "honeycomb" pattern.

Throb from Sway should be able to enlighten more since he actually worked on it while at D2.

[richard_rosenman]

You can do it in Max without any scripts:

http://www.richardrosenman.com/movies/pins.mov

-Richard

P.S. Really nice job! Love NIN.

[DaForce]

Are those pins moving or just stretching Richard? or abit of both?
And is it possible to make something like yours have have something more than just a rendered spline for the pins... i.e. a proper modelled pin which will move and not stretch?

[RErender]

$'foo'.z = getPixels "...\\thisframe.png" [x, y] 1

[DaForce]

nice, but means very little me. I mean i can pretty much understand how it works and what it means but how do i put it into use?
(maxscript experience = zero)

[RErender]

Well yeah, that's not quite enough to make it happen

Basically you'd have to grab each progressive frame of the "bump map" with a "for" loop counting through the frames. Then figure out where each pin hits what pixels on the image, maybe one pixel would do or perhaps an average of a block of pixels, and read that value for each pin (the "getPixels" and [x,y]) and probably put them in an array. Then you'd have to transpose the pixel values (0-255) to transform the pins as desired. I think it would best to bake these values into the pins' animation keys so you don't have to mess with callbacks and such.

I'd love to see what images they used to drive the animation and how they derived them. Perhaps they didn't use images at all and got the info from mocap or something, hmm...

[DaForce]

sounds like alot of work.
But would produce some great results.

I too would love more info on their pinscreen

[richard_rosenman]

Hey DaFroce;

Those pins are not stretching but moving as they should. Here's a bit of a write-up on it:

http://www.richardrosenman.com/misc.htm

Basically, I am displacing spline verts based on image luminance using the displace (?) spacewarp. The splines are 'renderable splines', in this case rectangles. Because they are splines, anything can be attached to them using a Linked X-Form modifier so you can create any object and attach it to them. I did this about a year ago (I think) so my memory's a little foggy on the procedure. But it's not too complicated. My original matrix rez was much higher - around 400x300 but then you couldn't really tell that they were pins, and they looked like displaced geometry.

-Richard