Animation beginner help pls

[CA Portugal]

Hello,

We mostly do still images here so when an animation comes with objs moving and so on, we start to work out of our comfort area, which is good ofc but we surely need a bit of help hehe.

1. This must be a very common doubt for animation beginners. We have a fixed camera but a car is moving right in front of it. We surely don´t want to render 150frames of everything, so what do we do to just render the car + shadows as if the scene was still there? What are the object and render settings in this situation?

2. Is MadCar3 the best resource to animate a car? Any other cheaper?

3. A bit offtopic, anyone knows where we can find video clips of airplane in the sky (but in alpha - no sky around), and e.g. also alpha candle lights?

Thanks for the help!

[Neilg]

For the first one, to keep it simple you could just use a vray sphere fade - it only renders whats inside the sphere and gives an alpha for the rest. Not as efficient as proper render layers but a little more straightforward. just link it to the car, make it big enough to cover the shadow/reflections and switch over to BF/LC. very fire & forget.

For the car, I much prefer craft director studio - and the free edition contains the tools for a simple 4 wheeled car http://www.craftanimations.com/produ...irector-studio

I did a job recently with flickering candles - I filmed it with a 5d in a dark room and used the brightness as the alpha. You could probably even use an iphone for this, get it full in the frame and there's more than enough resolution. little curves adjustment, crop & made it loop in fusion and it worked great.

[CA Portugal]

Thanks so much Neilg!

Amazing tips! That vray sphere fade is rly spot on! Didnt knew about it!

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Here is another approach that you can use when rendering an animation with small moving objects.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYYrlxwB7Eg (after the 19min )