Keep 3DLuVr online!
3DLuVr Logo
Sections
Articles
 From the Real World
 Digital Painting Series
 Featuring of...
 On the Bookshelf
Tutorials
 3ds max
 LightWave3D
 Softimage XSI
 Rhinoceros 3D
 Video Tutorials
FunZone menu
 I always wanted to be
 Talk to an employer
 Why Ask "Why"
TechZone menu
 Hardware Reviews
 Software Reviews
 Benchmarking
 Q&A, Tips & Tricks
UserZone menu
 The Artist Sites
 15 Min of Fame
 Request an Account
 Current Assignment
 Sponsors & Prizes
 Make a Submission
 Voting Booth
 Competition Rules
About menu
 Mission Statement
 Policies
 Advertising
 Comments
 Poll Archive
 Links
 How to IRC
 Donations
Login
Log in to be able to post comments to the news items, forum posts, and other facilities.
Username: 
 
Password: 
Not registered? Register!     Lost Password?
Poll
 Your New Year`s Resolution is...
Gain employment
Stop smoking/drinking/etc
Get back in shape
Find the meaning of life
Conquer the World
Absolutely nothing

    Poll Results
Comments
Want to leave us a comment about the site or in general? Click here to access the form.
ArtZone Heading
Compositing: Giving Depth to Stock Footage
Added on: Sun Aug 27 2000
Page: 2 3 

Lets say you wanted to make an explosion, blowing an object up and making debris fly at the screen, of course rather than using CG fire which a lot of the time looks, well... CG. You might want to use stock footage, video footage of fire which you can overlay into your 3D scene making the explosion look a lot more realistic.

Of course the first problem of doing this is the fact that the footage is 2D!
It's a flat image, rather than being 3D and having depth, so throwing it into your scene will look cool, but if you want it to interact with the geometry and have debris fly through it it's going to be quite difficult, because it's either behind the explosion or in front, it won't be inbetween since it's just a flat 2D sprite, so that's going to look quite fake.

So that's what this tutorial will cover, how to make debris and objects shoot out of an explosion and actually look like they shoot out, and also look cool and easy to set up. After this tutorial I might get onto writing a really neat technique for doing the same
thing, but at a more advanced level. Check out this video clip here, explosion.avi, which is just a test using this technique, but gives you an idea of what you can do.
Anyway the other technique uses a plugin from Cebas called Real Lense Flare although whereas the technique in this tutorial just uses max 3's standard tools.

To start off we're using this standard 3dsmax scene which I've created for you just for the sake of focusing more on what this tutorial is meant to cover.

Load up depth.max after you download it here: depth.zip.

This file is rather simple, a house which explodes, what we want to do is set up the depth of it, so that we can create a lumience map for the debris so that it controls when the debris is visible and when it's behind the firey explosion.


This is a pretty simple process but go to the effects panel and click on file output. A pop up screen similiar to the one below should apear.

Go down the parameters and adjust the channel to depth(greyscale) and if effect source bitmap isn't selected enable it, and deactivate the fit entire scene button so that you can adjust the parameters, click on the none button and select camera 1.

Now adjust the near Z value to -7.381 and far Z to -337.921. Click on the interactive button to see what this does, essentially what it does is create a 256 grey frame based on the depth of the objects to the camera and the values control what is and isn't visible from the distance of the camera so you can tell the debris that is within a certain distance to be visible and the rest not to be, and use this as a lumience map.



 
� 1997-2024 3DLuVrTM (Three Dee Lover)
Best viewed in 1024x768 or higher,
using any modern CSS compliant browser.