With there being a few questions here recently about Baking Sound To F-curves, I thought I would have a go at doing a more-than-quick effort myself. So I took some things from my “Toy Train” WIP and stated to get busy with the Baking… :eyebrowlift:
I think I may have a little too much motion blur in this shot, I may lower it a little…
Here below you can see “Hector” just emerged from his engine shed and with con-rods whirring, sets off down the track. The track sleepers are now piano keys and are animated using BSTF (I can’t be a***d to keep writing it out in full). The green light things are also BSTFed for both their Y scale and emission values. The brick tunnels in the background has the track as a curve modifier to make it all bent like that. :spin:
I have done a quick screencast video as below:
The music I did some years ago, with a little help from a friend, using Fruity Loops, then updated it using LMMS on my Ubuntu Machine. The video dropped a few frames along the way, so the audio got out of sequence with the video, I am cooking a properly rendered extract at the moment and will share this with you once it is ready. :eyebrowlift:
There will be a lot more things that Hector will encounter on his journey, taken from other projects of mine, and maybe some new stuff, most of which will be BSTFed along the way.
I hope you like this kind of idiocy and should appreciate some feedback.
I don’t understand what you’re demonstrating. I see no relationship between the music and the animation. It just sounds like a music track playing while the animation runs.
Here’s the first 20 seconds rendered, not full HD yet, but you should get the idea. :eyebrowlift:
I am going to add more sound-driven objects to the route, using various techniques, so for example some will be driven by a specific frequency range, rather than the whole range as were the piano keys and green lights.
I also noticed an error on the track behind Hector in the image in post #1, this I have corrected now. :o It was caused by the track profile not being at 0,0,0 - I should listen to my own advice some times. :ba:
Cheers, Clock.
PS I have loaded CUDA onto my Ubuntu machine, still trying to persuade Blender to use my GPU rather than CPU to render. Oh well one day it will happen, this took 2 days to cook.
This is my first attempt at this so it may need some tuning, the idea is the rails are being manufactured at high temperature by the blue diamond shape, then cooling in front of the train as it travels around the track. This is why there is a blue glow around the diamond shape and red around the cooling tracks. Reality has to be suspended here as the cooling is almost instant otherwise poor Hector would melt!
The diamond shape is sound baked to the bass drum, so it will pulse as Hector travels around, this is the brightest it gets.
I have three glare filters set to Blur, Fog Glow and Streaks, with a gamma to control the output level. I have probably not done this exactly right, but it’s a start and has been a good learning experience, :yes:
I have played with the DOF of the camera to put more distant objects out of focus and added some motion blur to help the feeling of movement.
Hector is to disappear into the tunnel, the camera will turn around, so it is looking out of the tunnel from in front of Hector, at the end of the animation. Maybe at this point I will fade all the lights so it all goes dark, I am not sure yet how things will end. Next it is more added BSTF objects.
This is “Philip” the aeroplane, he just wonders around the sky being a pain in the a*** - his row of lights light up according to a baked sound in the higher frequencies, so the the BSTF value is 0 no lights are lit, when it is 1 all his lights are lit. In this picture just 5 out of the 17 are lit, this was not easy to do!!!
I have arranged his flight path so he is not in the camera too much, just enough to show him being a general nuisance.
Cheers, Clock.
PS. Waiting for my MSI GTX970, complete with new power supply and extra fans to improve render times…
Showing the two main toys and the track. I hope to be able to render the full animation starting back end of this week, I don’t know how long it will take with my new toy… :eyebrowlift:
This is a very nice project, Clock. And I love the choice of colors.
I think the environment textures are a stand in, so far? Isn’t Hector running a bit slow, compared to the pace of the sound? … just a feeling I have, when I look at the animation.
The terrain texture is just an approximate effort to get a good colour mix with the rest of the scene, but I have changed the UV map to the texture image as below:
I have scaled the UV’s to make the image much smaller relatively, this should look better I hope! I used the same sky as for my Maja project (Sky-Free add-on), but increased the cloud cover and put slightly less red into the sun.
As for the speed of Hector, I wanted a juxtaposition between him running at a believable speed so his con-rods didn’t go too fast and the other sound baked animations objects such as the piano keys, the trees, which “grow” and “shrink” in time with the beat, the lights on Philip and the ground and also some more objects I have yet to add. So it will be a combination of objects in time with the beat and Hector running at a more modest rate. Hopefully I will achieve a good result once it is finished, but I can always speed him up, although that means making the track longer so he travels further during the fixed time of the sound track, about 3 mins 40 seconds. Changing the track length will also involve moving the tunnels as one of these coincides with a change in the overall volume of the sound. Currently render times are about 7 minutes per frame on my Mac, hopefully they will be much faster once I have my server back with its new MSI GPU. :spin:
I am tinkering with some smoke from the chimney that pulses in time with the beat, but not really achieving a good result yet… I can see render times getting very high!
I remember seeing a smoke with particles tutorial by Jonathan Lampel some time ago. Maybe that could help to reduce render times and maybe it offers some sound baking options too …
But it’s not too good yet, I think I have to work on the particle settings, the other thing is that as the train is moving, it doesn’t come upwards from the top of the chimney - so many things to work at! Thanks for the advice and kind words, I followed the tutorial to the letter, but I must do some more work here.
I also noticed that when I render the frame rather than just preview it that the smoke disappears, not good and I don’t know why this is, should I bake it before rendering?
I am still looking at which variable in the particle system I should try to bake some sound to…
The two brass horns are baked to sound with a shapekey to expand the widest part of the horn, as though these are making the sound. These horns are also parented to the camera, which now either follows Hector or Philip using Child Of and Track To constraints whose influence is controlled by drivers linked to two empties so I can have the camera tracking Philip but targeted on Hector, for example.
i.e. it all gets FUBARed into a single globule of smoke, not a nice spread out cloud like it should be, here is the render, note the smoke has all gone to pot!
I am now confused, an easy state of mind for an old git like me to get into, can someone please enlighten me why this should be and what I should do to correct matters please.
Hi Clock, I can still see smoke in the last image. Is it a real smoke simulation? Or is it based on particles? If it is based on particles it could be the size of the particles or maybe also the material. Maybe too much transparency? Sorry if that sounds to silly …
