For those of you who have entered in the past, if you could post a brief description of how you render and compress your animations, I know several people who would really appreciate it. Also, please include your platform information and any versions of the software you use. I’ll assemble the responses into a “compression” tutorial that we can point people to when they run into trouble. At least one person has felt unable to enter these in the past because of this issue, so I’d like to help him out and anyone else who may be suffering from the same problem.
Also, if you ARE one of those people, let us know, too, and include your platform information, as well. We’ll see what we can do to help you out.
I’m not that hot at rendering, but I know of two very nice encoders.
For the last contest I used a neat little Mpeg-1 encoding program I found at the 10secondclub. There is a page with a link to it and a tutorial on how to use it here: TMPGenc
X-Vid is also a very nice encoder. It gives very small sizes with very nice image quality. (Right now the website isn’t working. I don’t know if that’s temporary or not. Here’s a seperate link: http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/)
I personally like the mpeg-1 encoder best since it plays in both Windows Media Player and Quicktime.
For rendering I just render it at 320X420, with OSA 11 and motion blur however I feel it works. For the last contest I actually had to run some simple filters on the frames to make them brighter.
I really would recommend using OSA 5/8/11/16 OR motion blur, but probably not both, though it’s worth experimenting on a frame or two just to see. If you use OSA and motion blur, you’ll be taking the number of samples (5,8,11,16) and repeating those as many times with the motion blur, for a total sample count of the OSA number squared (25,64,121,256). This can take a veeeeery long time with not too much of an improvement in quality. For me, motion blur usually works okay on its own, since the blurring takes out a lot of aliasing, but your mileage may vary, so do feel free to test out whatever combo works for you.
On Linux, I use a combination of mplayer and transcode with the xvid codec, and I do a double pass, like so in the command line:
For my own purposes, I like to render at NTSC 720x480, just in case I want to use the render on a DVD or whatnot, and then skrink to 320x240 with transcode, but rendering at 320x240 is fine for most people.
Animation is 48 seconds long, encoded in Xvid format. File is around 1.6MB. Audio is by me too (from an instrumental I recorded back in 2002 called “Pathos”).
This is a great topic, but I have some serious deficiencies in the NLA and Action editor arena. Time to go back and re-do all the basic tutorials I think.
At any rate, I considered this a good learning exercise, and will post what I have, though I admit its not anything near what I wanted.
Well this is my first attempt at animating a character.
I must agree with DracoFodder the NLA and action editor can be very confusing and its easy to get into a real mess.
I haven’t got any more time this weekend to polish the performance but I think the dance action is very realistic - OK he’s very stiff and wooden and slow and he’s got two left feet… but hey that’s how I dance!!!
Hello,
this is my attempt with animation so i know it is kinda crappy.
I used nozzy’s skinny guy model with is a great skined model but kinda hard to control.I know am not gonna win so ill try harder to make next one better. :D.Btw the file is in WMV and it is 1mb.
Enjoy!!!
I got it done in time and uploaded! Thanks to enriq for letting me use blenderprojects.com. Heh, this idea is completely different from what I had originally intended.
VirtualDub was used to merge audio and video.