Does anyone remember how in Tarzan, Tarzan surfed in and out of trees in a Computer generated environment? Or how in Treasure Planet, Jimmy Hawkins climbed the mass of a 3D ship?
I’m trying to create a similar effect by bringing Traditionally animated characters into a Blender environment.
What I need to accomplish are two things:
add the 2D animation on a plane as an alpha texture (which I’ve already done) and succeed in making the white “clear” while at the same time maintaining the orignal colors of the characters (which I haven’t been able to do.
I know this first step involves clicking the "mul" (multiply) button and sliding the "Col" and "Var" buttons. But I never end up with the proper combination.
Somehow rig the plane in relationship to the camera so that the plane is always parrallel to the camera at any camera angle or camera move.
This one...I haven't the slightest clue. Any ideas would help.
That’s easy enough: just make your plane track the camera. You might need to adjust it’s tracking coordinate in the animation settings, but other than that you shouldn’t get into any problems.
to get the character to appear, have the character on a white background. Apply the texture to your plane, and in the material window, click on the alpha button (once or twice, you’ll be able to tell which is right easily) and click on the mul button below. It should make the white area’s transparent.
I’ve made my character with a white background and clicked alpha twice and clicked mul and the white becomes transparent. The problem is that the colors are all distorted. And I’ve slided the Col and Var slides and I can’t find a balance between the proper color and opacity.
You can make an animated sequence with tga files, in photoshop create the alpha map that you need and save it as 32 bit targa (with alpha map), that way, when using alpha in Blender you don´t have to mess with any more parameters.
Marf, I forgot to mention that I’m a newbie. Your solution makes perfect sense because I messed around once and got that same effect but, of course, I forgot how I did it.