Well, I’ve got an animation that’s getting to about 4 minutes in length. As I’m making updates and changes to it, of course there are some scenes at the beginning that need to be a little bit longer.
Essentially, I made it all on one time line with one camera. But now that it’s late in the process, I’m having second thoughts as adding frames is pretty painful since I not only have to modify key frames in the main time line, but also in the IPO’s of Materials, and changing start and stop values for particles etc. Quite a tangled knot… I wish it were like Flash where you could just add a frame to the timeline.
So I was interested in how people organize their animations to make such adjustments easy. Do you make a new blend file for each scene, leave a gap between scenes to allow for expansion? I’d like to hear how others deal with it.
Great question. I just wrote (too much i think) about this very subject in the wiki under Video Sequences. I am involved in a shoot right now with two days of footage to keep straight, some animation thrown in there etc. Please read the diatribe I’ve drafted and let me know how it reads. thanks.
Now, more to your point:
An animation is a short movie. A movie is typically three acts, bunch of Scenes for each act, and Takes for each scene. Elephants Dream had 8 acts, about 20-30 scenes each act. They went thru many takes, but only published the best one. Each scene is a Scene in your Blend file. So, for any more stuff you want to add at this point, just create another scene. You can splice it in using the VSE so easily it’s almost ridiculous.
Next time, a script really helps (use Celtx.org) and a shooting script with some storyboards helps you layout the whole thing. Yes, leave room if you are animating two scenes within the same blender scene, with liberal room between them, like frames 1-2000 for scene 1, frames 3000-4000 scene 2. At 30 fps, you chew up the frames really fast.
Yes, of course I have a script, standard hollywood style so it runs about 1 page to the minute. I’ve done a lot of animation, but most if it for 30 second spots or less. Other longer bits were done in a rush so that I would animate a section and make a copy of the blend file to render on another computer as I worked on the animation. That made nice short lengths by default. This time I tried to be more elegant and organized… :spin: :spin: :spin: Whoops.
Well, at this stage in the production I decided just to make multiple copies of the blend file and expand the scenes that needed expanding in those copies only and just render out the affected frames.
Blender Scenes look interesting. I was unaware of them. I’ll use them next time.
I read part of your stuff on video sequencing. It’s been a while since I used the video sequencer, so I don’t have too many comments. But the Wiki was helpful.