I have been comishionned to make some work lately (renders of future crockery items), and the only things i was able to produce were still images.
Of course I could have made some movies (turntable style), but i thought that some kind of little standalone program where one could move the mouse and circle around the model would be much better !
So here comes the question !
Do you know a way to do that ? Like calculate 50 renders and turn them into a little standalone app that would cycle through the renders depending on the mouse ?
I have some javascript background, and some python knowledge, but C, Flash/actionscript etc. I don’t know…
you could just have a web page that way you could ahve a main page that lists all of hte possible items, and then when clicking on an item a page oculd be displayed that basically uses a script to cycle forwards/ backwards through a series of jpg images that show the product, this would give the effect of a turntable animation, and it would be easy to replicate as you would just need to have a separate folder for each image sequence.
Last week I put together a murgaLua script that does this very thing…loads a directory of renders (png/jpg/gif/bmp) and allows you to shuffle through them by dragging the mouse back and forth. It’s not trememdously impressive, but it works.
I’m not sure how interested you’d be in MurgaLua, considering it’s a very niche program, but the script is here in case you want to try it: http://www.murga-projects.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=410
The murgaLua interpreter is available in the first thread on that forum.
@Daniel8488: yes, that is something i could do myself. @Freemind: yes, just jpegs, I guess it is the cheapest way to do it ! @mikshaw: could be interesting, but i don’t want to register into yet another forum just for that, sorry ! @Harley: I guess this is more or less similar to what mikshaw proposes: I am having a look at it right now to see how it is constructed: it seems to be spot on ! @FishB8: interesting, but not quite as adapted as Harley’s solution.
@Harley: Thanks for that link. That’s a really great find.
I don’t know how to get it working in 2.57, but works fine in 2.49. All I’ve done so far is swap out the cube in the example scene with a new object and render, but it looks like there’s a lot of room for experimentation. It’s very similar to what I was working on with murgaLua, but definitely far better…much more flexible and readily accessible to many more people.
I couldn’t figure out how to update the 3DNP scripts to the new Blender/Python, and my attempts to make a camera path to follow the CameraBoss turned out as failure, so I made a Blender 2.5 file that includes a camera keyframe for each of the 252 frames. It’s not an ideal solution, but the resulting renders are identical to those created in the 2.4 version.
One other issue: you have to manually adjust the number of frames rendered, rather than letting a script do it. Basically it just means having to remember that there are 7 levels of 36 frames each, and that the floor is on level 4.
3DNP is great… I have a somewhat customised version at my Entoforms project website (bit more basic and using jquery). I could share the script if anyone’s interested: http://www.entoforms.com/0039-0561/
By the way… you don’t need to use a python script inside blender to generate a simple turntable, just set up a camera to rotate around your model nicely… .then animate…
The difference being that would create rotation on only one axis. The Blender file included with 3DNP creates seven camera levels, which simulate multiple axis rotation. I’m sure there must be several ways to create the rotation, but I wanted to stay with a method that will create the same angles and number of frames as the original.
