Attached Link: Movie (38 kb) requires the Divex codec 5.02 or later

Well, I decided to practice animation on a SINGLE metaball before I tackled multiple thousand. and to be quite honest.. I don't think I will be able to do it in bryce anyway... This animation is 5.5 seconds long, at 320 by 240 and 38 kb in size (I don't know HOW I got it this small and still retained decent quality so don't ask lol...) I used the divex codec 5.02 but anything above that will be able to view it. On the corners you will notice that it still appears to be using radiosity =P I used a stone age style of shadow baking... By painting UV textures for the cubes, and using "blur brush" with darkening for the edges and an airbrush with noise applied and a black coloration. Perhaps I'll do a tutorial on this some time... Anyway, I don't think this animation was worth it.. for 5 seconds of anim it took me 5 hours... It was my first serious (object based) animation attempt in bryce. I may upload this scene to the free stuff once I finalize it. EFFECTS MINI-TUTORIAL: You may at first be impressed by the simulation of the ball squishing down and deforming when it strikes various objects. However. It was actually very simple. I just placed an elongated negative metaball on the edge of the first block, then a flattened/ enlarged negative metaball on the inside sides of the two outer cubes, one ontop of the center cube, and one under the floor where it finally lands. The result is fairly impressive considering how easy it was to set up. Time Distribution: -Setting up the objects, [1 minute] -doing the shadow baking in photoshop/applying to objects [10 minutes] -setting up the spline path for the ball, [1 hour] -Playing with the curves in the Advanced motion lab to get the correct downward acceleration for gravity and simulate directional acceleration of a rubber ball squishing when it hit various objects.... (not counting the 30 minutes I spent banging my head against the wall trying to figure out HOW to do this....) [3 hours...] -Rendering time [2 hours 45 minutes (170 frames)] -post processing in after effects/photoshop through batch editing to take out unwanted color pallets / apply a little gaussian blur. [15 minutes] -loading the bitmap sequence/encoding in adobe premier [5 minutes] -Finishing your first complex bryce animation and finding out that the resulting file is only 38 kb! [Timeless]

Attached Link: Divx Codec 5.05

If you need the Divx Codec, it can be found here.

Attached Link: http://www.3ivx.com/download/index.html

Quite impressive! Just so you know, the codec you're using is newer than the one bundled with my OS, so here's the link for anyone who needs to update theirs.

Crosspost. Either should work.

Here is a freeze frame at high quality with true ambiance of the part where it bounces off the corner.

It actually lacks a lot of realism because the ball doesn't spin at any point, but still, you can't tell with this material so your mind assumes that it is. Shhhh... Nobody has to know.

wow---you are really pushing bryce to new levels! love the animation, espacially that first bounce. excellent work.

Not worth 5 hours though.. For 5 seconds of movie... But, now that I have learned so much about the motion lab, and how to get the most realistic acceleration, it should be a LOT faster. As most of this Advanced motion editor play was trying to figure it out, since I've never really used it before. If anyone has any suggestions for a similar movie, perhaps more complex motion they'd like to see, I want a challenge.

Very cool! I have never really got the Motion editor myself.

great job getting a realistic bounce! it's too bad Bryce doesn't allow for seperate x/y/z acceleration and velocity vectors. it would make that so much easier. (I guess you could do it with paths...)

I was reading on pixar's site today that in Toy story each frame took 6 hours to render, some taking as much as ninety hours...and that's on the pixar network rendering system!!!!

Yeah, well, cloth dynamics, hair dynamics, all premium effects, massive resolution and size... I'm not surprised.

Hepcatbrandon: Yeah, the only way I found how was using paths along with so much tweaking in the advanced motion lab. I really did have a headache by the time i was done.