I've just completed my most successful bryce animation ever, and I just want to let you know, YES! It IS possible to create totally awesome animations in bryce! (that don't kinda suck!) organic motion can be really hard, but mechanical is fairly easy! Just wanted to keep up the spirits of the aspiring animators out there. (oh, if anyone wants to see the clip, PM me, and I can send it to you... or if you have webspace, so we could all see it...hehe. I'm such a moocher. BAD ian BAD! Don't mooch! Sit...stay!) Oh, I'm making this post when I'm really tired, so if it makes no sense to anyone, that's why. WHen I look back tomorrow, I'll probably want to delete it. (that's how these things go!) and think, why did I even make that post? I don't know really. Just want to feel like I'm a "Part of the COmmunity" or something like that I guess. CRAZY!

HA! Got to see this before you came to your senses and deleted it! Seriously though, it really is possible to create impressive animations in Bryce. I admire your Sci-fi concoctions Ian and would enjoy seeing your clip. I'm working on my most ambitious project to date, with multi-plane moving star backgrounds, fleets of starships and SFX which are a combo of Bryce and Particle Illusion SE. Do you use an external editing app to assemble your clips?

I'll host it for you, send me a PM. Bryce animation is fun once you get the hang of it. It's the renders that kill you. Also very powerful (albeit mysterious) is the bryce advanced motion lab window. That's were you can control acceleration, repeat motions, and delete only certain parts of a keyframed object.

all right chief, come out with the goods :P drac

Can't wait!

Yeah, I woke up this morning and read the post, and wanted to delete it, but I didn't! LETS ALL GIVE UP A HAND FOR MADMAX! (please excuse the all caps!) He is hosting the image temporarily! Thanks very much! (I hope that after all of that that this animation isn't anticlimatic.) http://www.renderring.com/movies/Bryceanimation.mov

Attached Link: Movie

Fantastic! Great ships and city. Love the motion blur and the rain! I won't ask you to spill your secrets, but I'd be awfully surprised if you did all of that in Bryce with no post.

Yes, to do that all in Bryce with no post would be mighty difficult (not impossible, but difficult). I rendered the building that the ships fly out of as one layer, then i rendered a mask, then I rendered the ships flying out, then I rendered the background city. I did that cause it makes life easier. I can control each object more, can add blur to the background but not the ships, and also because my computer couldn't hold any more than that (sad but true). All it could really take at once was either the background city, the building, or the ships. but still, all animation was done with bryce.

Editing software??? Extra fine work BTW!!

After Effects the best purchase I ever made. It's an awesome tool. I've even used it to composite some images in my gallery! It's a very good tool. Yup.

Too bad it's so short and no sound beyond the nifty little title sequence. It's understandable, considering the computer power needed to pull off a longer animation. However it seems like something was just starting and that's it. (One wants to see where the vehicles are heading to.) Also something about it calls for pod-racer like engine sounds... Other than it being so short, everything else about it was excellent (perhaps a bit dark, but that's a Mac/PC gamma thing.) The spaceship part looks like a sequence from a production movie or TV show. Also if you ever get a chance to make the animation longer, please post an update. Now if only you and Rochr could bring all of your talents together on a serious render farm...

Well, this was the last clip in a two minute effects/heavy sequence of these ships leaving the building, in a one hour movie. Though this is one of the most dynamic of the clips, there are many others which are equally as awesome. Including quite a bit of which is composited onto live action plates, and people greenscreened in. I would have posted the whole thing, but I didn't want to take advantage of MadMax's generosity.

Mrdodobird Thanks for the info, RE: AE. I've had it and several others in my arsenal for 6 mo.s and have not had time to become very proficient in its use. My animation work is not is the same ballpark as yours. But getting better! Do you do this commercially? A one hour work is an Awesome undertaking. Did you collaborate on it or did you do it alone? Don't mean to be nosey :) Just Very interested. High Regards Mike

Yes, thank you Mrdodobird for sharing your great animation and some of the technical info. Wow, a one hour video project must have been quite an undertaking! Either you have unlimited time, or one hell of a render farm! Granted you had some live-action also, but still! I hope you are able to locate a host for your full-length video. I would dearly love to see how you incorporated such a shot in the context of your story-line. I'm certainly a piker compared to you. The longest project I've ever done was Three and a half minutes for a music video. Cheers, Daniel

I'd also like to see the whole schmeel if you can find a suitable web host. Especially if it's at the same level as the one sequence. You sorta whet the "appetite" for more as it is. LOL!

Hehe. Yes, this will be my fourth hour-long movie to try to complete. Each one is getting better! (that's the way it should be). Navigating around the highschool schedule is kinda hard, but it's going well. I kinda was silly though, and put WAY to many people into the shot. I'll tell you what. I'll compress the scene as small as I can make it will reasonable quality, and see how that would go with MADMAX, but I don't want to have him feel obligated. (but I think I can make it pretty small.) Yes, most of the movie is live action, (although a surprising number of shots have invisible effects. In one shot of the sequence the clip I posted is from, the dude looked right at the camera for half of the shot, so I just took his eye from a frame where he wasn't looking at the camera, and tracked it in.) But I must make some calls reguarding a shoot tomorrow, so I must go (already 3 after 9!)