Attached Link: "Boarding Party" by SoulTaker

http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=919747

...as a base. Any suggestions will be more than welcome, we all struggle with this FX stuff. The FX here are a bit heavy-handed, for clarity, but once you have practiced a bit, it's easy to make things smaller (or bigger, as the case and need may be). The point is that these FX call for no experience at drawing or painting. Such skills certainly come in handy, but there's a lot of artists out there who do superb images without'em ;o)

I'm on board for this...have an animation that needs some dust kicking up from the fall of a heavy object. Buuuttttttt....this seems to be a 'postwork' tutorial, no? I can't find the paint can in poser. Cool scene! ::::: Opera :::::

Definitely postwork - it's Paint Shop Pro, BTW. Might work for animation if you "faded in" and "faded out" a muzzle flash over, say, 10 images, but I am definitely no expert at anim FX ;o)

OOh...this is great stuff. If I ever get some time to do postworking, I'd find this really handy. Thanks!

"I'm on board for this...have an animation that needs some dust kicking up from the fall of a heavy object." Look into Particle Illusion. It's a great "affordable" particle simulator that can do muzzle flashes and the dust that you want to have in your animations. Yes, it is a seperate app to poser, and you'd be doing it in post, but it's a very easy app to learn. The results can be quite visually pleasing as well.

Ouch... $400 Just for particles. Ah well it produces good results If you don't have any compositing software Opera I would once again suggest Bahuhaus software's Mirage. It does particles, Paint, compositing, 2d animation, any any number of other post effects. It costs Twice as much as particle illusion though, but is worth every penny if you are really serious about animation.

thanks thip, this is just what i have been looking for. i must say it is very good of you

Berserga, I have still not pulled the trigger on my compositing software. But the time is approaching. Will definitely look into your suggestion (which is in my budget range) and thank you. Is Mirage powerful for ripping out to DVD formats? One reason I have been holding back: might move out of Poser into 3DSMax or Maya or ? and would that cover me for compositing....probably not, but might drive choice of compositing software. Also, since I have another 'channel' in situ, namely a major Mac G5 with lottsa RAM and HD, plus Logic (major music 'compositing' software) and a good friend/mentor on Mac/FinalCutPro/After Effects, that may influence my choice. ::::: Opera :::::

Compositing software should have no influence on your 3d app, since in a compositor you are dealing with already rendered material. (Though Mirage does have good integration with Lightwave (Including a 3d paint plugin) Not sure what you mean about "Ripping out to DVD" Mirage is perfectly capable of producing content for DVDs (Indie animator Terrence walker has put out 2 DVDs with the progenetor software of Mirage which was sold by Newtek under the name Aura) If you mean MPEG 2 compression, I HIGHLY reccomend you get a dedicated encoder. I use TMPGEnc.

Attached Link: Movie FX

"Compositing software should have no influence on your 3d app"

I disagree (sort of). A 3D app with powerful and extensive G-Buffer output capability is far more beneficial to video editing, especially for compositing. Poser has very little in the way of render passes. P6 offers a "shadow only" pass, which is a step forward, but for compositing, I like to have diffuse, specular, shadows, key lights, Z-depth, alpha, velocity (for simulated motion blur), and ambient all in seperate render passes...

In a decent 3D app, you only really need to do a single pass, and it can seperate all those channels for you automatically. In Poser, you'd have to render multiple times, and change the scene specs for each one. That's some major wasted time there. Plus, you don't really have a good way to get half of the channels you may need or want. Opera, only XSI (that I know of) has an integrated post-compositing suite built into the app. The rest can output to various formats with G-Buffer data seperated, which is GREAT for putting them all together in a good video editor, but they don't have native post processing composite addons, if that's what you're asking. Message edited on: 04/27/2005 15:52

Yes, I asked it in a clumsy newbie way! Ripping indeed!

Attached Link: Odd Ditty Foundry

Ah yes you are right of course, about the G-buffer stuff. It's not something I think about much though since I'm pretty much stuck with lower end 3d apps, and Things like depth of field can already be faked pretty easy in mirage by simply animation gaussian blur to different degrees on different layers.

Ooo, too cool. Any chance you might clue us in on doing word ballons that don't have that tacked on as an after thought look?

Attached Link: Comics page setup tute

Opera; A couple of things glossed over about Particle Illusion: 1) If you have a .avi of your intended video, you can input it as the background and adjust your effects on a frame by frame basis, then output the two as a composite. 2) PI also supports multi-channel output (alpha, Zdepth, etc), for use in the better compositers. 3) There are several libraries of effects for free download from the PI site, and you can learn a lot by examining them and tweaking the values. 4) The demo =DOES NOT= do the actual program justice. The library included is more toy effects than anything, much of the actual capability of the program is locked or disabled (no adjustment of the emitters, for example).

You just can't keep a good pak down ;o) I use both the paks you describe. When placed in separate layers and combined with a bit of one's own airbrushing and blurring, etc. , there's next to nothing that can't be done. And I'm no on the "Pyrotechnica" creator's payroll, either ;o)

thanks Dale