animations

We’ve been to New Zealand recently to soak up the beautiful, natural landscape. The lure was the airshow—Wings over Wanaka—but we spent time travelling from Auckland down through the North and South islands. Highlights of the trip included the Huka Falls near Lake Taupo and the seal colony at Ohau.

We tested out Chris’s new camera, but still have a long way to go to understand how to use it to take great landscape shots. I am keen to use high res shots in video work— I have been experimenting with layering and animating a combination of photos (from Huka Falls and our fish pond), plus digitally manipulated photos, plus painted images (also digitally manipulated).

Screen shot from Adobe Premiere Pro project

I’m not yet happy with the result and it’s a painstaking process to layer and manipulate in Adobe Premiere Pro. But I’m getting closer to working out how many images per second to use and how to manipulate opacity and motion to get the effects I want. The Premiere project screen shot (at left) shows how many images I’ve used in approx. 1 second’s worth of footage—and that’s still not enough to get really effective depth and movement!

Feral koi in Huka Falls

The second screen shot (at left) is from the video project and shows our Ogon Koi swimming in the Huka Waters—of course, Koi are considered noxious and a threat to other species in NZ!

It’s an interesting challenge to try to recreate the movement of the koi through water using only still images.

I’ve been a bit quiet on the blog lately—getting stuck into lots of different projects—but will soon be ready to share some of the results of those!

My first foray into using Poser, which is an application with 3D models and character creation tools to create and render 3D graphics and animations. The manual is 800+ pages so I am ignoring that and jumping in to play. Luckily there is a scarab beetle in the library so I will use this library model to explore how to change materials, lighting, camera angles and to key frame to create movement. Some of the language of the app is familiar to other programs I have used (Danceforms, and a brief brush with 3D Studio Max).

There is significant complexity/capacity in the editing tools that deal with colour, texture and lighting. You can import textures and/or manipulate diffuse colour, highlights, ambient light and reflection. And you have to choose from individual body parts when making these manipulations.

So, without knowing what I was doing I have changed colours, textures and highlights on the library model. Next I plan to make changes because I know what I’m doing. Also want to change the shape.

No idea yet how I create my own models.

I can see that this is going to be a challenge!