My WOTW project

[Wyrmshadow]

I haven't posted anything in a long while on this forum because real life has gotten in the way like an angry dog defending his territory. It has not been 'fun' lately.
Anyways... 10 years ago I made this primative video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRsRa45l84
I just hope those outside of the USA are not blocked from hearing the audio.

Well now.. with the same program but 10 years of experience, I am redoing it.
Here's a taste of what I have done in the past week. I've already discarded the music for something else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRt0mrNgpiw

Due to the audio clip of Richard Burton's monologue from JW's WOTW.... the audio is blocked in some countries, like Germany. Sorry if you miss out 

[puddingwrestler]

Graphics look good, but as a WOTW fan and media teacher, I have to offer some advice.
When you pan left from Earth to Mars, you really need something more visible in the background. At present, it literally looks like some one has dragged Earth to the right, thrown the sun across the screen, and then pushed Mars on. It looks like the objects move, not the camera. It's that or make the pan faster, but as we all know, space is big and slow pans look better in space. Usually (when using Lightwave) I'd place a really big rectangle in the background and apply a star field texture to that, but I never made a 180 degree pan, so you probably want the inside of a hollowed cylinder with the texture on it.
Also towards the end, you have Martian warmachine moving to the right of the screen with camera tracking, next shot the camera is tracking left. The jump is very noticable, made me jerk backwards in shock, and made it look like the cameraman was drunk. An interesting achievment for CGI

What software are you using?
Did you make the models or download?
Will the heat rays destroy office buildings this time round? (In the first clip I wondered why everyone didn't just hide inside office buildings until th Martian's got fed up and left since they seemed impervious to destruction)

[Wyrmshadow]

My first question for you is: Can you hear the audio? For either video? It's very important because I know in Germany it's censored, don't know about Australia(is that right?.)
It's important because I'm using Richard Burton's opening monolouge from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds and the first part of the videos follow his narration. When he says "across the gulf of space" is when I pan the camera and "slowly and surely drew their plans against us" is when I have that alien viewing the globe. And THAT is why the audio is blocked in some places, because of that audio.

Graphics look good, but as a WOTW fan and media teacher, I have to offer some advice.
When you pan left from Earth to Mars, you really need something more visible in the background. At present, it literally looks like some one has dragged Earth to the right, thrown the sun across the screen, and then pushed Mars on. It looks like the objects move, not the camera. It's that or make the pan faster, but as we all know, space is big and slow pans look better in space. Usually (when using Lightwave) I'd place a really big rectangle in the background and apply a star field texture to that, but I never made a 180 degree pan, so you probably want the inside of a hollowed cylinder with the texture on it.

Youtube video compression takes out some of the stars, but I assure you, they are there. When the camera pans from the earth-sun-mars, it blurs them out. Camera movements and controls are very dicey in Bryce and sometimes difficult to work with. If you want to see how hard it is, look at my Jovian Moons video where I had a devil of a time focusing on the 4 moons as I zipped past them. I could not LOCK on to them each individually in turn because it just doesnt work that way, also too long to explain.

Also towards the end, you have Martian warmachine moving to the right of the screen with camera tracking, next shot the camera is tracking left. The jump is very noticable, made me jerk backwards in shock, and made it look like the cameraman was drunk. An interesting achievment for CGI

Again, dicey camera controls. I was trying to show an observer in a forrested area watching these things walk, and then suddenly get surprised by a very close foot of the nearest war machine, then look up at it and step back a bit in horror as the heat ray starts up. It's a very short clip because orginally I started with just 1 tripod and trying to make the thing walk

That took about 3 hours of trial and error because Bryce doesn't have anything like Bones... it's all up to me to be the puppet master for every frame. So I had to take 50 frames and make them into something longer, that's why the tripods are moving so slowly.

What software are you using?

I am using Bryce5 to animate everything then Premier4 to do the video production.

Did you make the models or download?

Only the tripod I did not make myself. I'm not that great at making something from scratch (especially SMOOTH things like living beings!!) I use Cinema4D to model.

Will the heat rays destroy office buildings this time round? (In the first clip I wondered why everyone didn't just hide inside office buildings until th Martian's got fed up and left since they seemed impervious to destruction)

I made that 10 years ago when my program and my skills were not that great. Infact, on my Pentium 166mhz that one scene took 36 hours to render.  But now on my 3.4 ghz quad core it took the same amount of time to do the Alien viewing the globe because I decided to have volumetric lighting and a dusty atmosphere. It's hard to tell with the youtube compression. I'll make something more detailed this time around, but no poeple! I just can't animate any number of poeple (like crowds!!) with the LIMITED tools that I have.
And please don't tell me to upgrade to another program, that is an impossibility at this time for a host of reasons.

But I do appreciate the informed statements you wrote for me. Thank you.

[puddingwrestler]

Audio came through fine for me on both. If it didn't, I've got the whole thing in Mp3 on my laptop anyway, so I'd just play it while I watched 

Interesting that you mostly animate and don;t model, I'm the exact opposite...

[Wyrmshadow]

Audio came through fine for me on both. If it didn't, I've got the whole thing in Mp3 on my laptop anyway, so I'd just play it while I watched 

Interesting that you mostly animate and don;t model, I'm the exact opposite...

Oh, I can kitbash the hell out of any number of models I already have, but it's really a struggle to make something from nothing. I haven't the proper training or tools.

[puddingwrestler]

You think I have? I taught myself lightwave over a period of about six years. The onyl formal training I had was a single semester of ultra basic Lightwave animation stuff at uni as part of the Bachelor of Contemporary Arts (Screen Studies). As a result, I can make some bitching stuff from primitive shapes, but I have NO idea how to texture effectively.
Regarde:

OKay, the lighting and so forth is cool, the textures are all basic built in LW stuff (ocassionaly with an image map thrown over the top) and the poses are nice. But there is no way I can animate this, I have no idea how to rig them for animation.

Same goes for these really. Although it'd be easier to animate as they have less moving parts.

[Wyrmshadow]

Atleast you CAN rig it.
The only school training I've had was for AutoCad2000 when I was studing to be an engineer and I hated it. Autocad was designed for engineers, not artists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DntzXVtT8t8

okay, slightly changed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFuTZvfQi44

[puddingwrestler]

That star field BG helps things a lot. It adds a feeling of space, depth and realism, and also cures the objects moving past camera issue. Nice one.

[Wyrmshadow]

That star field BG helps things a lot. It adds a feeling of space, depth and realism, and also cures the objects moving past camera issue. Nice one.

Thx... took a while to create. Bryce is a program for making mountains and landscapes.. one really has to wrestle with it to mimic the lighting effects of far more capable programs. I refuse to upgrade to Bryce6 because it doesn't animate textures.. 5 still does and I do a lot of that.

[Wyrmshadow]

Do you know how large the JW tripods are supposed to be? I've been looking but I can only guess @ 200ft tall. The one they constructed for the stage show in the UK is said to be 35ft tall but not at what scale. From what little I've seen of the visuals from the CGI accompanyment, they are massive. I just need to know so I can figure a few things out for future models I have planned.

EDIT: I did some crude measurements of the wide screen shots from the musical and was able to guestimate of a 300ft height from the ground to the top of the knees.

[puddingwrestler]

Do you have a copy of the double CD? It comes with a booklet which includes some very nice paintings of the tripods. The good thing is that they are usually interacting with familiar objects; blowing up victorian buildings, heat-raying the Thunderchild etc. You should be able to work it out from the art.
I'd do scans, but I don't have a copy; my parents do, but they live 130km away.
I had a look round on google image search adn got this. Thunderchild is a fictional ship, classified as 'Torpedo Ram', but the one on the painting is most likely copied from a real ship. That should make working these things out easy enough. Note of course that the tripod is at sea, so you have to compensate for the amount of it that is submerged.

Also this one (my personal favourite as a kid; it took me AGES to realise the woman in the foreground is wearing a tight dress, not a jump suit )

[puddingwrestler]

On consulting a book on battleships I have, the Thunderchild looks kinda like the Japanese battleship Asahi, which is 438ft long. I expect the artist just looked for a battleship which looked right. It might not be the Asahi, I can't find my awesome book on later 19th century royal navy battleships which would have been more informative.

If you take the thunderchild as 438ft long, then the top of the warmachine looks about 400ft above water, plus some extra for submerged legs, plus or minus about a kilometer for me getting estimates hopelessley wrong. Hope that helps.
Also, the journalist calls them 'taller than the tallest steeple'... one thing you have to give these 19th century newspaper chappies, they are damn accurate in thier descriptions!

[Wyrmshadow]

After finding these two pictures, I did a few measurements and got what I did. The Thunderchild in the frame looks a lot like the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftsure_class_battleship.

[puddingwrestler]

That looks right; the Asahi looks a hell of a lot like a Swiftsure; it's possible the Japanese were buying british battleships at the time. It's even more possible the book I used got the captions wrong
A quick check on wikipedia reveals Asahi was made in the UK, but not by the same shipyards.

[ChernayaAkula]

HERE'S a 1/700 dio of the fight of the Thunderchild against the tripods. He says he used the HMS Duncan by Kombrig to pose as Thunderchild.