Paths
vindazi
Posts: 669
Under the create tab, in objects, there are paths. Can anyone explain how to use these?
Paths_screenshot_45.jpg
656 x 407 - 200K
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Comments
Yes.
Don't use them.
Ever.
Don't read about them, don't talk about them, don't convert trajectories to them. They are broken. If you use them, they will crash your computer, deliver unpredictable results, or worse, corrupt your files.
Delete them.
Agreed with Oroboros...
My advice: Make your own animation paths.
If you need to know how to do that, please feel free to ask and welcome to the forum Vindazi.
I don't agree with Oro and TheSavage at all. Path are hardly understood and used. I once thought they could only be used for animation and that's exactly where I'm a nut (the opposite of Oro). However, there are other uses, too. Here's a tutorial how to create flexible pipes using paths. It's an old tute we wrote over 7 years ago for Bryce 5: http://www.horo.ch/raytracing/tuts/pdf/minitut10_en.pdf
Thanks for the input everyone. I have been creating my own paths but find that I am getting inconsistent results. It seems I do the exact same thing and sometimes the key frames take and sometimes they don't.
Never-the-less, I have managed to make a number of short animations, now I am trying to improve my work flow. I was thinking to use the paths. But, since I since I am getting the hint of lack of confidence with this approach for animation :-), I would like to know if I can save my own paths. I.e., when I get a set up to work, I may want to use it again with different materials or objects and I could save a lot of time if I did have to reconstruct the complex paths.
Feedback?
ljd
The newvideo tutorials for beginners by DB is a great improvement. Thanks.
If I could offer a suggestion from a beginners perspective, there is too much information. Kind of like drinking from a fire hydrant :-). As a person who teaches some complex stuff, I face this all the time so I can appreciate the problem from inside out. I would offer a step by step 90% how, and explain the whys only when it is critical to avoid a likely mistake. In one of DB's videos he shows what happens when too much light is put on the subject, so I know he knows what to much light on a subject can do.
But I found I got a lot more out of these videos than the earlier ones. I will be watching them again.
In the David B. video tutorials, I noticed that he focuses on using HDRI/IBL for lighting. While I think I can see some advantages in the results for still life, it seems that for animation, it is too expensive in rendering time. What am I missing?
I think you're right here. Though IBL must not necessarily render slow - if you can do without IBL shadows and a low quality setting, things get quite fast. Also, an HDRI image can be used as backdrop without generating light. As I see it, animations must concentrate at other aspects than stills because the beholder looks for the action, the images change where in a still, he/she has all the time to look for flaws.
"90% how and explain the whys only when it is critical to avoid a likely mistake".
Now that sounds like a very helpful tip thank you!
In my mind I am always thinking about "why" not "how" - which for the beginner as you say, is probably not very helpful. I'll give this a go.
It's a good job I stumbled over this thread. Bear in mind, that I have no formal (or informal) training in teaching, I just ended up doing these video's because DAZ 3D have not got around to sorting out the documentation and could see a lot of cool new features being bypassed for want of any guidance.
What, if you don't mind my asking, do you teach?
I think it depends on how you create the path.
If you use the "create path" option which puts the default rail line path up for you to edit, then yes you can save one of those in the same way you save any element in Bryce.
Make sure the path is selected and give it a unique name in the attributes box.
Keeping it selected, click the "create" tab on the Object Presets triangle to the right of the word 'create'.
Bottom left hand side of the library that opens up, best to choose 'user' and create a new sub section called "My Paths".
Then click "add" and your path will be added to your library and will be available to re use in any new document in the same way you would choose a preset sky or material.
Hope this helps.
Now that's interesting, you live and learn.
Thanks for posting this Horo, I'd never have thought of trying that... but I know what I'm going to be doing today now.
And Thanks to David for writing it up.
I don't think you're missing anything. David has been pushing the envelope in trying to achieve photorealistic results and frankly the vast majority of people coming to Bryce aren't particularly interested in doing animations. SO I think when David is making his video's he's catering to what most people want rather then thinking about all possible scenarios. Plus I don't think David does much if any animations so it's not a strong suit of his.
As for paths well I'm kind of surprised the paths are even offered if they are as broken as has been suggested and are better off being deleted. It just doesn't seem to make sense to me that the folks of the steering commity for Bryce's developement would have allowed something so bad to stay in Bryce and waste space. I've heard people talk almost the same about the Instancing Lab, that it's broken, shouldn't be used, etc. Turns out though that it was just misunderstood and it just needed so individuals to dedicate some time to figure it out and then document how to use it. Similarly there are things that people thought of as bugs and perhaps are in fact bugs but some are figuring out ways to exploit these "bugs" to achieve desired results. So I'm wondering if the problems with paths is the lack of documentation that Bryce has suffered in recent years and all that is needed is for someone to figure out how to use the paths?
Further to David's tutorial that Horo posted.
I knocked up a very quick and low quality render using the bendy pipe technique combined with animation.
The result can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZIGu55CIXQ
It took 20 minutes to set up and less than an hour to render (144 frames) using soft shadows, premium effects True Ambience and set to only 4RPP.
@TheSavage64 - That was a nice video. I see, you get the hang of this.
@LordHardDriven - It is not easy to find and and document bugs. It asks for a lot of understanding how a program is supposed to work. Knowing all options is nearly impossible. I also complained about the Instancing Lab until Rashad and Peter came up with tutorials. Obviously, it works. Other bugs can - as you say - be exploited and we've got to keep track of bugs that turned out to be features - or can be considered as such. One thing is to stumble over an irregularity, the other thing is to understand what's going on.
I used to use paths a lot, Horo. I have a lot of experience with them, not just with animation, but with static modeling using them.
That was prior Bryce 6. Since Bryce 5.5, paths are broken. I stand by my testimony: if you use paths, you will get unpredicable results, crash Bryce or worse, corrupt your files.
The fact that the tutorial you've linked to uses Bryce 5 is NOT evidence that paths in Bryce 6 or 7 are even approaching reliable, whether in animation or static modeling.
Avoid Paths in Bryce. They will prematurely age you. If you choose to avoid my advice (and believe me, paths are the first thing I chase down after a Bryce release, in the vain hope that they've been fixed), you leave your scene wide open to catastrophic, irreversible file-death.
In my experience, saving paths (when they worked) was seldom ever productive. In the field of animation for instance, almost every scene, no matter how repetitive or robotic, required changes in the path or trajectory. A re-positioned camera might mean something needed to be tweaked; a material change no longer synced with the motion; the addition of a light cast a shadow that hid a key movement, and now the movement needs to change, etc.
Also, long trajectories or paths are often way more work than you need. My advice is: if any action requires more than 4 keyframes, don't do it. Rather, re-shoot your scene from a different camera position for variety, or use the Repeat/Pendulum/Circular modifiers to continue the action indefinitely.
Ah, since I've never used path on a regular basis, I haven't noticed the new bugs introduced. To test them after a release, you need to know exactly how they ought to work. So paths were broken, thanks to point out that important detail.
Thats so cool.
Nicely done, Sav.
Sadly, this is pretty much the extent of a successful path animation: abstract work with perfectly symmetrical objects. Try and get, say, a 'bird' model to fly along a path and the bird will invariably flip upside down at the midway point (something you won't notice with a metaball object), or an adjustment to the curvature of the path will crash Bryce, or, for some mad reason, rendering the scene will result in a completely black frame.
Minimise losses: avoid paths, use less than 5 keyframes per object in your scene.
Yes, just running another test now of a plane taking off and flying around a bit... As you say, midway through, it flips upside down.
As a result, you have to find the point that it flips and only use the path up to that point (I make it around position 35).
The other annoying thing about using paths is that once you have your object set to animate correctly along the path and then you want to multiply it so there are a few objects doing the same thing, although the path and object duplicate, their position along the path at the start and end keyframes don't.
I flipped the green blobby stalk on it's side to have it growing out of the ground and then decided to try and multiply it so lots of green blobby things grew and couldn't get it work without re-doing each one... which I wasn't prepared to do just for a test.
Be aware also that not all 'potential' crashes are 'actual' crashes there-in. Having done several animations using Bryce, I found that if using high-end, high-bit (16-bit) data, when it comes to running the actual animation in mesh-mode alone (not actually rendering), a 'crash' does sometimes occur - that is, the mesh animation freezes. However, an actual 'crash' may not be occurring - if one is prepared to wait - as in the end they do work themselves out eventually.
For example. Having created a homemade path (not using the paths' installed), and having run it in Bryce's 'mesh-mode' animation format for several seconds in slices ('slices' because I stop it occassionally to do a render to see how the actual rendered image looks, how the camera needs to be adjusted in terms of position and angle...etc.,) at that particular stage of the entire animation, I find that while the meshed image on the computer screen may freeze after a few seconds or so, it isn't actually 'crashing' - because the calculations are still 'going-on' in the background.
The advised option is to wait a few seconds to half-a-minute/minute or so to see how your work/renders is (or, minutes - depending upon the size of the file and data you are working on), and see if that works for you. Bryce animation, on the outset, looks simple, however, it can get very tricky at times, behave seriously uncomprimised to confuse, but it is applicable when one get's to know its mannerisms. The 'beast', the 'ghost'...in the machine?
Jay
For animation I'd suggest:
- avoid TA and rely on fill lights,
- using multiple lights instead of soft shadows in regular rendering mode,
- ...or soft shadows with 4-16 rpp in premium mode
- using IBL + fills for open spaces (landscapes, exteriors),
- using sphere dome light (with positive bias) in the openings combined with fills and bounce lights for interiors,
There's a series of tutorials on classic lighting techniques (not physically correct) - that might be useful for animations:
- http://www.cgarchitect.com/2003/11/tutorial-advanced-lighting-techniques-part-1
- http://www.cgarchitect.com/2010/12/advanced-lighting-techniques-part-2
- http://www.cgarchitect.com/2010/12/details-in-materials
- http://www.cgarchitect.com/2010/12/semi-outdoor-lighting
There were even more, but sadly they disappeared (possibly were considered too dated). Still I should have them cached somewhere.
Dwsel_ covered a lot of good ideas and they're well worth considering.
the main difference between static scenes and animation is, of course, time. But not playback time: RENDER time. You can compose a beautiful scene and think nothing of a 1 hour render (and I'm well aware some renders cost days), but when you consider PAL runs at 25 FRAMES PER SECOND (and NTSC at 29.97fps), that's over a day your computer is tied up rendering 1 second of usable footage.
Animation scene building differs from static scene building in two areas: optimizing the scene for render speed, and valuing frame composition over subtle lighting. It means substituting time-expensive object materials with simpler textures. It means cutting out reflection and refraction unless it's absolutely necessary (or substituting reflection for Specularity), and if you HAVE to use reflection or refraction, try and chop down your Maximum Ray Depth and TIR to as low as you can (in action scenes, I often go down to an MRD of 2 and a TIR of 1. Both settings are found in your Render Options).
If it's a high action scene, be miserly on quality - if you're following a tumbling rock down a canyon, no-one's going to notice if distant water is dead flat or has bump, so turn off the bump). It's about drawing your watcher's attention to the focus of activity, not trying to have your watcher appreciate every detail of every frame.
Also... Beware of Shimmer :( For more info, check my link at the foot of my posts.
I still don't go to Bryce 7. I'm afraid the tools I use most in Bryce - animation - are just too dodgy in B7. I stick with B6 and acknowledge I'm missing out on some features that do actually work.