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tim3dwards - all messages by user

2016/6/2 18:42:50
Using Alpha Channel Instead of Chroma Key in Post No probs, be my guest!
2016/6/2 17:41:47
Using Alpha Channel Instead of Chroma Key in Post Hi guys,

I've been having fun the past few weeks playing around with Muvizu. We're intending to use it in a professional context, so I've been seeing what it can do in this regard.

I found something useful today that may be useful to some of the rest of you, and after a quick search I can't find another post that talks about this. A problem with using a key plugin on a video of CG characters is that when anti-aliased, the colour you're using to key with bleeds through onto the character. Therefore, if you're using red for your key, you'll see a slight red halo around the character once the key is working in post. There are various spill suppressors that can be employed to counter this, the problem is that because CG usually involves clean, straight inorganic edges, the result can look a bit messy.

So, what I wanted to do was see if it's possible to export an alpha channel as part of the final exported video. If your scene is set up so that all of the objects exist on a single layer, then the alpha channel included in the exported sequence is pure white, and therefore unusable for keying. This is due to the background being included in the alpha. I then found that it possible to get a usable alpha channel, by moving all of the objects that you want to be keyed into their own new layer. Once this has been done, simply hide the background layer, then export the video as a sequence of stills. Then, load the image sequence into your video editor of choice and voila! You get an instant perfect key layer as part of the sequence.

Apologies if this is already covered in a tutorial / other post somewhere, but it took me a while to figure it out and may well be of use to others who haven't discovered this technique.
2016/5/20 13:26:22
How to make dialogue play at a specific time? Hi there,

I've just watched the tutorial video for preparing and directing dialogue. I'm somewhat confused though, because the options in my version of Play+ don't seem to match the options in the video.

I've created a scene with three characters in it. They each have their own dialogue to speak, at different points throughout the shot. In the tutorial video, there is an option to select a start time for the dialogue (highlighted in blue below):-




In my copy of Play+ (fully licensed), no such option seems to exist :-




Is there something simple that I'm missing, please? Having all three characters speak at the same time is no good, and it's going to be difficult to add silence in an external audio editor because I don't yet know exactly when I need the characters to speak their lines (as they're going to be moving about in Muvizu and playing various animations).
2016/5/18 11:31:48
What kind of assets can I import? Hi Guys,

I've been getting into Muvizu over the past few days. It's an excellent little piece of kit, I'm dead impressed at the amount that it offers at such a low price.

I've got a background in 3D design / animation, and particularly in realtime animation systems such as Muvizu. I worked for many years for a company called Scene Systems, where we developed and released a very similar animation system that was called Antics. Unfortunately Scene Systems and Antics folded many years ago, so I moved on to pastures new.

I now work making e-learning materials. We're looking to use Muvizu to put together animations for an online English language course. The fact that Muvizu offers realtime lipsyncing is going to be very useful for us.

Cute as the bundled Muvizu characters are, we would rather create our own bespoke characters in 3DSMax, then import them into Muvizu. Is this a possibility using the standard importer? If so, are there instructions available for the character design standards? Particularly for preparing the mesh for lip-syncing, as I presume it's a collection of morph targets created for the different phonemes, that would presumably have to be named correctly for the engine to make use of.

Aside from characters, we would also be interested in importing our own animations for the characters. Again, the bundled animations are excellent, but not quite specific enough for our own needs.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Any advice very much appreciated!

Best wishes,
Tim.
2016/5/17 17:07:11
Lip Sync is out of sync on output Is the sync out uniformally, or does it gradually get worse and worse as the video progresses? If it's uniformally out, rather than messing around trying to figure out what's going wrong, I would just load the video into Premiere or similar and move the audio track independently of the video track so that it's back in sync.
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Muvizu is easy to use 3D animation software that allows anyone to create high quality animations quickly and easily. Muvizu’s animation engine is ideal for storytellers, animators, teachers and businesses looking to engage, enchant and delight audiences with animated content.