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viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Live performances or exported movies created with Magic.
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hazardman
Posts: 74
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 1:33 am

viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by hazardman »

finally after almost two months of experimenting with magic and getting down to creating content, here is the result in my attempt to create visuals to my track, “Controlling Transmission”...any feedback would be appreciated…
zpink
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 15, 2014 2:52 pm

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by zpink »

Some elements in it, like the glowing cables, looks absolutely fab!
Well done! :)
hazardman
Posts: 74
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 1:33 am

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by hazardman »

zpink wrote:Some elements in it, like the glowing cables, looks absolutely fab!
i agree ;) and thanks...

it was a bit of a challenge at first as i wasn't sure how to go about doing this....i ended up rendering a loopable animation of the telephone poles with embed alpha....along with that, i did separate renderings for each of the cables in white as to be affected by the trail and HSB module with differing audio files as input sources...i then assembled all the separate videos into a scene and ordered them appropriately so that the white cables would be hidden behind black ones....

the field of power transmission towers was all 3D geometry inside magic (so, GPU intensive), with duplicate black and white wires and insulators superimposed over each other...the white wires were then treated similarly to the trail and HSB module as with the telephone pole animation...i used a translation module with a ramp with an exactly tuned x translation for a seamless loop which gave the appearance of unending travel....in real-time, the trails of the wires have better gradients then the rendered video (limitation of the frame rate when rendering) but i like it better the way it turned out in the video :D
zpink
Posts: 5
Joined: Mon Dec 15, 2014 2:52 pm

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by zpink »

WOW, lots of work gone into it, so your new YouTube subscription is well deserved. ;-)

Looking forward to seeing/hearing more of it!
blackdot
Posts: 528
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:18 pm

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by blackdot »

quite cool.may i ask how you managed to line up the satellite dishes with the music? looks very good :)
hazardman
Posts: 74
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 1:33 am

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by hazardman »

blackdot wrote:quite cool.may i ask how you managed to line up the satellite dishes with the music? looks very good :)
i modeled the radio telescope (based on lots of internet images to give it some semblance of proper mass/scale) and exported the model in three different parts:
1) the base "RT_Base"
2) the support frame, space frame structure, the underside of the dish, and the focal room structure, "RT_Space_frame"; and,
3) the reflector dish with "glowing" technohazard symbol texture map, "RT_Dish"

in the model, i ensured that the pivot point for the 3 parts were set at 0,0,0 so in magic i could simply set up a rotation module to make parts 2) & 3) "bob" to the music...to restrict the amount of x-rotation, i simply scaled it by 0.4 (through a bit of trial and error to suit the audio source loudness)....

in magic, i created one scene where i assembled the various parts and assigned the various inputs to the various module parameters...
RT model scene.jpg
RT model scene.jpg (183.19 KiB) Viewed 8653 times
in another scene, i added a scene module and linked it thru several transform modules to have 3 copies placed and oriented differently in 3D space...
RT 3x model scene.jpg
RT 3x model scene.jpg (239.29 KiB) Viewed 8653 times
because the models were black, i had to add either a polygon or a GLSL shader as a background and then turned on the bypass switch to turn them off for the final rendering...

here's a screen shot of the 3d model...
RT Model 3ds max.jpg
RT Model 3ds max.jpg (107.19 KiB) Viewed 8653 times
hope the above is clear enough ;)
Magic
Site Admin
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Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by Magic »

That's really great! Thanks for sharing all that :). I'm pretty impressed by your 3D modeling abilities!
blackdot
Posts: 528
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:18 pm

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by blackdot »

Thanks a lot for elaborating. One thing i dont understand is how you got a texture on the model. Does .obj include a texture and uv map and magic understands both componenta? In early tests of mine i could only influence the diffuse colour of an object but nothing else. It may very well be that i didnt try hard enough.

/edit: just read up on it. Apparently obj includes the uv map. But how do you tell magic which texture file corresponds to the the obj?
hazardman
Posts: 74
Joined: Sat Nov 08, 2014 1:33 am

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by hazardman »

Eric wrote:That's really great! Thanks for sharing all that :). I'm pretty impressed by your 3D modeling abilities!
thanks, but i took a 6-month intensive training course in 3D animation--omg was that already 15 years ago!?--to beef up my architectural viz skills so, yeah, i know my way around a little ;)
blackdot wrote:But how do you tell magic which texture file corresponds to the the obj?
when i export the model from 3d max, there are options to include texture coordinates, export materials and create mat-library...with all of those on, i get a *.obj file, a *.mtl file and *.jpg of the texture map...

the *.mtl file is the important one as it contains the path information where to find the texture along with the mapping coordinates...

for the moon in my project, this is what is inside the "moon.mtl" file:

Code: Select all

# 3ds Max Wavefront OBJ Exporter v0.97b - (c)2007 guruware
# File Created: 11.01.2015 13:52:06

newmtl Moon_Baked
	Ns 10.0000
	Ni 1.5000
	d 1.0000
	Tr 0.0000
	Tf 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000 
	illum 2
	Ka 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000
	Kd 1.0000 1.0000 1.0000
	Ks 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
	Ke 0.0000 0.0000 0.0000
	map_Ka maps\Sphere001CompleteMap.jpg
	map_Kd maps\Sphere001CompleteMap.jpg
where, at the end, is the file path to the texture map...in my case, i exported to a relative path with a "map" folder but it's probably best to have the image file in the same directory as the model....also, in this case, the same map is being used for the ambient, Ka, and diffuse colour, Kd...see this link http://cgkit.sourceforge.net/doc2/objmaterial.html for some further parameters that the obj material file can contain but i'm not sure which ones magic recognizes--my guess is only diffuse?

it is important to note that the *.mtl file must have the exact same name as the model name, eg moon.obj -> moon.mtl...once you have the moon.mtl you can edit (using note pad or similar) the texture name and path if you wish to point it elsewhere...

in earlier tests in magic, i was not successful with tiled u/v parameters as the model in magic would only show 1 area on the model with the texture map...for example, if i had 3x3 tiling in max (that would mean 9 copies of the texture map tiled across the model) i would only have the centre of the model showing the 1 copy of the map and then have 8 "blank" areas around it....not sure if this is a limitation with magic, with obj or with exporting options from max but for now i'm only making models with 1x1 u/v coordinates to be safe ;)...
blackdot
Posts: 528
Joined: Sun Jul 06, 2014 10:18 pm

Re: viz to my track "Controlling Transmission"

Post by blackdot »

Ok, thanks very much. I'll have to tesr how this works with blender.
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