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02-27-2007, 19:41 joysprod Joined on 08-24-2006 London Posts 110 Ventuz Introduction Movie Scene Hi, On the home page of your website you have a very good movie showing some of the features of Ventuz. I was wondering how I would go about achieving a similar effect to various effects in your video.. Namely, when some of the windows are shown with different content, duplicate copies appear behind these 'windows' with a reducing level of transparancy and scaled slightly larger. That seems relatively easy to achive with a modification of 'reflection', but when these windows move, there is a slight delay and lag in the positioning of the copies. I cant figure out how to do this in Ventuz, so was it done in post production or all in Ventuz? Regards Peter a wider window on the world    Report

03-01-2007, 10:02 Christian Schmidt Joined on 05-16-2005 Dubai, U.A.E. Posts 289 Re: Intro Movie Technique Hi Peter! The movie was entirely done in Ventuz. The window effect you mentioned is nothing special really. The movie is mapped on several rectangles, each with different scaling and transparency. The delay in the position of these copies is done in the Keyframe Animation. Since animating all those seperate windows would be too much work, I created a Container which includes the rectangles, the reflection and the entire IN/OUT animation of them. This resulted in a reusable node. No matter what image or movie texture I would place before this container, it would always be animated the same way. But explaining something like that is never the same as actually studying it for yourself. I planned to release this archive at a later state, but why wait. You can download the entire Ventuz Introduction sequence as a Ventuz archive from our FTP server. This is the download link: Ventuz Introduction Archive The file is 19MB in size. The scene is compatible with all Ventuz versions and does not use any Professional Edition nodes/functionality. The scene is designed only for 16:9 aspect ratios, so I recommend a project resolution of 1280x720. Since the scene has a lot of different aspects to it, I welcome anyone to ask questions about it. I will gladly explain how it was created. Chris    Report

12-23-2008, 6:14 promedical Joined on 12-23-2008 Posts 2 Re: Intro Movie Technique Hello there: OK! I got today the express version and I have been playing around with it. I have some experience with Maya  so I think I can find my way around. I see you guys want to introduce it world wide (That free edition is a killer). Anyway I have been learning reading and so, but these are the questions: -How hard is i to learn it? -Is there any authors writing about Ventuz? -How do you export the final product? -What is the market for it? -What can you do with it that Maya doesn't? -Can you work with life cameras? So far what I saw got me awake until 2:00am Happy holidays Gus    Report

12-23-2008, 20:37 The Krix Joined on 08-22-2007 Dubai Posts 247 Re: Intro Movie Technique Hi Gus! Boy that is an old topic. I haven't seen that Introduction scene in a long while. Good to know that it works on Ventuz 2008 Express. :) If you know Maya and can deal with its Hypershade and Hypergraph Editors then you should not have a problem with Ventuz and be able to learn it pretty fast. I don't know about any books on Ventuz. But there should be plenty of material in the forum. The final product you design/author is played back similar to applications such as Flash. You export a presenation VPR file which is essentially an archive which includes the scene and all resources. This presentation file is then played back by the stand-alone Ventuz Presenter. The presenter is always installed with the Designer setup or can be installed from the stand-alone setup. THis is the normal playout way. For bigger projects, especially when working with multiple scenes, you export all scenes in a special format and start Ventuz in Director mode. This allows you to do multi-scene management and more. You can also always run a scene from the Designer but you will loose a bit of performance. Or with the Professional Edition you could render out videos or image sequences. Which market it is for? Similar to a product like Photoshop if think Ventuz is not for a specific market. It is used already in several markets. I for exmaple use it to create pre-visualisations for events, presentations, VJ graphics for clubs and parties, on events for the entire content on screens, interactive terminals and installations and for broadcast graphics either on screen or for graphics on videowalls and such. There is a really wide range of things you can do with Ventuz. I even use it to create DVD menu graphics - simply because it is faster than After Effects. I guess that ties in with your question of what Ventuz can do that Maya cannot. You cannot compare those applications. Maya is a tool for creating images and movies - static non-interacitve stuff. You can use Maya to create content such as 3d models which you can use in Ventuz but that's about it. Programs like Ventuz offer you a different output medium - realtime rendered graphics. The technique is similar to a computer game - the content is rendered 50 or 60 times per second and any change you make are instantly visible. You cannot do that with a movie. You have to wait for it to be rendered again - which can take up to several days. :) Realtime graphics will never look as good as post-production rendered graphics but they offer many other advantages such as life-interaction. And Ventuz is also a product which creates final output you can directly hook up to projectors, screens and such. Stuff you create in Maya you still have to implement and run in other applications - even if it just a media player. If you have a camera you can hook it up to you computer and use it in Ventuz as a live video source. It behaves like any other texture source. You might have problems with Firewire cameras because of shitty drivers but it should work. Ususally all live video sources have to be registered and installed as a Windows Video device - regardless of whether it is a video capture card or just a webcam. As long as your device is registered in Windows properly you can use it in Ventuz. But drivers for crappy sub-$100 cards and other non-professional equipment might pose a couple of problems. Just warning you. There is lot of crap out there. Anyway, I better get back to the christmas tree. :) Cheers and merry xmas everyone! Krix    Report

12-24-2008, 19:06 promedical Joined on 12-23-2008 Posts 2 Re: Intro Movie Technique Hello Krix: Thanks a lot for the explanation, really clear for me now. Yes I was trying to do a size by size with Maya and you are right is not even close. Seems Ventuz is like a multiprogram package in one, I really want to keep playing with it, and I am sure I will be around asking questions to" Pros " like you. Thanks again and I hope you have a wonderful holidays. Best wishes, Gus    Report

11-27-2009, 12:29 Thomas Joined on 01-16-2009 Duesseldorf / Ger Posts 29 Re: Intro Movie Technique Attachment: 1.JPG Hi @ all, I tried to replay the IntroMovie but something went wrong. Only for to know if I did everything in the right way, here are my steps: 1. New Project with a new scene 16:9 2. Copying the ventuzIntroduction.vza into archives 3. Choosing >File >Import >Archive >ventuzIntroduction.vza 4. Playing with "R" Result; Intro- and Outropart with black background (where the different text-lines are appearing) are looking good, but the rest .... I add two screenshot to this post to let you know what I mean. Can anybody help me please?!    Report

11-27-2009, 12:30 Thomas Joined on 01-16-2009 Duesseldorf / Ger Posts 29 Re: Intro Movie Technique Attachment: 2a.JPG 2. example    Report

11-27-2009, 14:20 Thomas Joined on 01-16-2009 Duesseldorf / Ger Posts 29 Re: Intro Movie Technique oh sorry : anybody = anyone    Report

11-30-2009, 7:38 The Krix Joined on 08-22-2007 Dubai Posts 247 Re: Intro Movie Technique hi thomas! I just checked the scene and it looks fine on my machine using a geforce 280. if you are using nVidia as well, which driver are you using? do you have an amd/ati card? and if so, which one? the scene is very old - several years actually. i think i created that beginning of 2007. there were a lot of changes in graphics cards, their drivers and in ventuz as well. i am surprised that it actually works that well. kudos to ventuz for that. i did found one other issue. the part about custom effects is not working properly. there is a bump applied to the opening cube. problem is the Img2Bump node. you have to deactivate the luma property to make it work. but i think that only applies to nvidia cards. in order to find the problem with the scene on your machine, could you please start deleting sub-tree per sub-tree from the scene. cache first, then glow layer, then the texts, followed by the glow render target and all it's content and so on. in order to find you why the scene is not working, you need to pinpoint the source. does anyone else have the same problem? krix    Report

11-30-2009, 13:06 Thomas Joined on 01-16-2009 Duesseldorf / Ger Posts 29 Re: Intro Movie Technique Hi Krix, thanks for your reply! First let me send congratulations to you, Christian and all of team from 3m, for realising this amazing event in Saudi! About the Intro Movie... Meanwhile I checked this on several machines. The first one uses an ATI 1900 XTX with CCC 9.3 on Win7 64 bit. I tried a little bit and found out it is working fine when I block the glow Render Target respectively the Overlay Rectangle. The second one was my laptop with an ATI Mobility 3650 and Win 7 32 bit. The result was much more better, the overlay can be active, but not all renderings appear completely. The third one was a Win 7 64 bit with ATI X1650 and CCC 9.10, everything was fine here. The last one was a WinXP 32 bit SP3 with Nvidia 9800 GTX with Gforce 191. and everythings fine. If you need some results on machines with more current graphic cards let me know. I can check it on some PC´s of my customers with ATI 4650 and Nvidia 290 but I need some time... Even if the scene is "very" old, this one is my beginning to understand how to use Ventuz for more complex shows. I can´t say that everything in the tutorials is understandable to the last for me but the more I try to understand what others do, the more I understand philosophie and technic of Ventuz. Thanks for your help!    Report

11-30-2009, 14:58 The Krix Joined on 08-22-2007 Dubai Posts 247 Re: Intro Movie Technique Thanks Thomas. Much appreciated. But we did get gray hair. :) Don't bother checking the scene on other machines. It is due to the small differences between AMD and nVidia. The scene is old and was never ever tested again on more modern graphics cards. But at least it works. And like you said, just because it is old does not mean that you cannot learn something from it. All the best! Krix aka Christian :)    Report

11-30-2009, 15:54 Thomas Joined on 01-16-2009 Duesseldorf / Ger Posts 29 Re: Intro Movie Technique I got my first gray hair when I was 42, so you know how old you are now (mental, not physical). I thought your aka is... but was not shure, so please excuse my test :) Maybe you remeber me, we met each other at Ventuz in Dubai, 3 years ago. So, good luck for your next jobs and all the best for you, too! Thomas    Report