Welcome Axeman3d to SSC

And thank you and Potsmoke for your efforts. Right now I cannot see the video due to my wonderful firewall at work. But when I get home I will gladly give you some feedback.

But just some things to think about...

- If your a space gamer like most of here and you like what you see and if this was the first time visiting a website and saw that animation what would you think?

- Overall file size depending on how this animation is used on the website. If it is used like a banner it will need to be small in file size generally or page load times will increase because we cannot take for granted that everyone has high download speeds. But if it will be a youtube posted animation it is no big deal at all and I will put it right on the front page.

But it really what pleases everyone here. 🙂

No worries, the header animation will be a small version at 1024 x 149 like your current one, probably an animated gif of some sort. I dont know if I'd want to use any animated header for ever page of a site, it might remind everyone too much of all those adverts you see on the web, but we'll see how it turns out. The big animation will be on Youtube for now, but i could always send you it when finished and it might be able to be used for something, perhaps an intro page that displays only once? Even if it's not used for the site, it will still be fun to do. 🙂

kenny

Hi There Axeman3D

Welcome to the SSC. 🙂

Nice to see you here and already had a look at your early work on the animation, very impressed with what I have seen so far! 🙂

I've started rendering the next scene, about 10 seconds of animation. I've given the Cobra MkIII some nice particle exhaust blast so it's going to take all night to render.

Wow. Nice start Axeman.

Did a nice job on the lighting.

Right now the banner is linked to all pages and kinda integrated into the portal that way I would have to see what I could do to only have it viewable on the portal only and not the other pages.

But I think the direction you are going in is just fine and seeing different ships is classic. Should the site logo be displayed once all the ships have passed or on each ships passing and each ship that passes disperses the logo to be replaced by the next ships exhaust.

That's just a brainstorm thought just because in some sort of loop it wouldn't look too bad I don't think? Or should the animation only happen one time per page load?

I know I use a wide screen display at home and I see a lot of gray space on my screen and the website is in the middle. I have always wanted to populate the gray space with a animation that moves just a little. Kinda like a camera panning the star and planet you made. But not sure how many people would see it? Because right now someone has to have at least 1024x768 to view the site with it taking the whole screen. I run 1920x1080 and I see quite a bit of empty space. But I would have to dig into the css of the site and I hate css 🙂

How long does that animation take to render Axeman?

Here's part two. I'll re-render the second half, the camera movement is way too slow and not what I'd hoped.

Render times depend on how powerful your PC is, what your quality settings are and what's on screen. This is being rendered on an Intel E6800 with 3Gb of memory so just basic stars takes a couple of seconds, the Apollo takes maybe 50 seconds a frame, and when the Cobra goes by spitting out 20 particles a frame with motion blur and hypervoxel exhausts it takes 6 minutes a frame! In total it took about 5 hours to do the 300 frames.

Loving this Axeman3D, also noted you used your "boy racer" Cobra MK3, with the "go faster" stripes, ....class 8-). If I may ask, when it's finished, could you post a link on the Frontier Forum so that the devs there can see it too? Might give em a wee incentive to get things moving along for E4, just a thought. 🙄

Yeah, the boy racer Cobra is first past the post. The idea is that they're all racing to spacesimcentral.com, so turbo cobra is first, then next it's going to be an A-wing or something similarly sleek, then the main pack and the big ships bringing up the rear. I'll use the plain cobra as well, and I've just built a similarly styled Python to go with my Krait and the rest of the models.

Ah. Now I see what your doing Axeman. Looking forward to seeing which ships show up for the race 🙂 I see what you mean about the camera not panning quickly enough. But overall great stuff so far.

This will be the last work in progress post, no point doing it all in dribs and drabs. The next one you see should be the finished product, although that might not be till next week sometime. Here's where the ships start to come a little thicker. I'll need to rerender the last 150 frames of the previous animation to get the panning correct on the camera, but that's no hardship as the scene is saved anyway.

Excellent animations Axeman3d,look forward to seeing the finished one.

very cool vid, I was trying to make one but yours is way better then mine. I can't wait to see it on the front page of the site

Axeman are you still working on this?

Guess he must be busy working on it Darkone. Hopefully he will have some news for us soon.