UCS Millenium Falcon Animated Build Rendered With LDView

[Rob]

Hi All,

I hope this is OK to post here...

Having previously created a number of animations using POV-Ray for rendering the frames I thought I would try using LDView to render the frames required instead. (Thanks to Travis (author LDView) for answering a number of my questions in this forum which helped me to get this working).

First online result of this can be seen at the folllowing link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7Iq3wju3O0

Rendering this is POV-Ray would take about 100 times longer... (Such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TudW-8FjMzE)

The 'falling parts' code (my software) is new and rather than one part falling at time (which is how I have done these animations previously) now multiple parts are in motion in any one frame. The 'algorithm' is not perfect yet, some parts still 'fly through' other parts - work in progress ...

Rob

(TCBUK)

[Philippe Hurbain]

Excellent! nicely done, very fluid...

[Chris Dee]

Very nice. It's great that the years of work put into the LDraw parts library has made things like this possible.

[Anonymous User]

Do you have provision for the rest of us to run your custom 'falling parts code', as well as guide on how to indicate the order of the .ldr file to control where in the scene the parts "fall in" (likely automated based on the elevation?) as well as what defines a part that flies in from the sides rather than from above? The animation is quite impressive.

[Rob]

Hi Jeff,

The application for creating the animations which you see on my youtube channel (thecreativebrickcouk) and at www.thecreativebrick.co.uk has been my main 'hobby project' for the last couple of years. My goal ultimately is to be able to input any LDR file and have it create the animation automatically - and this is what it currently achieves. i.e. select LDR file - click create animation - and wait...

However the system, or algorithm, for achieving this is not quite as good as I would like quite yet. Is does a pretty good job with parts that are aligned with any axis (in any direction) but parts which are rotated by some angle cause some issues - parts flying through other parts etc. Improving this is currently my work in progress.

F.Y.I. The Millenium Falcon took about an hour (on an i3 processor) to create the individual LDR files and then a couple or hours to render (using LDView). If I used POVRay - would take about a week to render (I kept getting out of memory errors with this model in POVRAY) which is why I used LDView to create the frame images in this particular case.

For models with a large number of parts (>2000) the current system is not really praticical - hence for some of my animations (like the Taj Mahal - I took the MUCH easier course of just added a piece each frame (with no 'fly in')) - I'm currently rendering 'Tower Bridge' using that method.

And finally, to answer your actual question - I'm afraid the code is not something I am willing to release, or give too much detail on, as I have some thoughts of doing something 'commercial' with it in the future.

Kind regards

Rob @ The Creative Brick Co. UK