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The scene I have in mind
is already to familiar to all of us. It should be - George Lucas
has shown it to us over and over!
Picture the "God's Eye View." You are the deity, seated
comfortably on the cozy swing on your front porch. You cast a
weary eye out over the starry expanse, procrastinating over the
need to fill in that black hole in the driveway. Just then, a
Star Cruiser slides ponderously by at the edge of your field
of vision (or maybe a title fades in and out to a trumpet fanfare).
"Oh, good grief," you muse imperiously, "what
are they up to now?" A moment or two pass, while you decide
whether the antics of those pesky humans merit your attention.
Then slowly, so slowly, you turn your gaze leftward and down,
panning majestically across the twinkling firmament, until your
gaze encompasses the little green and blue gem they call "Home."
All right, we've defined our end result. Let's do it! "Piece
of cake," you say. I'll just load up LightWave, a "planet"
object, a copy of "randomstars.lwo," a dash of lighting
and a keyframe or two, and hit F10. Sure, that would work. But
consider the advantages of doing the shot as a composite in Aura
instead.
Why 'Composite?'
First, it'll be a lot faster to render initially. Then again,
suppose your client says "That's just dandy, but I'd like
the planet to be in the lower left corner in the last frame rather
than centered." Another possibility: "That's super
(By the way, it's always bad news when a comment begins with
"That's super...") but I want the title fixed in place,
so the camera pans across it as it traverses the sky." In
these cases (and many more that come to mind) Aura will let you
make the change(s) without requiring a time consuming 3D render!
Let's assemble the components of the shot. The basic recipe really
only calls for one item: an oversize shot of the galaxy, with
a planet in the foreground. We could scan one in out of a magazine,
render a single high-res frame in LightWave, or paint it by hand
in Aura. As it happens, we're going to combine the last two options.
I've used LightWave to render "a little of planet all my
own" along with it's companion star. I saved this image
as a brush (in 32 bit Targa format). You can simply download
the "planet brush," the starscape background image,
and the finished composite (fig.9). from here.
Assuming you've either completed Part 1 and/or downloaded the
files, let's proceed.
This is the cool part -
using Aura as a virtual camera! We've created our super-size
image. Now we'll use the Keyframer to pan our virtual camera
across it. It's almost too easy to bother describing, but I'll
do so to point out a few new things in Aura2.
Close the oversize project, and (if necessary) open a new one
at your standard video resolution (for NTSC Toaster V1 users,
that would be 720 X 480, 29.97, even field first - you PAL guys
'n gals know what to do.) Drag the endpoint of the layer to something
like 240-300 frames (this is a slooooow pan.)
Load your hi-res starfield image into Aura as a brush. Open Aura's
"Keyframe" Filter and, in case you've been mucking
about with it, select "Reset" in its' File menu. Set
the filter's "Source" mode to "Brush," and
checkmark the "Preview" box at the bottom. Select the
first frame on the timeline by clicking on the Layer panel drag
bar to activate it, and hitting the "Home" key.
By default, the Keyframer brush preview is centered on the Project
window. Drag it down and left, until you see the right and top
borders of the brush appear in the upper-right corner of the
screen. Naturally, you've gone just a bit too far at this point;
so re-position the brush so it nicely covers the screen. If you
have "Auto Key" turned on (just below the Layer panel
title bar), a keyframe for the brush at this frame has just been
set. It's position on the timeline is represented by the small
"+" below the frame. Now move to the last frame of
the animation, by pressing "End" on the keyboard.
Reposition the starfield brush so that, in the last frame, the
planet is tidily placed in the lower left corner of the frame.
You should see a white line (representing the current Keyframer
path) stretching from upper right to lower left. In this instance
the lower left endpoint of that line marks the center of the
brush at the first frame, while the upper-right endpoint is where
the brush will be centered in the last frame.
"Easy there, big fella..."
Now, here's something cool. We don't want the camera to slam
into it's ending position - we want it to "ease-out."
Aura2 allows us to use splines to control Keyframer motions.
Checkmark the "Spline" switch in the Keyframe panel.
Since our motion in this
animation is linear, the spline handles that appear in the Edit
window review may be hard to see (since they line up with the
path). However, if you click on the upper right end point of
the path, the spline control handle will appear. I've moved the
handles in the image above to show them to you more clearly.
By dragging the handle's diamond-shaped endpoints you can alter
the curvature of the path. When you change the length of the
handles, you alter the ease-in/out characteristics of the move.
For our purpose, we want to shorten the handles substantially.
Drag one of the endpoints in towards the handle's center until
the handle is roughly 1/4 of its original length. With that done,
select the first frame of the animation, and repeat the operation
(a quick way to move to the first frame is to click on its' node
in the path shown in the edit window.)
Keyboard Tricks
Well, that's almost it. There's nothing to do now but render
the animation, secure in the knowledge that a) it's not going
to take nearly as long to render as it would in 3D, and b) if
you need to make changes, it won't take long at all! But wait!
Here's another tip: you can select all the frames of the current
layer for which keyframes exist by hitting "Control + S"
on the keyboard. By the way, you can select ALL the layer's frames
(which may not be the same thing at all) by double clicking on
the layer in the timeline. Do the former before you render or
you'll only affect one frame.
Of course, this is a very simple way of using Aura as a virtual
camera. Pans, trucks and dollies, curving paths, camera shakes,
zooms, DOF and even rack-focus effects are all possible without
ever leaving 2D |
