Glowing 3d vector... stuff... using motion blur...

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 1:25 pm

I think this technique was already covered a long time ago... but I kind of stumbled across it again on my own.

One of my favorite movies is The Andromeda Strain. I just got it on DVD.

There is a scene that shows a 3d rotating wireframe diagram of an under ground facility.

Keep in mind this was done in 1974! There were no computer graphics back then!

The way they did it was... well... it was a lot of work. Using back lit film and rotating each image at an angle and filming one frame at a time.... blah blah... better description on the DVD.

Anyway... I wanted to "replicate" this... I know there are easier ways to achieve this... but I was bored. I used one layer multiplied several times and offset on the z-axis and rotated the camera.

I then animated the z-axis movement of the layers at different points... blah blah blah... and used motion blur set to the full length of the animation and rendered just the last frame.

-vern

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 1:27 pm

Looks superb.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Mon Jul 24, 2006 1:33 pm

Here's the screen grab from the movie...

-vern

PixelDust · Post by **PixelDust** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 12:13 am

Nice work, Vern! It's got that retro wireframe look down pat.

BTW, I remember reading the novel years ago, and I may have seen the movie once, but I don't remember much about the movie version.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 3:22 am

Oh man! You got to rent it.

It was made in the 70's... but it still holds up today. It is really an amazing flick. Very polished, great acting... Michael Crichton at his best. A real cool bad space bug.

So I'm watching the DVD... and I am flipping out on how they got that wire frame look. 1974 didn't even have the most rudementary computer graphics at all. They had nothing back then. Remember that Star Wars was a few years later and they only had computer controlled cameras.

It was such a simple thing. They took flat archetictural drawings of each level of the building layout and rotated them to the camera and rotated on the "y axis" to create this "fake" 3d which looks great. Of course this was a time consuming process to expose these plates on to the film... like "old style" animation.

This movie was made just before "Silent Running". Douglas Trumball did the effects for Andromeda Strain and Silent Running. Apparently he underbid the effects for Andromeda and totally lost his shirt on it but he "invented" this whole new process for printing video to film (a lot of the movie has video monitors for communication, they actually used "hi-def" video and printed to film for this effect.)

They really had to think outside the box back then... kind of seems sad how everyone now a days just buys some software... it's all done the same way... it all looks the same.

-vern

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 8:11 am

Silent Running was a great movie..

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 12:26 pm

For some odd reason I am enjoying this technique... it just looks... cool to me... having some fun. takes an age to render. Even if this could be animated... it would take hours. Would have to set up and render one frame at a time... real headache.

Anyway here are some examples using PNG image layers set to screen in the layer properties.

I need to experiment some more. With the motion blur and a lot of layers... even set to screen only... the black in the rest of the image kind of darkens the layers under it... a cumulative effect of all the motion blur frames.

I used the screen grabs from the movie to create the images for this effect. It isn't "exact" by any means but I really like the effect.

(Screen grab from the movie)

-vern

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Tue Jul 25, 2006 2:08 pm

Cool! I especially like the last one.