Demo reel,how do I make one of these then?
polycounter lvl 18
Afternoon Guys
Having done some job hunting ive decided to try my hand at making a demo reel after noting
companies like to see one either up front or at the interview so i feel i should be prepared.
I have seen alot of demo reels from alot of you guys on this forum,some are complex some are for a specific job (animator,eviromental/level artist,charcter artist etc)
and some are dead simple but straight to the point,which is what I am going for here (nothing to ambitious)
However I have some questions:- (heres my idiosy becomes apprent
)
*How long should a General model/texture demo with some tradional thrown in for good measure be? (recommendations)
*I have been asking around and Adobe Premiere has come up alot,I presume this is the program of choice?
* When you have a fully textured object and the texture fades away into a wireframe how is this done?
* When you have a camara rotating round an object is that just an animated camara in studio max which is then rendered into a video file?
* When yo uhave multiple scenes presumably they are binded together in premiere? (I could find this one out but don't want to open the program and waste my trial period)
* more questions later no doubt.
These are the things that are bugging me right now though
Thanks in advance for any advise you guys can give.
John
Having done some job hunting ive decided to try my hand at making a demo reel after noting
companies like to see one either up front or at the interview so i feel i should be prepared.
I have seen alot of demo reels from alot of you guys on this forum,some are complex some are for a specific job (animator,eviromental/level artist,charcter artist etc)
and some are dead simple but straight to the point,which is what I am going for here (nothing to ambitious)
However I have some questions:- (heres my idiosy becomes apprent
)*How long should a General model/texture demo with some tradional thrown in for good measure be? (recommendations)
*I have been asking around and Adobe Premiere has come up alot,I presume this is the program of choice?
* When you have a fully textured object and the texture fades away into a wireframe how is this done?
* When you have a camara rotating round an object is that just an animated camara in studio max which is then rendered into a video file?
* When yo uhave multiple scenes presumably they are binded together in premiere? (I could find this one out but don't want to open the program and waste my trial period)
* more questions later no doubt
.These are the things that are bugging me right now though
Thanks in advance for any advise you guys can give.
John
Replies
*How long should a General model/texture demo with some tradional thrown in for good measure be? (recommendations)
- My reel (which scored me a job) had two rotations of each character, one untextured, one textured. Without opening it up, I think each model was on screen for about 7 seconds which is enough to get a good look at your work.
*I have been asking around and Adobe Premiere has come up alot,I presume this is the program of choice?
- Thats what I used. Theres a number of other possibilities, but Premiere works well and is pretty easy to use.
* When you have a fully textured object and the texture fades away into a wireframe how is this done?
- Use the standard push modifier set up to put the wireframe over your model (duplicate the model, add a push modifier of .03 or so, turn on wireframe). WHen you want to switch to the textured, simply drop the opacity on the wireframe and fade in the texture using a blend map.
* When you have a camara rotating round an object is that just an animated camara in studio max which is then rendered into a video file?
- Thats right. The easiest way I find is to bind the camera to a spline circle and move the camer around that.
* When yo uhave multiple scenes presumably they are
binded together in premiere? (I could find this one out but don't want to open the program and waste my trial period)
Yeah. Its a simple drag and drop interface. You load up all the clips the drag them onto the timeline in the order you'd like. You can do fancy things like transitions which is a bit more complicated, but its not too hard to work out with a bit of experimentation.
I may get some flak for saying this, but I reckon Quicktime (.MOV) is a good format for demo reels - mainly because of the nice smooth file tracking - you can drag the time slider in the QT Player and the movie will smoothly update, meaning even if your models aren't on screen very long, the viewer can go back and scrub the time slider over the portion they want to see again. Some AVI and MPG formats don't do this very well, if at all.
That said, file size and compression quality are more important factors.
MoP
Render everything as image files, so that you get image_01.tga, image_02.tga....image_200.tga etc for each object.
Then you can use the RAM player in Max to load the sequences in and render them out into whatever format you want. You can also pick good still images for printouts or websites.
http://portfolio.rsart.co.uk
2. Premier is OK. Vegas is an outstanding editor. Avid Express is probably the most commonly used by real video editing pros. Pinnacle Liquid Edition is supposed to be solid. But in reality, if you're on a limited budget, just a very basic $50 editor is probably more than enough for editing.
3. May be done with a Blend or similar Material directly within 3d package, or with the Push/opacity solution, or you can render out the animation twice, once with textures, once with wire, and fade between the two clips in the editing package.
4. Animated Camera is best bet. Link it to a dummy object and rotate the dummy for a quick and easy solution.
5. Multiple clips one after the other would be done it the editing package. If you're on a super tight budget, you can do this within Video Post, which is built into Max. A little crude, but it'll work fine.
I'd second Rick's suggestion of rendering out the clips as a lossless TGA sequence. Import this into your editing package, and edit away. As far as final output format, I've really become a big fan of Windows Media Video. Very high quality, small file sizes, and anyone on a PC will be able to view the demo with little question about what compressor they need, etc.
Before doing a demo reel, make sure you do a website though. You can quickly and easily refer people to it, you can update it whenever you want, and a lot of companies actually prefer this, as they can look at a site at their leisure. Similarly, you can just add a link to it in an e-mail cover letter, without having to wait for the postal service.
I think I understand what your all saying about the fading issue.
In terms of using adobe Premiere I have the try out edition,I have 30day trial I do hope i complete this within that 30day trial,espcially as acturally a fair amount of it is done in max anyway then rendered out.So prefurbly id have my reel but not have spent any money,only real bummer is that I can't go back and edit once that 30days is up.
Ill just try the animated camara method first and see how it goes if that fails ill give the render everyframe method a go.
The file format is soemthing i need to think about,WMP would make sense though,but presumably whatever method you use to import the frames you can save them as these video formats anyway,right?
And don't worry Ryno I have myself a website,registered it just a couple of weeks ago.... www.hedgeart.com/index.html Hopefully gonna update it tonight.
Thanks again
john