Demo idiot needs help.
Hi guys,
I have some models ready, but do not know how to make a demo reel at all. I know basic after effects stuff and rendering in Maya. I need to know how to put your short reels on DVD for recruiter to see.
Do I use premier? Any one has a tutorial? What size should I render my reel? Do I include texture maps? I also have a Zbrush model, do I render it in Zbrush?
Your help will be greatly appreciated. You can also visit my website to give me further advices.
web page
I have some models ready, but do not know how to make a demo reel at all. I know basic after effects stuff and rendering in Maya. I need to know how to put your short reels on DVD for recruiter to see.
Do I use premier? Any one has a tutorial? What size should I render my reel? Do I include texture maps? I also have a Zbrush model, do I render it in Zbrush?
Your help will be greatly appreciated. You can also visit my website to give me further advices.
web page
Replies
If you decide to go for it (but then, why not, if you make it stellar, it can only help), here's the page with some advice. You can surely google up some more useful info on this subject. If it will be of any help, here's mine too, although it's painfully outdated, and I should take it off. I used after effects for all the animation, and Maya/mental ray for rendering, so if you're already good with after effects, don't bother with Premiere, since you'll probably do more compositing and animation than video editing. Final piece of advice is to try to pick the music that won't annoy anyone.
I think you'd better to use your time to go back to your site and give it some love and polish, removing dead links and "Coming Soon" links, putting "Min Zhu game art portfolio" in the title of all your pages and adding contact information.
Pior has one of my favourite portfolio sites these days (in presentation as well as content):
http://www.pioroberson.com/
That said I saw this the other day and thought it would make it easy to make create a rotating model view for a reel.
Link
http://forums.ego-farms.com/index.php?PH...511.msg6468#new
Yeah I know it's for Max but the idea works in any software good software. Link and your object or camara to your spline circle, set the duration and render. Do this for a shaded with wires showing and textures showing, then have the object fade out. I usually just have the objects fade in and out and made a still shot that showed all the views at once before I had them rotating. If I remember correctly you can do this in Maya, but it might depend on the version of it. Maya Unlimited might let you do it but Maya Complete might not. When you render your sequence of each object render it out as frames. You will need a lot of hard drive space for this since it can easily eat up a few gigs. You want no compression on your source files when you bring it into you video editing software or if you can do it in your animation program but sometimes it's just easier to do it in the video editing program since some programs idea of video editing sucks.
For Premiere:
Preparation:
1. Setup a master file in your 3D program that has the type of lighting you want for your objects. Bring the objects in. I like to keep it consistent but that's up to you. I usually put them in separate layers and link them to a dummy that has the animation I want. Hide and reveal the layers as needed.
2. Make a separate folder each object that will contains the frames of it's animation. Render a small preview so you know how it will play and check that you like the timing and it's perfect. Render out to frames.
3. In Premiere go to File, New project, and make sure your frame rate is correct for that project, if you need 30 frames a second make sure you have it set to that and not some other number.
4. Go under file, to import and select import folder. I think you can drag and drop but I forget. Bring in all your folders or do it one at time. Place your imported folder to the work area. You just drag the folder once it's in to the timeline, or whatever it's called I forget. You just drag and drop it. Go under options and set it to display your animation as frames. You do this so you can do your cuts in an accurate manner. The last version I used of Premiere was 5.1 so I don't know how much it changed. It used to have two tracks for regular video that didn't use alpha, one for video with alpha, and the tracks for sound. There is a track in the middle that is for transitions, where you can add things like fades. To preview your transition you have to render it, and then it shows it. I prefer the way After Effect previewed things but to organize things Premiere was easier. You can render just a segment out or the entire thing. There are little handles all the way on top that let you just render sections. Save your file.
5. When you are done go to file and there should be an option that says print to video. It might have changed but that's where you go to render out your video and save it as quicktime, avi or mpeg.
I hope that helps.
Alex
Also do I include texture maps in the DVD. Rumors are that HR people don;t really want to see your texture maps...
Also do I include texture maps in the DVD. Rumors are that HR people don't really want to see your texture maps...
[/ QUOTE ]That'd depend on the company. Our art director handles artist HR at our studio so if you'd want textures in that case. Show everything but just don't linger too long on anything. If you're going DVD quality, they can always pause if they want a better look at anything.
As for how to show them off, the simplest way is to drop the texture flat in for a few seconds after you've shown your model. You could try something fancier with the texture appearing on the same screen as your model, but it'd mean there are several things to examine on the screen at once which so things would be smaller and the HR fellow would likely have to watch the sequence a couple of times to see everything.
Alex