3D design and animation

[UKBob]

Just a general query (im not a techie)

If you build a scene in 3DS max, rendered 30 frames (no camera movement, the same frame 30 times over) and imported them into flash, would it be possible to loop the scenes over and over again so that the scene appeared to be live video.

The flash side of this is perfectly possible (one could even randomize the order in which frames are shown) but my query is this (Im not a max user)

When rendering frames (of a castle for example) how would one get each rendered frame to be exactly the same, but to have subtle lighting difference which made all 30 frames appear to be live?

example. If I take 30 photos with my camera on a tripod, the lighting in the room makes the frames look like video when run together.

What I dont want is max to render the same scene again and again, and end up with 30 pixel perfect identical frames, which actually look like still image when played back in sequence.

Not looking for flash trickery solutions, just hoping someone can educate me on the max side of thigns.

To confirm, the video loop needs to appear to be seamless, with a camera which does not move. A loop that can be recognised as a look after its played 10 times will not suffice.

[Bodo]

I'm not a 3DS user as well, but I use other 3D software.

You'd need to move one or all lights in the scene, in order to get a recognizeable movie without the camera or the object moving (if I understood you right?).

When you let the light move in a loop, each frame 1/30th part of the loop, then it will play seamless when repeated.

Alias Maya is an application that will allow you doing all this. You would define a curve on which the light/s are moving, and render the picture right to *.swf vector format. (It creates thirty seperate vector frames in to a flash movie).

[drea]

I am a MAX user.

I'd try adding a film grain render effect (from the rendering menu). The scene will be static, but the grain structure changes each frame. It's subtle, but it really brings the shot alive.

[simpo two]

Any reason for 30 fps? As a video bod, that smells like NTSC to me whereas PAL is 25fps. Wouldn't reducing the fps make for a shorter download time/filesize?

[stig]

If you just want to affect the lighting, you can add 'noise' to the light value. This will subtly change the lighting parameters (you can vary the degree of change depending on the amount of noise variance you specify) to give you the effect you need.

At a push, you could always just render one frame and play around with the image levels in Photoshop, saving multiple versions of the same base frame.