Matrix Bullettime Effect

[Nighthawk_1989]

Hi guys!!!
I'm new in this game and you are all very good. i need some help to a school project. i'm making a movie and i want the matrix bullettime effect in it. I have 3ds max but i don't know how to do it.
I read some tutorials, but i didn't understand a thing.

like this one. very difficult to understand

3D Kingdom

is there somebody in here who ca teach me that or have some better tutorials???

Thanks for paying attention guys!!!!

[ross_coe]

i think that most tutorials concerning bullet-time in max are going to need a certain degree of good working knowledge of the software (as will most special FX shots). what parts of the 3dkingdom tutorial are you having trouble with?

and out of interest....which element of "bullet-time" are you trying to achieve? are you going only for the bullet flying thu the air....or do you also want to add the slow-motion camera movement???

here's a tutorial for the camera movement...in case you need it too...
http://www.angelfire.com/fl5/jcmiller/Bullet.htm
most search results for bullet time all point to the same 3dkingdom tut tho

[Nighthawk_1989]

bullet flying threw the air

Some places i think it's difficult to undertand what to do. i made the bullet, did some other stuff and after that i didn't undertand the rest of the tutorial.
So i need som help here guys!

thank you for answering

And Ross you have an extremely cool website
This is not something i'm saying just to get help from you or something. But it's something i really mean. It's extremely cool

[ross_coe]

i'll have a proper look at the tutorial and work thru it myself later, then see if i can give you more help (after my saturday afternoon pint) what version of max are you using out of interest?

and thanks for the kind comments about my site i think i really need to update it tho....but there's so much coding that I've forgotten where to begin and a few people had trouble navigating it, so i might design a new layout.
cheers

[Nighthawk_1989]

Thanks for helping me Ross
I'm using 3ds Max 7.0

[anhon]

I've done the bullet time effect the really tedious way, and it really requires scripting with maxscript in order to do it easily. I've seen scripts for early versions of max, but nothing written particularly for max 7. They all looked too complicated for me. I thought it might help to explain the concept of bullet time and what makes it look awesome...

I've seen that tutorial above, and the camera placement is correct, but the cheat with stopping the animation by deleting keyframes wont produce a good effect for action. Bullet time is supposed to show a changing camera view during a frozen instant of action, so the motion blur on a moving object needs to be the same all the time, and it will not be there if you stop the animation. It's all about getting a different viewpoint of the same frame of animation in the middle of the action.

What I do is decide where i want the cam at the start and end of the bullet time shot, and how long i want the effect to last.

then i animate the camera movement from start the of bullet time shot to the end of it.

I name the camera X01 to differentiate it from other cams in the scene, then use the snapshot tool to create a camera for every frame of the bullet time segement. If your bullet time is 2 seconds and your anim is 24 fps, then you'll end up with 48 bullet time cams named X01 to X48.

Then is the tedious part of it, rendering the frame from each camera. I did this manually with video post, setting up a camera event, then an image output event for each camera. Then just execute the Video Post Sequnce , set the output to SINGLE FRAME, not a range of frames.
it sucks to do it this way, but it gets the effect done.

I've been meaning to figure out enough maxscript to be able to automatically assign the image output of each cam, that would really be the best way to do it.

again, i always talk too much, but i hope i made myself clear enough. good luck.

[Nighthawk_1989]

i don't think we are talking about the same bullettime effect
Do we?

I talk about that one where there are rings behind the bullet. it's named bullet trail time effect i think.

you mean the other one or? that with changing camera?

Thanks

[anhon]

oh sorry. Bullet time has become a generic term in visual effects these days for moving cameras while freezing time. i guess i should have read more carefully. i can think of a bunch of good ways to do the pressure waves that come off of the bullet using particles with instanced ringwaves and a refractive raytrace material, but i'm not about to write a step by step tutorial about it... you need to really research the help file in MAX and get to know what it can do before you try anything even remotely fancy. Also, lots of movie effects are the result of many different rendered layers and go through several editing and compositing programs before they look as good as they do. By knowing how to use MAX render elements or RPF / RLA file outputs and Adobe after effects or especially discreet combustion, you can make far superior composited effects with only 1 tenth of the render time it would take to do it all in MAX. Not that this helps really, i'm just saying you can't expect professional results until you've got a few years experience and experimentation under your belt.