Digital Painting Software - tutorials with PD Pro Digital Painter 4.1: post work special effects movie specialFX holywood style effects, rising air, turbulent water, animated displacement mapping

PD Pro tutorials:

Post Work with PD Pro 4.1: moving into the scene:
Transforming the Scale in the Timeline, and how to 'Save Often!'

more tutorials:

PD Particles

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After extending the clip at the start and at the end by a few seconds each, perhaps we would like to make a slight change in the cameramovement some

here. For example, at the end of the clip, when the camera comes to a stop, looking at the desert dunes, perhaps we'd like to gently drift into that scene.

Of course we can't re-render the scene from 3D, no time for that. We'll have to do what we can just by scaling/transforming the existing frames.

Select the Timeline editor from the Animation menu:

Animation > Timeline...

This will bring up the tool that lets you apply filters along the frames on the timeline.

Select the Transform filter, and set a keyframe at 100% (1.0 factor) scale, essentially unchanged, for the start of the animation.

Then set another keyframe with same value near the end, where the zoom will start to increase.

Thereafter, increase the scale, or perhaps also change the position a little, drifting upward. Set another keyframe towards the end.

You can now render the filter and it will keep the clip unchanged for most of it. Towards the end, it will gradually and slightly scale up (zoom in) and drift a bit higher if you changed the position too.

Ok, so now the movie may look a nit like this:

Notice how towards the end of the clip, we don't come to a standstill. Instead, we start drifting forward and a little up as well, thanks to the scale transformation we just applied. There is however also a little bit of black border showing, towards the midle. It's because of the Sline interpolation, sort of 'overshooting' the scale that's about to happing. The Spline interpolation could be disabled on that scaling transform. Or we could force a keyframe along the center of the clip so as to not get the transform in that area.

Keep in mind that you do have one level of Undo available in the timeline editor. It can be disabled if you prefer to work faster (without the disk i/o) but it is usually recommended when experimenting and learning that you keep it enabled. Don't uncheck the "Save undo" box, or you won't be ableto undo.

Save Often...

Be sure to often save your work in progress, and use a number in the file name. Make that number increase each time so you have a historical reference as to which save was done first and which was done last.

The native DWA format is the fatest to save, so it's perfect for a quick memory dump. You want to occasionally do some house cleaning though, since these are uncompressed files. Make sure you don't run out of disk space.

External DWA Viewer for Quick Movie Playback?

If you need an external standalone movie player that can play your DWA animation files directly from disk without loading into RAM, check the free DWA Viewer. It is Open Source software and you're welcome to make your own, port it to Mac and Linux, make a plugin version for Irfanview and other popular viewers.

See http://www.thebest3d.com/dogwaffle/freebies/plugins/index.html#DWAviewer for more details on the DWA Viewer.