Is it possible to do such thing in max? You know, to achieve animation effect like special effects in Jason and the Argonauts for example. or dinosaurs in really old s-f movies

Of course it is possible. Animation in Max or any other 3D software for that matter is very much like stop motion animation. The main difference is the software can do interpolations for you.

If you want a stop motion like "look" to your animation then treat it the same. Make your own frame by frame pose and render without motion blur. This is exactly what stop motion animation would have been.

thanks

wow, that's sounds scary. sitting and making about 1200 frames for one-minute cinematic shot... is there any way to do something like this: make the standard motion blur animation, and then convert it somehow to achieve this 'jumps' in movement?

You could use normal animation technique in 3D and maybe render at a lower framerate and without motion blur. So in stead of rendering at 30fps render it at 15fps. This will create a bit of a gap inbetween each frame and give it a jumpy look. Without motion blur it should be fairly convincing for stop motion look. You can make some tests and see what works. I'm just trying to come up with the theory.

that won't work perfectly as it will need to be converted to 30fps in most cases.

Here's what I used to do:

make your keyframe in pose A. Go to the point where pose B is susposed to me (say, 3 seconds later). Move 1 frame before & make another keyframe jsut like A. Move one frame forward & make a keyframe B. Now, it will jump from one position to another, instantly.

No need to do such things THF, in the "motion" panel, you can define what trajectory blend between a key A and a key B will look like, just choosing the "in" & the "out" curves, you can directly choose here to not smooth at all the "between keys A & B".

But doing this is not really the good way, you will make all the frame manually? long job.

I deffinitivly go for the obihb one, and at the end, merging a 30/24fps animation (for a non stop motion character) and the 10/15fps one into max videopost to a full 30/24fps movie will definitivly give you the best results.

hey, i haven't used max/lightwave/maya in 7 years.

yep, but only one thing in the scene need to look like stop-motion animated, so rendering at 15/fps is not solving my problem. and it will not be rendered in max, it will be exported to d3. so, looks like i really need to do it frame by frame.... is it really impossible to convert or do something to autocreate several keyframes in second from one simple animation?

for christ sake, such a big and expensive program, and probably can't help me with my work stylization, what a shame.

Ok, so another thing you can do for you needs will be to set your fps to 10 (or what you want lower than 15, less it is, more stop motion it is...), then create your animation with no blend method between keys (in motion panel), then when it's done, select all your bones and make keys at each frame from their actual position (still with no blend), then rescall fps (not time) to 30.

Theorically, you will have a 30fps anim with many keys, but looking like a 10fps one.

@THF: man, i just discovered it 6 months ago, and i started with 3d studio 2 under dos... lol. :wink:

-edit- maybe 3ds studio 4, don't remember, but it was not yet MAX.

In case you are a programmer, you could write a maxscript that converts your animation to a new one with keyframes every x frames (kinda like "baking" animation).

Because Doom3 interpolates md5 animations, you'd have to export it at a high framerate so that Doom3's interpolation doesn't make it all smooth again.

For example, if you want the stop-motion effect have a framerate of 15 frames/sec, I'd say the md5anim created from it should have 60 or something, which means 4 frames in a row would have the same pose. But still your animated character in Doom3 will sometimes have poses that are interpolated.

thank you all for your help

strange... i even tried copy/pasting frames for the imp walk in the md5anim file & it didn't work. in the editor you see him stutter his walk, but in game it doesn't work. like it's ignoring the md5anim i made completely & using the stock one.

All I did was copy/paste frame content over other fames.