Transparent AVI in Muvizu in 4 easy steps

So I've been playing around with transparent AVI files in Muvizu recently. They are actually really useful for making videos with as you can do all sorts of neat tricks with them that would be impossible otherwise. There's a couple of videos that have been made already using this tip, check them out here.

I've made a tutorial video to take you through the process of making an AVI with transparency and importing it into Muvizu. All you need to do is -

Step 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=0m55s
Configure Muvizu. You need to make sure Muvizu 3D animation software is not running and then go to c:\program files\muvizu\muvizugame\config and open the file DefaultGame.ini and change the tag bStripVideoAlpha to false.

Step 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=2m40s
Image editor and Virtual Dub. Make sure that you have an image editor that will allow you to save transparency within a PNG file. Microsoft paint will not allow you to save the transparency so you will need something like GIMP (http://www.gimp.org) or Adobe Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com). Then you will need to have the latest experimental version of Virtual Dub (http://www.virtualdub.org) this is version 1.10.0, either of the 32bit and 64bit versions will work fine.


Step 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=4m01s
Create your transparent video frames. In this example we take a screen shot of the "Axe in the head" character attachment and using Photoshop generate 24 frames of this axe spinning around 360 degrees.

Step 4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BUjgTuREI0&t=10m43s
Import your video frames into Virtual Dub and then configure Virtual Dub to output the transparency within the AVI. To do this you will need to go to the Video - Colour depth option and make sure that "Decompression format" is on "Autoselect" and that "Output format to compressor/display" is on "Same as decompression format". Then you need to ensure that Virtual Dub is using the "(Uncompressed RGB/YCbCr)" codec. That's it. Save your file as an AVI and import it in to Muvizu.

There are other things you can do with this technique. In my example I've basically stop motioned the axe spinning around however, you can use other existing video - of a character walking about, for example - and using a mask or other tools remove the background to import just the characters movement. You could even film yourself on a green screen background and chroma key out the background to leave only yourself in the video to be imported, and then interact with a Muvizu character.

Hopefully this tutorial is clear and easy to follow and the technique is useful to you!

Directing cameras in Muvizu 3D - An overview

I thought I'd do a little overview video this week to explain all of the available controls for directing your cameras in Muvizu 3D animation software.

There are a lot of options to do this however, most of them take a bit of practice to get the most out of them.

To begin with you have the keyboard controls. These are WASD, Q, E, [, ], Page Up, Page Down and the arrow keys.

The W and S keys will let you move the camera forward while, the A and D keys will let you strafe your camera left or right. The Q and E keys will let you move your camera up and down respectively. Next up are the square bracket keys (that's [ and ]). These will let you roll the camera to the left and to the right. Additional to the roll you can tilt the camera up and down with the Page Up and Page Down keys and finally the arrow keys will allow you to move the camera forwards and backwards as well as rotating the camera view to the left and the right. The main difference between the forwards and backwards arrow and the W and S keys is that W and S will move your camera on the level it is at, regardless of the angle that the camera is facing whereas the forward and backwards arrow keys will let you apply the tilt angle to the forwards or backwards movement.

Next up is the mouse, you can use the left mouse button to move the camera forwards, backwards and steer to the left and right at the same time. The right mouse button allows you to rotate the camera around 360 degrees without moving it from the current position. Finally you can use both mouse buttons together to lift the camera up or down as well as strafing to the left and right.

My big tip for directing camera movement is to use the mouse wheel. If you push this forwards then the camera will start moving forward and continue to do so until you pull the mouse wheel back a little to stop the movement. The same will happen if you pull the mouse wheel backwards, the camera will automatically continue to move backwards until you push the mouse wheel forwards to stop the movement.

This is my preferred method of directing camera movement in Muvizu 3D as it allows me to set the camera moving and then all I need to focus on is using the keyboard to rotate left, or right and tilt up, down and so forth without trying to hold another key to keep the camera moving.

So what do you do when you direct cameras? Leave a comment with you top tips below!

Royalty free and commercial use audio

I've struggled for a while to find good sound effects and music that can be used on my youtube videos. There are a lot of sites out there that offer royalty free content however, they want you to buy the music or sound effects first of all. Other sites give you Creative Commons non-commercial attribution licenses. These are mostly good to use but, as the license states they do not allow for commercialisation of your video on youtube (or else where for that matter).

It's taken a long time to track these sites down but so far I have these 2 main sites as the best source of audio content online that will allow you to commercially distrabute your videos and animations on youtube. Or else where.

http://incompetech.com/
http://www.freesound.org

The first site has a lot, and I mean a lot, of music. Especially considering that it is all produced by one person (Kevin MacLeod) and the only condition on use is that the audio is listed within the video as coming from that site, by the musician and which track it was you used. The second site is a collection of sound effects. Well, the audio there is not specifically made as sound effects and a lot of it can be a bit raw as it's just a site for people to upload any and all noises to. Most of them are within context (tagged, titled, etc) to make it easy to find the type of noise that you want and you just need to register a free account to download a track. All of the sounds there are listed under the creative commons no rights reserved license, so you can download them and then edit them and include them in your own videos, animations or other works for commercial distribution without any problems.

Of course, the best way to get sound effects is to make them yourself. The music on the other hand is not as easy for those of use less musically inclined. Producing the content yourself is time consuming though.

The one site I found that was of interest as well is http://www.fiverr.com it's a site that lets people offer services for $5 - hence the name of the site, everything is $5 - and they have a lot of voice over artists listed there. Most of the ads say it's limited to 60 seconds which sounds ideal for my own videos as I tend to be between 2 and 5 minutes in  length and I don't think any of my characters would have more than 1 minute of dialogue in the whole video. I've not tried this yet but I will and report back here once I do.

Does anyone else know of good resources to use or what do you use or do?

Dialogue recording problems!

So this is my first blog post here! Woohoo! I had wanted the page http://cerebraldump.blogspot.com but that is already taken. Bah. So this one will do for now.

I was trying to record some dialogue last night and everything seemed to be going well. I made a few mistakes here and there and had to repeat my lines, no big deal though. I just removed the mistakes with audacity and thought it was all good. That was until I ran it through the normalise effect and noise removal. As it turns out, my mic had picked up the dup-dup-dup from the washing machine of the neighbour above me. D'oh. I've not been able to remove the noise with any of the effects in Audacity, so I've just had to live with it. After I played it back, through the speakers and with headphones in work this morning, I was not able to hear it. So all good then? Mostly, I'm still trying to find out how to remove that type of background noise with Audacity. Maybe one day I will find out - does anyone know how to?

Anyway, in case you've not been following my youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/cerebraldump) I bought a new mic specifically to record audio for my animations. Check out this video to see the quality difference.

I also have a twitter account @ http://www.twitter.com/cerebraldump - I post my favourites and uploaded videos there. Check it out or follow if you like what you see!