2001 style slitscan effect

[Starbase1]

Hi All,
Some time ago I did some 'slitscan' effects, like the light show near the end of the film 2001. (Well, a bit!). Anyway, I thought others might be interested in seeing how I did it, so I put together some sample scenes and objects.Docs included.

I'll upload it to the file areas shortly, but I thought this would be a better way for people to discuss it, (if anyone feels like it!). I'd certainly be very interested to see any good stuff you do with it.

In this example I have only used shaders included with lightwave, but I have had even better results with IFW2 shaders - long wavy lines work particularly well.

Is there any kind of a prize available for the best animation using only 2 polygons and 4 points???!!!
:D:D:D

Nick

[bmckain]

I can't help but think of the old Amiga scene when I see these. They just look like they came straight out of a demo.

[Starbase1]

I can't help but think of the old Amiga scene when I see these. They just look like they came straight out of a demo.

I'm not surprised, it's really a very simple scene!

But I've wondered before now what happened to the demo scene - there were some truly spectacular visuals produced with what was, by todays standards, incredibly low powered hardware. Why are we not seeing anything a hundred times more amazing now?

Nick

[Rigel]

I'm not surprised, it's really a very simple scene!

But I've wondered before now what happened to the demo scene - there were some truly spectacular visuals produced with what was, by todays standards, incredibly low powered hardware. Why are we not seeing anything a hundred times more amazing now?

Nick

Because the whole point of the demo scene was to get maximum graphics and sound in the fewest bytes you could manage.

Sure, today's high powered pc's could make stunning visuals that would blow demos out of the water. They would also range in size from 10mb to 120mb. Demos were (usually) written in machine language code to minimize the byte count. How many kids these days, so proud of their Guitar Hero skills, or their mad pwnge in Half Life or Team Fortress even know what machine language is?

The demo scene had it's time. It was programmers trying to outdo other programmers in the maximum bang/minimum byte game, but it's gone now.

Starbase1, that is just so pyschedelic! Groovy, man, groovy.

[Starbase1]

Thanks Rigel!

One thing I do not understand, that someone may be able to advise with...

I want to use these clips on Youtube for a friends band - Other stuff I have done looks fine (at least before its upload) after optimising for youtube. But Scenes from this tend to look much more visibly compressed.It shows a bit in the video clip I include in the archive.

Is there something about this kind of scene that compresses badly, or is there something I can do to improve matters? I suppose the defining characteristics are, lots of movement across the scene, lots of black, shoft shading between colours.

I'm using uLead video studio - as I said, it works great with other stuff. Anyone got any ideas?

[Rigel]

It's probably the colour and movement causing the problems. Compression means removing data and with all of those curves in there, the moment you drop a couple of bytes, you've got jaggies.

No suggestions on how you could fix it though.

[Starbase1]

It's probably the colour and movement causing the problems. Compression means removing data and with all of those curves in there, the moment you drop a couple of bytes, you've got jaggies.

No suggestions on how you could fix it though.

Yeah, and the softer areas come out worst. Hmmm... Maybe I should try running it through a sharpen filter, and see what comes out. It's abstract, so any artefacts of sharpening I can claim are deliberate!
:D

[Mahoney]

wow, but how did Kubrick do it back than?

[Starbase1]

wow, but how did Kubrick do it back than?

Douglas Trumbull did it for 2001...

For more details see here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slitscan

And the clever chap here has untangled the film 2001, to recreate the images that were fed in!
http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

[Montana Joe]

Takes me back to 1968... oh, wait... was that yesterday?

Nice work... any settings we can emulate?

[Starbase1]

Takes me back to 1968... oh, wait... was that yesterday?

Nice work... any settings we can emulate?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by settings. The basic idea is to take a texture, and apply a gradient to it to control colour, and whizz it towards the camera. So you can easily change the function driving the texture, or the colours in the gradient. It works very well with many of the IFW2 surfaces.

Does that cover it?
Nick

[dever123]

Where is Douglas Trumbull when you need him