Hey guys! I’m halfway through my first 3D Animation course and my teacher has given me the opportunity to create and lead a project. I chose a video of an amusement park. I will be creating the entrance and foliage for the park. Here is my reference image for the entrance:

How would I go about doing an animated sign as in the picture above, and is it plausible for someone on my level to complete it in an adequate amount of time. (Deadline is fully rendered avi by January 27). Thanks in advance!

What an odd assignment for a 3D animation course. You sure you’re not attending 3D modelling class? For animation, I think characters, dialogue, facial expressions, bipeds, walk cycles etc etc.
For modelling this, it looks mostly like boxes and then a Photoshop job for the sign.
Can you finish it in time? How the bloody h… would anybody but you know the answer to that…

Old in animation - New in the rest!

Voodooman 15 January 2012 08:26 PM

What an odd assignment for a 3D animation course. You sure you’re not attending 3D modelling class? For animation, I think characters, dialogue, facial expressions, bipeds, walk cycles etc etc.
For modelling this, it looks mostly like boxes and then a Photoshop job for the sign.
Can you finish it in time? How the bloody h… would anybody but you know the answer to that…

The class is called 3D Animation. We do a combination of modeling/animation. It is required that we have one project that deals with science, and thus my project deals with physics, a theme park. For the entrance, I’m modeling it and I’m wondering how will I animate the sign. You know, the scrolling ones that use lights to form words. Not the giant Kings Dominion one, but the one below.

By wondering if I could finish it in time, would it take me 3 hours, 4 hours, 5 days? To animate the lights. It’s more of an estimate, rather than a definitive answer. Thank you for your response.

You’re talking about the “Park Crowded...” part? Create a wide image of all the words (plus some bank space at the end), apply it to just the polys of that part of the sign, apply a UVW Map (set to Planar) and animate the UV’s Gizmo. It will probably take longer to create the image than do what is necessary in Max.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.

Steve_Curley 16 January 2012 06:41 AM

You’re talking about the “Park Crowded...” part? Create a wide image of all the words (plus some bank space at the end), apply it to just the polys of that part of the sign, apply a UVW Map (set to Planar) and animate the UV’s Gizmo. It will probably take longer to create the image than do what is necessary in Max.

Thank you very much for your help! Worked perfectly!

@Doughboy
I meant more along the lines of the time it would take to create the image with the proposed suggestion, but your information helped a lot too! I normally render using just animation, because we normally render between classes.

Re Render Times: If only the sign, and nothing else moves, you could save a lot of render time by rendering the scene with a blank sign as a single still frame. Then render just the animated sign onto that still image for the whole sequence.