People n Motion and ArchiCAD

[Anonymous]

Does anyone know a way to place Merlin Studio's People N Motion into an archicad scene? Im having trouble finding ways to convert the 3ds, obj, lwo, or max files. I would love to use the people passing by and talking on phones and lights coming on and off in my presentations. if anyone has any suggestions i would very appreciative.
Thank You

[stefan]

I strongly suggest you do animations in an external program, like 3ds max, Lightwave, Cinema4D, ... There's only so much a CAD-program can do. The only animation I would do in ArchiCAD is a sun study...

[Anonymous]

Ppl walking around is overrated.
If you look at any TV documentary about architecture, you willl notice things rarely move around (cars, ppl, doors, elevators).
More: cameras rarely move around!
It's all in rendering some really good fixed images, maybe 2 or 3 small clips with simple camera movements, and then editing them on a video editing program, which is probably allready inside your computer (Windows Movie Maker or Imovie).
If you want to do lights, you can allways render the same scene with various light settings, and then show them sequencially.
Ah, and dont forget to pic a nice background music.
And please, PLEASE, dont do flythroughs.

[Anonymous]

i'd have to agree on flythru's - awful

in imovie the 'ken burns effect' (panning/zooming over stills) works surprisingly well

bill

[Dwight]

Another simple utility "Still Life" allows for panning, cross fading and zooming of stills, producing a multi-media effort with soundtrack for $30.

[Anonymous]

Dwight wrote:
Another simple utility "Still Life" allows for panning, cross fading and zooming of stills, producing a multi-media effort with soundtrack for $30.

Unfortunately does not work on Windows platform. Are there any programs that do a similar job for windows.

Richard

[Dwight]

MIght in Adobe Premiere. But pricey.

[stefan]

I've did some "panning stills" in the cheap $100 (Windows-only) Sony Screenblast Movie Studio, a usable light-version of Sony Vegas, which is a competitor for Premiere.

Although Premiere is usable, I found the MovieStudio/Vegas-interface a lot more direct and friendly and it allowed me to be more creative then with Premiere, even on my aging PC. It's a shame that there is no Mac-version, but they have free iMovie & cheap Final Cut Express, so they can't complain 😉

[Anonymous]

I always try to do some camera displacement when I do a simple pan. This way, the final result doesn't appear so "flat", like a viewmaster slide (remember them?).
The slight camera movement, for instance a vertical one, gives an extra depth to the image. A simple pan feels just like that, as if you where panning across a still picture.
So I really don't see any use to this kind of guizmos.
As for zoom, I simply avoid them. Mostly.

[Karl Ottenstein]

Doesn't Flash work well for these things - pan/zoom/fade between images, at a fraction of the file size of video files?

Karl