Im looking for some advice on how to create a animation to have street names or signs fade in and out during a fly through/drive through.

something like where the object fade’s in at about 200m away and fades out as you pass it

Chris. This is a simple task if you do it during post processing of the animation i.e. fading in titles, street names and signs in Premiere, Windows Movie Maker etc etc.

But if you want to do it in Dynamite / Max, its a little more work. One method you could use would be to add a vertical animation to each street name / sign. Time each sign to rise above the ground model as your camera approaches the sign. Could be alot of work if you have alot of street names / signs thou !! I’m sure there are alternative/better methods in Max, but this is one method anyway.

cheers Mark

Thanks Mark,

I have been looking at using movie maker but i found it hard to locate the text in exactly the right spot.

another question i have been told that you can simply photoshop the text onto the slides that make up the movie.

have you used this way before?

Yeah, while Movie Maker is very simple to learn and use (and its free) it doesn’t allow you to place text in exact spots. There are other movie compilers out there that let you place text where ever you want i.e. Vegas, Premiere, Camtasia, Pinnacle etc. Down side is that some of these software’s are not free. (you can download free trials thou to test out)

Using Photoshop to place text onto the slides sounds fairly painful and time consuming. I’ve never used that method before, but I’m no expert in Photoshop !!

cheers Mark

What I would do is use the Visibility Track in 3ds Max. This allows you to fade the visibility of objects in and out over time, which for me is the easiest approach.  Just create your street names and otehr labels as static geometry, then control their visibility through the dedicated visbility track for each object.

Visibiity Tracks need to be explicitly added to each object that you want to control in this way which can be done from the Track View panel in 3ds Max.

Adding street names in post production sucks unless it’s an output that’s rendered from your camera or you’re just using static titles in one position of the view.  Trying to line up text with a moving point is pure pain.

I use the visability track as Bruce suggests.  It’s not too hard and you can copy and paste the info to reduce some of the repetition.  You could then render it as a part of your scene or if the cameras finalised, have it as a seperate render and use it as an overlay in your editing software.

Wow,
I think that would suit my needs by far the best i will test it and see how it goes.

thanks again.

Yup, let us know.  The good thing about using the visability track is that it gets you used to using graphs which you can use in soo many different ways with anything else that can be animated.

You could also use a gradient ramp material with animated properties in addition to the fade or in lieu of. A good example of how to do this was shown in Louis Marcoux class last year at AU. http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=class&session_id=3773

Yup, animate the opacity of the material would work.