One of the reasons for building my newest Phase II ship is that I've decided I'm going to learn to animate and I wanted to do Phase II animations but I'm not happy with the old model. I tried animating once years ago on my old Compaq with the AMD K6-2 533 MHz processor with the whole 64 MB of RAM and tS 3 and it totally sucked. I've got the new PC (AMD Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM) and tS 7, so I decided over the weekend that I was going to start animating.
So, I did a couple simple flybys with a planet rendered into the background instead of an actual mesh and some little sound FX I created in Audacity (I can upload it if you people really want to see it but it's not all that special.) It went well so I decided to try something more complex with camera turns and a modeled planet (modeled planets are over-rated, BTW
) Anywho, it was going well until I realized tS 7 has a major flaw (besides the frequent program crashes.) Not only can it only handle 4k textures, like every previous version of tS, but it can also apparently only load a certain amount of (what it considers to be) large textures before it refuses to render. This isn't the case in tS 4. So, I was dismayed but I moved the animation studio over to good ol' tS 4. I even managed to export my mesh to a tS 4 friendly .cob so that I didn't have to retexture and I only had to redo a few of the lights.
Sooo..... this was rendered in trueSpace 4.2 over the last couple days and the sound FX are done in Audacity. It's actually 2 sequences, the first ends just after the turn (allowing me to get rid of the planet and movable starfield in favor of a rendered background, speeding up my render times considerably.) I spliced them together and added the sound with Windows Movie Maker. Incidentally, before Saturday, I'd never used either Audacity or Windows Movie Maker.
Also, this animation is going to be part of a longer sequence, I have more animations to make for it. I also plan to do a "Phase II" 2 or 3 minute sort of mini-movie with different animations daisy chained together and some music. :evil:
