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 Using animation to demo your music. 
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Post Using animation to demo your music.
I've been messing around with Blender
Get it here -> https://www.blender.org/download/
Making music for animation can be very lucrative.
The software is absolutely free. Let your imagination go wild.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY0K65eXhkA[/youtube]

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Mon Jul 25, 2016 11:57 pm
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Wow! How can I resist? Thanks man! Definitely gonna check it out!


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Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:03 am
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Yes Blender looks cool, but the learning curve... holy crap... Totally counter intuitive to any other software I have ever used. The best I could do with the time I had available was to do some moving text (ala Swift 3d).

You know, making the music is the easy part getting it to market seems like a real grind...

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Tue Jul 26, 2016 9:35 am
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Werkspace, you know me--this topic has paigan0-bait written all over it! :) My apologies for the massive posting.

I've played with Blender for about 2 years now, ever since they allowed me to use my 2 MSI 980 graphic cards together at the same time--something I still can't do with any other program I have. Blender would do that even without them being SLI'd (linked with a circuitboard connector to make two GPUs sync together as one).

Judging by the "What do you do for a living" thread, 98% of us are in the IT fields, but for those not tech geeks, GPU is the graphics card version of a CPU. The GPUs can process several tiny things that only need a little bit of math processing quickly (like each pixel of a video screen), while CPUs are better for more complicated operations to much fewer things at a time. CPUs are generally clocked faster, but there's a heck of a lot more "cores" or little brains on a GPU than a CPU.

Blender can do all or more than several of the more expensive programs, like MAYA and AUTODESK (and I think they're one product now!)--and they are very expensive. They ALL have a high, high, learning curve so that's actually not as big a factor as you'd think.

Blender being open source, powerful, and free, has a HUGE community behind it and there are a metric shit-tonne of tutorials out there and samples. There are more importantly vast libraries you can "draw" on--I need a bridge, here's a bridge, here's a cup, here's a classroom, etc. With a vast library, worlds can be built with a cut and paste.

But I haven't touched Blender in almost a year now. Ever since I discovered the wonderful world of 3D Fractal Animation, I've been hooked, line and SINKERR. I can animate and build entire fractal worlds, and soar through them and explore them, and morph them, and twist them, and put random numbers into random boxes on sheets of formulas until something cool enough to melt your eyeballs pops out at me. And then melts my eyeballs. I'm a "script kiddie" (someone who uses software and snippets of code that he cannot write, only parrot) or a video game player who mashes buttons. I do not understand the higher-dimensional math that goes into these formulas. My latest video's formula would fit on a T-shirt, yet it can easily generate a 4-minute movie of about 7000 frames in 1920 by 1080 HD, and over 8 GBs of pixel data. I suspect fractals are the key to understanding the entire universe, and I am not actually joking by saying this. :ugeek: (That's obviously a much longer posting with particle and quantum physics, and WAVE and String theory, and branes and all that.)

My animation rendering gear so far, HARDWARE:
My main CPU is a fancy-dancy 16-core chip (I7 5960X) overclocked to 4.4 mHz; the GPUs (MSI 980s) are a fancy-dancy 2048-core chip each. That's 4098 GPU cores at around 1.6 mHz. And I have an HP Blade server with 5 i7 blades, each with 32 cores, out in the garage, plus I have 2 16-core rackmount servers in a closet in the basement, plus a Dell 8-core that runs the other GPU and plays Batman: Arkham Knight with the son, and then more house PCs and a MacMini that all can output together to generate one line of 1080p for each core of each PC and then stitch them all together. Somewhere around 240 PC cores in total.

SOFTWARE
There's a lot of fractal animation software out there. I recommend for doing what I'm doing, either Mandelbulb 3D or the better product that is much less popular, Mandelbulber, available at Mandelbulber.com. I use Mandelbulber for all of my videos now, either Mandelbulber version 2.8.1 for CPUs, or the older version for GPUs, version 1.21 (it's OpenCL, if that means anything to you.) I'm in contact and online friends with a few of the Mandelbulber Dev Team now, and I hope to get a GPU version of the latest Mandelbulber sometime this next year. Meanwhile I get fed formulas to try out and bug test and poke and prod and make them do phantasmagorical things.

My process and software at the moment: Mandelbulber CPU/GPU renders my 7-10K of jpeg frames, and then I use the free Virtual Dub to stitch jpeg or png frames together into a raw H264-codec .avi file, and then add the raw wave file to the video. That avi file goes to Adobe Premiere (not free, sorry) for watermarks and titles and transitions, and then gets uploaded to Youtube and Vimeo. Vimeo has better quality than Youtube and also allows people to download the original files--something you should really do if you like this stuff, because you're missing a TON of detail that is on the originals, which are compressed down to about 3 GBs.

And then posted to Facebook, Google, Twitter, and the Fractal Forums site (and occasionally here at Stickist, especially if it's a Stick song.)

So all of that results in this:

My latest 3D Fractal Animation & Music Video is "Knighty Night -- D is 4 Drone," featuring an original piano tune that is an exploration and exercise with one simple rule: every chord and measure has to have a D in it somewhere. I've posted this song (about 4 months or so old now) here before with a different video. The video is created using Mandelbulber v.1.21 OpenCL (with graphics cards (2 MSI 980s) instead of the CPU render farm). The formula is a custom algorithm based on the "knighty" formula ported over from V2, with some tweaks and optimizations from a friend and myself. My favorite animation yet! I really love this fractal world and formula. Cheers!


You tube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bms8_FOYdP0

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Tue Jul 26, 2016 2:52 pm
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
This is such a cool thread! Thanks for sharing. I have a very early ray-tracing rig from 1990 that achieves 5 fps on 20 cores! A wonderful piece of computing history.

(Off topic, but these days I'm looking for some 2d software that can replay animated pencil sketches. Any ideas?)


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Tue Jul 26, 2016 5:59 pm
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
I would like to share another resource.
http://www.scribd.com/search?page=1&content_type=documents&query=blender%20art

I used to spend $500+ per year on books. (my ongoing education fee)
I now spend only $50 per year at http://www.scribd.com/
Almost all of my books are now digital and fit on my USB Stick.
I often carry over 30,000 digital books in my pocket.

Blender can also be used as a precision modelling tool for 3D printers.
http://www.blendernation.com/2007/12/27/precision-modelling-pdf-guide/

You will find the stand-alone portable app Blender here.
http://portableapps.com/apps/graphics_pictures
The advantage is that it will run on corporate machines without installing anything.

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Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:04 pm
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
http://en.cze.cz/Images-to-video
Scronk wrote:
Off topic, but these days I'm looking for some 2d software that can replay animated pencil sketches. Any ideas?

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Tue Jul 26, 2016 7:28 pm
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Scronk wrote:
Off topic, but these days I'm looking for some 2d software that can replay animated pencil sketches. Any ideas?
My daughter Xandria (13) is into art and graphic art and she like to do animations as well. She's using Adobe Flash Pro and also Paint Tool Sai to do simple animations.

I'm trying to get her to use Blender as well, but she's used Flash and thinks it's the best thing in the world (it's the only thing in the world, as far as she knows, at the moment!).

I'm trying to get her into the industry standard Photoshop, but she wants to do animations and not just static images.

The whole suite of Adobe Creative Cloud software is EXTREMELY powerful and awesome. Premier and After Effects for video, Photoshop and Lightroom for images, Illustrator and Framemaker and Acrobat and Dreamweaver and many more. I get everything that Adobe puts out available to me at work, so I use a lot of it at home as well for my own stuff.

I don't know if Adobe Flash would work for you, but it sounds like my daughter is doing something similar to wanting to "replay animated pencil sketches."

Adds: I wasn't able to get the link you posted about images to video to work at first, so I used my cellphone.

If you just want to turn a folder of images into a movie file, use the free Virtual Dub, which is part of my lengthy fractal process up there a couple of posts. See this for the details:
http://www.virtualdub.org/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=34
Virtual Dub is free and powerful as well!

Cheers!

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Thu Jul 28, 2016 8:39 am
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Flash is great (No worky on the ipad or iphone, though so you'll have to save your .swf's as .mov) plus with cool easy 3d softwares like swift 3d, it's pretty cool.

For drawings, in particular softwares that will export as .dxf (Which is nice for CNC machines) Inventor and Solidworks is amazing. Solidworks, I have used both extensively and it really makes sense how you can build your components as parts and then piece them together in assemblies. Heck, Autocad I've used since, like 1998. (D'assault has a 'super-close-to-auto-cad' software for free called draftsight...) Even softwares like Viacad are

Blender is cool, especially for the price but I've used 3dS max and lightwave and they are WAY more intuitive, especially when it comes to workflow. lol I think I'd rather just pay for Cheetah, Rhino or Strata and get a good workflow haha (I use Cheetah, it's pretty nice) And I can CNC 3d print, waterjet, plasma or mill those files as well... Animation, I'm not sure I'm so interested in lol maybe...

I guess at the end of the day it depends what you want to achieve, and how much you are willing to spend.

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Thu Jul 28, 2016 8:57 am
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Post Re: Using animation to demo your music.
Jayesskerr wrote:
Flash is great (No worky on the ipad or iphone, though so you'll have to save your .swf's as .mov) plus with cool easy 3d softwares like swift 3d, it's pretty cool.

For drawings, in particular softwares that will export as .dxf (Which is nice for CNC machines) Inventor and Solidworks is amazing. Solidworks, I have used both extensively and it really makes sense how you can build your components as parts and then piece them together in assemblies. Heck, Autocad I've used since, like 1998. (D'assault has a 'super-close-to-auto-cad' software for free called draftsight...) Even softwares like Viacad are

Blender is cool, especially for the price but I've used 3dS max and lightwave and they are WAY more intuitive, especially when it comes to workflow. lol I think I'd rather just pay for Cheetah, Rhino or Strata and get a good workflow haha (I use Cheetah, it's pretty nice) And I can CNC 3d print, waterjet, plasma or mill those files as well... Animation, I'm not sure I'm so interested in lol maybe...

I guess at the end of the day it depends what you want to achieve, and how much you are willing to spend.
Ah, the whole suite of stuff for CNC and 3d prototyping and milling and all that--that's right up your alley, Scott!

I've used 3DS Max and Autodesk (that's the one that's one product now) as well as Lightwave, but I've never had to actually "work" with any of that software, strictly "play." So for me, learning 3DS Autodesk was just as great a learning curve as learning Blender, so I just went with the free one. Truth be told, I could probably find the more expensive software on the net where it's fallen of the back of a truck (pirated) but I figured if it was all new to me, might as well go with the free one, which is supposed to be as powerful as the industry giants. I hear Blender is overtaking more and more of the established market as well--but I'm not an animator by trade, just hobby, nor do I use CAD files much anymore.

I agree completely with this statement as well:
Quote:
I guess at the end of the day it depends what you want to achieve, and how much you are willing to spend.

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Thu Jul 28, 2016 9:13 am
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