Hello All! I would like to thank God and all those responsible for making such a great app. (EI - duh.. )
I am a novice at best and have a million questions. But the main thing I like to do is Sci-Fi style anime
So that means flying my little spaceships through the EI 3D Universe. But, how do I get the background to track
or match my camera movements. I have been playing with the Camera’s Rotoscope -Background setting but not sure how those numbers relate the camera’s actual position(s) in the animation.
Is there thumb rule? A secret formula? Do I have to have the join some secret society and learn that secret hand shake?
A space battle awaits for me.. but first I must track the stars with my camera… any help from anyone on this planet would be appreciated..

-Vivek
I am using the 3DToolkit and I have version 2.9. .. ok stop laughing.. and help me please..

Hi Vivek,
When you say you need to have the background match the camera’s movements, do you mean that your background is a separate image? e.g. a separate star-field image.

How about mapping the star-field image to the inside of a very large sphere (luminance channel - so that you don’t need to light the sphere separately). Then have your action sequence within the sphere.

To save on render time and simplify animating the elements within the sphere, render the space ship animation and the background as two separate passes, i.e. turn off the already created and mapped sphere and render your foreground action sequence with an alpha channel.

Then turn off the space ships and foreground elements and just render the background using the same camera you used to render the spaceships. Thus camera motion affecting the background will match the earlier action sequence.

Composite both in After Effects or any other compositing software.

Hope this is what you had in mind.

Aziz.

2.9 is OK Vivek - there’s no GI in space!

If I remember there used to be a big dipper plugin that came with EI, specifically for making starfields (see the tutorials files that came with the old EI). Or there’s power particles. Otherwise aziz’ tip of a big sphere is good. make it very big!

Roto will be no good unless you want to create 3D tracking data on a background plate in another app (eg syntheyes) from real footage. You would import the data for the EI camera to use, then comp in the BG (which you would often do in a post app like after effects rather than directly in EI using the roto feature - more flexibility) . But unless you’ve been flying around in space with your video camera recently this won’t be very useful!

Rory

I used a huge sphere, with it’s normals pointing inward, for this shot:

Earth Approach

Parent the sphere to the camera and the stars will always stay at “infinity” no matter what the camera does. Uncheck inherit “Rotation” so the camera can pan as ships go cruising past.

I would also follow Aziz’s advice. Render all your ships, stars, planets, separately with alpha channels and composite them together for maximum flexibility and control.

Hi All

Actually the using of “large environment sphere object” is a way to go. But it’s not only “not elegant” (and forces user to make a lot of tricky setups) but also decreases RT speed significantly. Good news are coming in EI8

hello fellow gents
thanks for the help I am going to upload some test samples later this weeked to show you what I have done so far.
And yes as soon as I can get my hands on one of those UFOs that the government has hidden I will get some onlocation footage from space!

-vivek
live long and render prosperly