from flame news
quick example by Eric Schaechter
 
 

Some time ago there was a thread on flame-news which was called "impossible shot" which started with the following message:
 

lkfdsjhsadlfkjhfdsalkjhfsda

Some answers later, the same person who sent this first message (xxx) came up with a solution, which involved using static particles to generate the corn field. At the time I carved out a bit of time to learn this so I found myself some corn images on the internet and re-created the problem.
 

Download everything at once	trigo_setups.tar.gz (xxx kb)  - que incluya un readme
Here's the action setup:	particulas_estaticas.action.txt  (x kb) (after download, remove the .txt extension before loading into action)
And here are the related images	trigo.jpg          (x kb) trigo_mt1.jpg   (x kb) trigo_mt2.jpg   (x kb) trigo_mt3.jpg   (x kb) piso.jpg           (x kb)
For those of you with time, here are the warper setups to make the corns "sway" with the wind	trigo1.warper   (x kb) trigo2.warper   (x kb) trigo3.warper   (x kb)

Note: Before starting, let me excuse the quality of the images, camera movements, lighting..., but remember this was no actual job, but rather a test I did to learn a technique. You will see that you can acheive photorealistic results if you give it more time than I did, just watch (xxx)'s original test images   ;-)

(IMAGEN DEL ESQUEMATICO)

I generated the particles with 3 different corns, all taken from the same image. Thus I needed 3 particle branches, each working similarly. To generate the particles use an
image, in this case an extended bicubic to break the flatness of the "terrain".

The manipulator's speed is set to 0 and the amount of particles per generator is determined with the number variable, which is animated from frame 1 to frame 2:

(IMAGEN DE LA GRAFICA)

Each particle has an image mapped to it. This is done by setting the particle type to "Quad" and adding to it a texture in "wrap" mode. The texture is one of our corn layers.

OPTIONAL:

Before entering action, go through each of the warper setups included (Front=trigo, Back=black, Matte=trigo_mt) and render fromt and matte. Use the appropriate matte for each setup (i.e. trigo_mt1 for trigo1.warper). Once again, these warper setups would need *a lot* of help should this be a real job.

Loop the resulting clips some 10 times and then enter action and substitute the original layers with these ones

Here are my modest results:

quicktime (10 sec, 1,300 mb)
jpeg (640x480, 125 kb)

Here are the final images by (xxx) from (xxx-studios in xxx)
 

One final note:

Recently (xxx) suggested to make particles static by adding the following function manipulator:

dfsalñjkhdfs

(I have not yet checked thid one out)

Of course this technique has many great uses appart from corn fields. I hope you will make good use of this tip in your work, and wouldn't mind getting an e-mail from you if such was the case.