The Blender Sequence Editor

Fourth Animation: a jumping logo

Let’s create some more randomness and chaos! Take a logo (We can just add a text object) and make it jump through the screen. Again, the easiest way to do this is to add vertices directly into the IPO window (select a LocX, LocY or LocZ channel first), but this time you may need to be a bit more careful with the minimum and maximum values for each channel. Don’t worry about the looks of this one too much – the next step will make is hardly recognizable anyway:

Save the animation as ‘jumpylogo.avi’.

Fifth Animation: particle bars

Our last effect will use an animated mask. By combining this with the logo of the previous step, I will achieve a streaking effect that introduces the logo to our animation. This mask is made by using a particle system. To set one up switch to side view, add a plane to your scene and while it is still selected switch to the Object Context (F7) in the Effects Tab of the Constraints Panel. Select New effect and then change the default effect build to Particles. Change the system’s settings as indicated below:

Press TAB to enter Edit Mode, select all vertices and subdivide the plane twice by pressing WKEY and selecting Subdivide from the pop-up menu.

Next switch to front view and add another plane. Scale it along the X-axis to turn it into a rectangle (press SKEY and move your mouse horizontally. Then press XKEY or MMB to scale along the indicated axis only). Give the rectangle a white material with an emit value of one.

Now you need to change the particles into rectangles by using the dupliverts function. Select rectangle, then particle emitter and parent them. Select only the plane and in the Object Context and Anim Settings Panel, select the DupliVerts Button. Each particle is now replaced by a rectangle:

I now add some mist as a quick hack to give the rectangles each a different shade of grey. Go to the World Buttons window with F5 to change to Shading Context, then click on the button and select Add New in the World Panel. The world settings will now appear.

By default, the sky will now be rendered as a gradient between blue and black. Change the horizon colors (HoR, HoG, HoB) to pure black (Figure 34).

To activate rendering of mist activate the Mist button in the middle of the screen. When using mist, you have to indicate on which distance from the camera it works. Select the camera, switch to the Editing Context enable ShowMist in the Camera Panel. Now switch to top view and return to the Shading Context (F5) and World Buttons. Tweak the Sta: and Di: (Start, Distance, respectively) parameters so that the mist covers the complete width of the particle stream.

Set the animation length to 100 frames and render the animation to disk. Call the file ‘particles.avi’ (Figure 36).

Third Sequence: Combining the logo and the particle bars

By now you know the drill: reload your compilation project file, switch to the Sequence Editor window and add both ‘particles.avi’ and ‘logo.avi’ to your project. Combine them together with a MUL effect. Since the logo animation is 50 frames and the particles animation is 100 frames, you’ll need to duplicate the logo animation once and apply a second MUL effect to it:

Combine these three strips into one meta strip. If you’re feeling brave you can make a few copies and give them a small time offset just like with the WireFrame cube.

Continued on page 4…