What is that?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Edit: I see it was a PBS series. Never heard of it. I am not sure how that would help. Thanks.

It may not be of any help, but it was PBS kid's show. Here is the link: Reading Rainbow

j razz

I may have found something:

http://www.free-nature-animal-butterfly-wallpaper.com/animated-butterfly.html

While it may not be as large as I like, I may be able to use it; specifically the mostly yellow one.

Would chroma-keying out the white BG be the best way to use this?

Thanks much for any help you can offer on how to best use this.

Edit: Now that I think of it, I am not sure I can use an animated gif in Vegas (I'm not at home right now), can I? Thanks.

If you can get a still of the wings you can use Vegas 3D to animate the wings,
Use "half" of the butterfly put it on a plane and use the 3D FX.
Mirror it to get the other half.

Vegas does have a lot of tools if you break down the project.

There are some video clips in Digital Juice's VideoTraxx 2: http://www.digitaljuice.com/products/products.asp?pid=102&cid=71&page=2&tab=t3#tabs or and animated wipe in their Wedding Toolkit 3: http://www.digitaljuice.com/products/products.asp?pid=39&cid=29&page=2&tab=t3#tabs

You are also welcome to a few photo's I took a couple of weeks ago:
http://birdcat.com/images/p8312418.jpg
http://birdcat.com/images/p8312420.jpg
http://birdcat.com/images/p9012481.jpg
http://birdcat.com/images/p9012483.jpg

Pretty certain DAZ Studio has a free butterfly model, if not you could buy one for a few dollars. Need to do the animation yourself but then you can make it anyway you like or any color for that matter. All the stuff will render out with an alpha channel, dead easy to composite in Vegas. Nothing absolutely photorealistic but not too horrid either.

Bob.

i said it before, and ill say it again.

Particle illusion...

theyve even got glowing fairies this month.. lol

Thanks for the responses¡K

Regarding the Vegas 3D; I kind of know of it, but have never delved into it. Any way I could get a sample Veg (Vegas 7) and I would be glad to take a look at it.

I have Vegas 7/8 (using 7 for now), Red 4, and just yesterday I bought Zaxworks Pro Animator 4, but I haven¡¦t worked with Pro Animator at all yet. It would seem to me that between all of this I could get a moving wing butterfly. ƒº

VideoTraxx is a great idea, but I need to separate the butterfly from the background. Nice pictures too. I might be able to use those, depending how I do it.

>>DAZ Studio has a free butterfly model,

How would I render it? I would certainly be willing to look at doing that. Not sure how to make it useable though.

Regarding Particle Illusion, I have that too and I saw the ¡§fairy¡¨ emitter you reference, but you really can¡¦t see the source object. I was probably going to use that emitter for a trail of whatever butterfly I can come up with. For my application, we need to be able to see the butterfly. PI is awesome and I have a lot of the Pro Emitters as well as the free ones. I do keep up with that every month. I just didn¡¦t see one that would help me here.

Could someone send me a sample Veg file, animating anything, and I could adapt it I am sure.

Thanks!!

How would I render it?

An image sequence, Vegas imports these perfectly.

Bob.

I went through my PI-3 and could swear there is a butterfly thing, but I've re-organized my emitters. As to finding something for you, I Googled "butterfly animation" and this was the first hit, go see others. Might be useful for it gives you the parts to animate.

Once you get it into Vegas, I feel some softening of the action would be good, maybe even som TrackMotion stretching-unstretching to give it a more fluid motion.



As far as using PI for this, you'd have to import the sequence into a "32 bit sequence" (bottom of particle properties/Particle shape.

Create your own shapes folder which shows up down there.But be aware that PI only exports in 8-bit, so you'd have to blow it up.

Then select it as the particle shape for some simple emitter, save it as a new one and go to town on it.

And of course, you can go to the PI fourm and pick Alan or Elvis's brains on this way to go :)

Butterflies are easy to animate. If you are really stuck and want a real flitting butterfly, I can whip up a few cycles for you -- as long as you don't want one of those dreamy, sleeping pill butterflies that dreamily coast through space. All I do is 2D, hand drawn animation; no CG style.

I can give it to you as image sequences so that you can create your own combinations so that you will never have a repetitious cycle, or I can give you a few cycles in uncompressed avi.

Send me a private message and I'll listen you out. It would be ideal to discuss this over the phone -- I live outside of Philadelphia. I won't charge you anything.

Hey, Guys:

Thank you all so much for the responses.

When all was said and done, as soon as I saw those butterfly peices, I guess on a Flash page, I thought I could do something with them.

I was able to animate them in Red 4 and it's looking good.

The thing I like about animating PSD files (Which is what I made them), I can change the color, etc. Very variable.

Fortunately, I only need 1 second (30 frames) of animation. All 30 frames are keyframed to keep the wings in touch with the body.

Certainly there must be an easier way, but hey...it works.

Also, a nice thing about Particle Illusion, I was able to go into the change shape dialog and was actually to export from PI3 the image sequence used in the PI emitter. That is excellent, but it wasn't the aspect I need.

Thank you all again for the help, the offers, etc. I really appreciate it. A lot!

why not drop in an animated gif? there are butterfly gifs all over, or you can paint your own

easy and worked for me

" PI is awesome and I have a lot of the Pro Emitters as well as the free ones. I do keep up with that every month. I just didn¡¦t see one that would help me here."

go through your emitters with the quick load library, i KNOW there are butterfly presets there... ive used them myself.. cheesy but effective.. lol