Moving Train Scene

[Y. Bar]

I intend to draw maybe a few cabins, and then copy and paste them together in different variations so it doesn’t look like they are all identical. It will not realistic, it’s going to look like a pencil sketch.. but this pencil sketch will have to accelerate in one shot from zero speed to a complete motion blur.

What do you mean shoot a train with a camera? You mean a real one ? That wouldn’t do it at all… I need the visual effect of the pencil sketch slowly speeding to a motion blur, and this scene will also include some animation, before the train speeds.

Thanks ,
Y.

[Y. Bar]

Ah, I see what you mean.. yes, it is moving in 2d, moving horizontally across.
I create the drawing in photoshop, I see how I could create it from a few drawings each one consisting of a few railroad cars. But could AE handle so many layers ? I assume that to have it accelerate from zero to a motion blur over 60 seconds, with each layer consisting of about 8 carts, will require quite a lot of layers. Some hundreds I guess.

I could divide this scene to a few smaller ones.. but the motion should look continuous. So handling the keyframes from one scene to another while still needing to keep the look of one consistent acceleration seems to be another tricky part.

Thanks,
Y.

[Y. Bar]

I guess I could try getting this done with the 1924 layer limit..

I will give it a try in the next few days, and I will return to this forum if I run into any difficulties.

Thank you,
Y.

[Tony Silva]

you could just create a set of 3 train cars and loop them using an offset, then just use a blur effect.

[Mark Hollis]

I recently did a comp with 114 layers, mostly text over video backgrounds, but some moving video dissolved in. There were also some documents that were either scanned in or created by pulling PDF files into Photoshop, merging visible layers for the first page and saving as PSD files.

End result was pretty good.

All of the books tell you about precomping elements in AE. For example, the wheels on your train would need to rotate. If you create a layer with the wheel slowly turning, gaining speed and really cranking until it became a blurred spinning circle, you’d be able to use that for all of the wheels on the train, save an old-time steam locomotive (which has levers attached to wheels). Any element that is going to repeat in a scene can be precomped like that and then brought in as you will.

Passenger cars tend to look the same on trains, with an occasional viewing car (bi-level with a glass top) interspersed every so often. if you have a freight train, freight cars tend to be fairly similar, with just a few types.

I should mention that I have never seen a train gather such speed that it blurred in 60 seconds — trains are really heavy and gather speed much more slowly. But we can pretty much alter any type of Physics we want when we animate.

What if there were no hypothetical questions?