[Brian Jones]

yeah Animation is a great storage codec since it’s lossless at 100% and it will carry an alpha channel but it’s huge and as the image size goes up playback gets to be tough.

[Brian Jones]

A couple things I should have thought of yesterday

– if you step through the Animation codec version frame by frame is it still jerky?
– what did you use to compress to DVD and what were the settings? With that much motion you’d want to keep the mp2 at not too high a bitrate

[Brian Jones]

if you are going to make the land ‘solid’ you can use the land to hide the extra water but you’d have to use the Displace Deformer in Mograph (I don’t remember if you have that) or the Relief object to get a displaced plane to extrude with (unless there is something I’m forgetting since I’m used to MoGraph).

An example build

[Brian Jones]

waterline? What do you mean, wetness? Erosion? Water is derfomed by the land, foam? which – or something else?

[Brian Jones]

yeah your image looks ok, try using Flat mapping instead of UVW. You’ll have to rotate the texture using the Texture Tool then scale it up so it’s just a bit bigger than the plane, that should do it.

[Brian Jones]

looks like antialiasing right at the edges of the image, zoom way in in PS and check the edges out where it’s too high, likely it’s whiter there. You’ll probably have to fix it by hand, just copy the last last row or column of pixels where the shape is right and paste it over the bad edge row/column

[Brian Jones]

Hair is highly configurable and there’s probably more than one way. Here’s a simple test using an animated gradient in the Hair materials Length channel.

[Brian Jones]

no idea, if it plays on one it should play on the other… maybe email support

[Brian Jones]

Animation codec that big is going to have trouble playing off anything. The SATAII bus is plenty fast but 62 MB/sec (496/8) is right in the range between min and Max sustained transfer rate for most 7200 rpm drives and those numbers are generated under perfect conditions with non-fragmented data, which this almost certainly is. So for the perfect quality Animation version expect it to not play back smoothly.

For compressed versions your processor should be fast enough, I don’t have enough knowledge of video cards to know if the 7300 is quick enough for that but it probably is.

I have the 8 core 2.8 Mac with an ATI 3870 and the HDV 720p 25 plays smoothly though I do see a slow down at the end of the 1st Calvin Klein it looks like the spline the camera is following is not set to Uniform, not a missed frame (or frames) in playback. That’s with VLC for playback and VLC won’t play the second test (I don’t have the full suite of codecs here at home – I assume I’m missing some of the FCP codecs)

The best guide I knew of is gone, though siggraph’s codec central here – https://www.siggraph.org/education/materials/HyperGraph/video/codecs/Default.htm – has some info though it’s getting seriously dated now. There are probably others I don’t know about, anybody?

[Brian Jones]

What’s the hardware you are trying to play back on? CPU? Graphics card? How much memory?
What is the resolution of the render?

Your link plays pretty smooth here (full screen 1920×1200). But a lot of things affect playback, if the res/file size is too big you need fast bus/mem/hd if you compress to bring down file size you have to watch which codec since almost anything that compresses really well is processor intensive, some are better than others for decompress speed (I’d have to look it up) so here CPU speed is important… So how big is this beast?

Have you tried putting it to DVD – check out playback on a purpose built device?