Modeling and Animation using Alias

Alias Logo Animation -

A project in the Level I Self Study Guide: I made a simple MPEG movie of the flying Alias logo (about 270KBytes). The original images (which are twice the size as those went into the movie) were rendered on an SGI Indy using Alias Studio.

DoomGate Animation -

Another little MPEG movie (about 5.4Mbytes) I made. The title is called DoomGate (inspired by the real DoomGate). It has 600 320 by 240 frames. I designed and created the animation - I'm not a good animator yet, and somehow the MPEG movie has some strange things in it (maybe I chose a bad parameter to the encoder or something) - so don't expect too much :-).

Alias2MPEG -

Ideally you would render the images in SGI RGB format and use the SGI WebFORCE tools to generate MPEG movies among other formats. For people who do not have those tools, here's a shell script I wrote to produce MPEG movies. It requires that you have the Berkeley MPEG encoder mpeg_encode package built and installed somewhere on your machine. It also assumes that you have the commands fromalias and toppm in your path.

After you have retrieved the shell script, save it to a file alias2mpeg and chmod it to add execution permissions; then edit it and set the variable ENCODER to the absolute path to the encoder installed on your system.

At this point you can start creating your MPEG movies - just cd to the directory where a series of Alias pix files are stored. Then use something like

alias2mpeg start# end# by# FileRoot

as if you were using fblast to display your animation. And you can change the image size in the movie without changing your original pix files - try the script by itself and see all the command line options.

This script has been tested on IRIX 5.2 with mpeg_encode version 1.5, and was last updated on Mar-22-1995. Check my FTP directory for compiled executables.

Alias2sRGB -

Another shell script to convert a series of Alias pix images to SGI RGB images and sort the suffixes. So file image.1 will become RGB-image.000001. It could be useful when generating an SGI movie using MovieMaker - it will be easier to insert the frames if the lexical order of the suffixes is the same as the natual numerical order.

This script uses fromalias and was last updated on Feb-28-1995. Check my FTP directory for compiled executables.

Miscellaneous

VRML -

3D multi-media Web!

Computer Graphics FUNdamentals -

A must read!

GRAFICA Obscura -

A collection of computer graphics hacks.

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