Author Topic: A little video I made (Read 16758 times)

ChemicalBR0 · « **on:** May 04, 2011, 09:25:29 AM »

thought i'd post a video of my latest creation

This software is awesome, thank god I'm off work this week, it's giving me plenty of time to tinker

the video is at 1280x720 so its best to download and view in your media player. (41.9Mb)
http://cid-7a8ecb0c7c5330e9.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/Binary%20symetry.wmv

if it says for some reason it can't play just refresh the page

Zaggeh · « **Reply #1 on:** May 04, 2011, 10:45:27 AM »

Pretty neat.

Did you know that if you press tab you can hide the interface? It's great for making videos.

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #2 on:** May 04, 2011, 12:04:23 PM »

AHA... thanks for that info.
I was wondering if you could do that, this is only my 2nd day with the software so there's much to learn

I'm never one for reading instructions tho and prefer to learn by trial and error ,I find it sticks in my brain easier if I learn something myself.

I was was thinking today whilst making this it would be great to have an object act as an emmiter.
so it constantly blows off particles (with a falloff over time for the particle life, so that you don't end up with too many)

that way you could do volcanos on Io

any chance that could work Dan? ........ pretty please

Dan Dixon · « **Reply #3 on:** May 04, 2011, 02:30:00 PM »

Or comet trails. Which I had half-working in version 1, but haven't fixed in version 2.

So yes... but no promises when.

Can you add that to the idea list?

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #4 on:** May 04, 2011, 05:17:23 PM »

Quote from: Dan Dixon on May 04, 2011, 02:30:00 PM

Can you add that to the idea list?

Will do

Dan Dixon · « **Reply #5 on:** May 04, 2011, 05:19:47 PM »

Great idea though...

Attach a volcano to a moon... generate a new ring around the parent planet.

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #6 on:** May 04, 2011, 05:53:25 PM »

well ideally you would be able to set up the life of the particle to whatever you want.
so it only travels a certain distance around the planet before vanishing.
or they could live long enough to create a ring.

i.e for every timestep emit # of particles and have each particle last # of timesteps

edit: falloff with distance would be awesome too because then you could decide how high from the bodies surface they get before vanishing.

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #7 on:** May 04, 2011, 07:44:55 PM »

I just did a little experiment in Lightwave
http://cid-7a8ecb0c7c5330e9.office.live.com/self.aspx/.Public/emitter.wmv

there's 3 factors generating the particles

Particle birth rate,Particle lifetime and particle velocity (which i guess would be escape velocity is US)
and obviously the rotation of the ball

if that could be done in US it would be better than awesome

I added also the idea to the spreadsheet.

atomic7732 · « **Reply #8 on:** May 04, 2011, 07:53:23 PM »

And solar wind! lol

kennydalglish · « **Reply #9 on:** May 05, 2011, 06:27:17 AM »

Nice video! Just wondering what you use for capture? Ive tried Fraps but it generates too huge a file (like 4GB per 30 Seconds) and it crashed when i tried to convert it a while ago

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz
NVidia Ge-force GTX460
4GB RAM

Id appreciate any tips

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #10 on:** May 05, 2011, 06:47:40 AM »

kenny
I used the latest version of MSI afterburner
EDIT: oops forgot this
http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm
afterburner will work with any video card not just Nvidia.
they have added a new option for hardware video capture straight from the GPU so becuase of the power of modern gpu's you don't see much of a performance hit when recording and the files are pretty small. (it only records video tho not sound)
it is based on riva tuner so it's main purpose is for overclocking

I have an MSI GTX460 with a gig of DDR5 on it and at the moment my card is sitting at 950mhz core clock, 1900Mhz shader clock, and 2000Mhz ram clock

originally this video was 1280x720 (downsized by afterburner from 1920x1080) recording @30FPS (the display FPS can be seen in the bottom right) and it weighed in at just over 370Mb.
I then put it through movie maker to compress it down a bit.

kennydalglish · « **Reply #11 on:** May 05, 2011, 06:55:34 AM »

Thanks very much, I will be able to look into that today while im off work

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #12 on:** May 05, 2011, 07:17:16 AM »

no probs.
it's very easy to set up and best of all it's free
go into settings. select the video capture tab.
assign the key combination you want to use to capture
how much downsize if any, and where you want the files to go and that's pretty much it.

if you have afterburner running when playing games (or any direct3d or openGl application) you also have the option to have onscreen display.
you can set that up to show you handy stuff like FPS, GPU temperature, GPU usage fan speed etc etc.

Zaggeh · « **Reply #13 on:** May 05, 2011, 08:26:12 AM »

I'll have to look into Afterburner, sounds neat. The only downside I see is the lack of sound support. I typically narrate my videos. If you must have sound with your video, then I think Fraps is the way to go if you want high quality.

@kennydalglish
Yeah, with Fraps, the file sizes are the main issue. There are a variety of video compression tools you can use to remedy that. Adobe Premiere works wonders if you can afford it. An alternative freeware solution would be VirtualDub.

I made a video walkthrough of how to join multiple Fraps clips and re-encode them to a manageable size for distribution/upload. You can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ny4aeU23qc

kennydalglish · « **Reply #14 on:** May 05, 2011, 09:43:54 AM »

Thanks for that info as well Zaggeh, it would be good if i could get fraps files converted into uploadable size. I'll be trying both these methods before the days out. Thanks again to both of you

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #15 on:** May 05, 2011, 11:52:44 AM »

kenny even windows movie maker will compress your files down for you.
by converting your fraps files (avi if i remember correct) to Wmv.

im pretty sure movie maker has come as standard since xp

Zaggeh · « **Reply #16 on:** May 05, 2011, 02:05:30 PM »

The compression format that Windows Movie Maker uses has always been a little too lossy for me. Also, I can't speak for the latest version as I haven't used it in a couple years, but it never really handled standard 16:9 HD resolutions very well. This may have been fixed with a later version though.

It is definitely the most user friendly of them all though.

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #17 on:** May 05, 2011, 05:26:07 PM »

the quality is in movie maker is pretty decent nowadays.
I only use it because it's free as I don't do a lot of video editing
so it suits me

kennydalglish · « **Reply #18 on:** May 06, 2011, 12:58:06 AM »

Ive got the movie maker and the afterburner so I'm gonna try them out now with a fraps video i recorded. I record in 1920x1080i (16:9 i think) so we'll see if MM supports that now. I'm intrigued to try afterburner as well since it will unleash the power of my GFX card!

I haven't overclocked my card yet because its handled everything I've thrown at it so far on max settings

Just wondering if anyone knows or if Dan reads this, is there a key to hide all the panels in US so you just see space and your simulation? For Video Recording and i intend to make some screensavers at some point. If not I'll add it to the suggestions (if no one has already)

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #19 on:** May 06, 2011, 03:21:39 AM »

Kenny
it's the Tab key.
(second post in this thread)

if you want to unleash the power of your vid card try running something like Shogun2 at max settings 1920x1080 or maffia2 with High Physx on
(those will more than unleash the power...... there won't be enough of it

the card i have MSI GTX460 Hawk "Talon attack" (who thinks up these names) comes from the factory with a generous overclock on it already of 810Mhz up from 760mhz of the reference chip. but there's plenty of potential to overclock it more.
I've seen this particular card running at over 1Ghz core speed in a liquid cooled system.
as standard the card comes with MSI's Twin Frozr air cooling. even with my overclock to 950mhz running most new games i've yet to see temps get past 65c

kennydalglish · « **Reply #20 on:** May 06, 2011, 04:30:51 AM »

"Kenny
it's the Tab key.
(second post in this thread) "

Cant believe i missed that thanks! I better delete that from m the suggestions sheet :/

I don't have either of those games just now (Mafia II Shogun2), but the original Crysis still isn't quite perfectly smooth with everything on and full lol

My GTX 460 is the GTX 460 GS, its DDR5 1024MB 256B (what it says on the box). It has something called 'XPertTool' in the system tray with the core speeds in it, fan control, heat monitor etc. Its set at 700MHz Clock Speed, 1800MHz Memory Clock and 1400 Shader Clock. There is sliders for overclocking them all but i haven't messed with them.. yet

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #21 on:** May 06, 2011, 04:54:48 AM »

Xperttool is more or less the company who made your cards version of afterburner
just be careful before you start messing around with overclocking.

read up on what you are doing before you do it.
you can find info on the net on how to overclock almost every card out there.

software like afterburner and riva tuner make it all too easy to do damage to your system with a few sliders.
the more you push the overclock the more heat the chip produces and the closer it gets to burning itself out.

I overclock my stuff as a matter of principle

manufacturers always back off the speed of the chips from what they are capable of to prolong the life of the components.

I on the other hand see a graphics card as semi disposable... if i get 2 or 3 years out of it that's good enough.
(after 2 years it will be hard for the card to keep up with the then current games and I'd be looking at a new one anyway) at the moment our GTX460's are considered mid range cards.
my CPU is also overclocked from 2.8 to 3.5Ghz (AMD phenom2 quad)

Dan Dixon · « **Reply #22 on:** May 09, 2011, 02:49:21 PM »

You're probably not going to see much improvement to Universe Sandbox by over-clocking your video card. With a couple hundred objects, almost all of the slow down is due to all of the gravity calculations on the CPU.

ChemicalBR0 · « **Reply #23 on:** May 10, 2011, 04:23:56 AM »

overclocking of GPU just happened to enter the conversation when talking about afterburners abilities.
I didn't mean that doing it would speed up US.

Joshimitsu91 · « **Reply #24 on:** May 15, 2011, 04:05:21 PM »

Quote from: Dan Dixon on May 09, 2011, 02:49:21 PM

You're probably not going to see much improvement to Universe Sandbox by over-clocking your video card. With a couple hundred objects, almost all of the slow down is due to all of the gravity calculations on the CPU.

Maybe its time to turn my 4.6 GHz profile on then?