Right, here's something a little better than my rubbish sketches for you all!
I've successfully rendered off the first opening sequence that pans round the building (the only sequence in the movie where the animation is created in the renderer - using moving cameras, moving elements, etc.). I now have to sort out a lot of issues frame-by-frame in Photoshop - the attached S1-Ftest jpg shows a very rough idea of what I'll be doing to each one.
I've also attached a few test renders from the time lapse sequence that will end the animation. I'll add more variation to each frame in Photoshop (people, boats, breaking waves, clouds, etc.) It gets dark pretty late as it's at the height of summer. Still need to make the lighting around the tower stronger so it stands out more in the darker shots.
The final image is a rough test of a Depth of Field animation showing the link between the centre and the tower. It'll open with the interior of the centre, and then change focus so that the viewer is looking at the tower beyond. Again, done frame by frame using the Lens Blur Photoshop filter and a ZDepth Map rendered in Maxwell.
One question I've got you might all be able to help me with. I want to populate the visitor centre in most shots with various people. As it's an animation basically produced frame by frame in Photoshop, my options are pretty limited. What I'm planning on doing (which I've done reasonably successfully before -
http://www.lsiarchitects.co.uk/proje...thumb=6&text=2) is to add in video footage of people walking and talking (the set sold by Marlin Studios where each frame and it's alpha channel is a separate JPG).
However, it's a pretty time consuming process, so makes it difficult to fully populate the centre to the extent I'd like. So my options are:
1) Only have a very few people in the centre (two or three per sequence), all animated.
2) Have two or three animated and the rest still images (which might not be as obvious as it sounds - people reading signs, sitting down in the cafe, etc. might not be noticeably static, especially as the camera will be moving)
3) Have all still images, like the place is frozen in time.
Or, do I change my approach sequence by sequence? Any advice gratefully received!
