Subtitles of the Movie

This helicopter called the Night Stalker is from a Lightwave File and I saved it as an RPF File and that means that the Rich Pixel Information in this file can be assigned to different materials that were assigned when I create the helicopter and the 3D Glow effect that I'm about to show you is going to take advantage of just that. Now that pretty much means that when I created this helicopter in Lightwave the application knew that I named this guy a certain thing, such as Light and it assigned the Material a certain number based on that and the Middle has a different number and so does the Window. So I can pick a Material to apply that Glow to. Let me go ahead and show you that. I'm going to go to Operators and I'm going to choose 3D Post, 3d Glow. Now as I mentioned earlier you can choose a Glow Source, you can choose an Object ID which works like a Material but if I had more then one Object here, such as maybe someone piloting the helicopter I can say apply to that Object and its number. I can assign it to a Material ID or a Render Node ID. So I'm going to stick with Material ID to show you this, then I'm going to use this Picker here to choose this surface. Alright so let me just go back to this filter and try it again and as you see here it says Material ID 5. Look what happens when I click on the Glass for example. Now it says Material ID 3, because once again each surface you create in your 3D application has a Internal Number that's assigned to it, even though you may give it a certain name. So this is Material ID 5 for this Light here. So now I can increase the Radius of the Glow Effect on that Light, check that out. So I'm making this Light Glow and yes I can animate that, so the Light can Flash over time and this is exactly what I did when I Animate my film Black Zero. I use this same effect to make this Light Flash. Now I could have done it in Lightwave but why bother when I can do it inside of Combustion and decide later on that I'm not happy with it and simply turn it off by clicking on its Icon like this. If I didn't like the Glow after I Rendered the file in Lightwave I'd have to render the entire file again without the Glow. So hopefully you can see how important it is to use a Compositing application to apply your Special Effects, such as Glows and Blurs and that kind of thing. I can also put a Glow and boost it's intensity with this Slider and really blow that out. So let me go ahead and before I show something other Slider such as the minimum luminates and stuff like that I'm going to animate this Glow. So I'll go ahead and put Animate On and I have the Glow Off, I have a couple of Frames, I'll increase the Radius of that and its intensity, I'll go a couple of Frames put it Off and put that down to and go a couple more Frames and put that back on and increase the intensity. I'll turn Animate Off and I'll manually Scrub and now we have a Strobe. Now whenever you have these guys down here on you can determine the minimum amount of Luminance, which means how bright does something have to be before this effect is applied. So by decreasing the minimum of my Luminance we're saying that the lower the number that we have this, the more the effect will be applied. So if we're saying it needs to be 100 percent this color then the Glow won't apply to it. So since it's 100 percent nothing's happening. So we say OK if this Color is a little lower then that, then apply the Glow and this is another way you can control how intense that Glow is and of course you have a Falloff. A Falloff simply means how far away from an effect until the effect goes away and you'll find this term in many applications. Falloff for a flashlight for example is let's say you have a flashlight in your basement, well that flashlight if the battery is not that new, the light is really not going to go that far, it's going to be pretty bright where you are and slowly but surely that light's going to decay and die off. That's an example of Falloff. Maybe you have a brand new battery that light's going to reach further so the Falloff is going to take a lot longer to go until the Light diminishes and falls out and decays. So hopefully that makes a little sense and you'll apply this to your animations and don't forget guys, it's really a good idea to apply Glows and that kind of thing in Combustion because you can always turn it off and change the Parameters instead of Re-rendering your file from your 3D application.