Hello, Well, I have recently started up a team and decided to make an animated logo for the team and maybe even for the website, too. Now, I have a simple question. When you start up a game (i.e. Battlefield 2 or Unreal Tournament 2004) before the game starts, you see the cinematics and cool little logo animations for each company. Now, if you also notice, they look so nice, cool, and clean (the animated logos). So I ask you, how can I get that level of detail for exporting my animation that I have made in 3ds Max? I have been trying to do Animation --> Make Preview, but that preview is too bad of a quality and doesn't even show the lighting effects I have in in it. So in a nutshell, how can I get a fancy animation export for my 3d animated logo in 3ds Max? Pat

what do you mean...?
you should just be able to render it to a file....
i would choose .avi and then convert the video to whatever format your engine supports.

Well, here... open up a game that is made by a major game design company (i.e. Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, etc.) and look at the opening cinmatics and logos for the game. They look very nice and in extremely good detail. Now, when the logo comes up, it should look pretty well made, too. So, how come when I export my animations through 3ds Max, even when the configurations are set to the maximum for my animation render, they still show up in bad detail.

Look at the logo for the Unreal Series made by Epic Games, see how nice and high detail it looks? I have a question for that, too, which might answer my question. When they made that logo, they probably already had the engine completed. Let's say they do; did they open up their logo animation in the engine and have the engine preview of it be the opening scene, because if they didn't, the animation renderer probably wasn't in as good detail as the engine's renderer. If you still don't get what I'm saying, ok. My two questions are: "How do I make a hi-detail animation render in 3ds Max?" And "Would an animation look better if I rendered it using a 3d engine rather than 3ds Max?"

Thanks,

Pat

You are not rendering the animation, you are previewing it. This is copy and pasted from the last person I helped over MSN, so I apologize for the bad formatting:
in your render settings, use active time segment in the common tab, common parameteres menu
in your render settings- common tab, set your Time Output to Active Time Segment or Range (and enter in your range)
lower down, in your Render Output, check Save File and choose tga, and type in a name for it
then render, 3ds will automatically number your frames
open up premiere (you're using 1.5/pro, right?)
ok, make a new project, go to the Custom Settings, and choose these settings:
editing mode: video for windows, timebase: 30 frames per second, Frame Size: 640 horizontal by 480 vertical (or whatever size your frames from 3ds were), pixel aspect: Square (1.0), Fields: no fields (progressive scan).
then hit Save Preset on the lower left
because that is the preset you'll almost always use for any video not intended for broadcast/TV
name it whatever, then hit OK to create your project
go to file-import
select the first image in your sequence, and check the 'numbered stills' box
and it will import the frames as a video file (each frame lasts 1/30th of a second, ie one frame of video)
before you export, you need to drag your movie from the project window to the timeline window
file-export-movie
settings button, then you have a whole host of compression options
Find out what compression/file type your game uses, and use those.

Your best bet is to check the max help files, they are extremely informative.

Hey man!

Great, it works just fine! Thanks...

Patrick