Not only has the entire program been reskinned with an easy-on-the-eyes
modern gray interface, but the main camera controls have been
simplified and extended.
The large "spray" of buttons surrounding each of the major
controls has been removed and a simple, multi-function center
button has been added in its place.
Each center button functions basically the same, and if you hold your
cursor over it momentarily, you'll see a hint similar to the one shown
above which is for the dolly control:
Click to Set Position "Rt Click: N/A " Ctrl+Click: Mouse
Mode
The general rule of thumb is that Left-Clicking (also
known as just clicking!) each of the controls' center button will display
a dialog where you can enter the appropriate value numerically,
Right-Clicking will reset that control if the function
has a standard value to be reset to such as roll and
pan and most of the object controls, and
Ctrl+Click will put you into a Mouse Control
Mode .
NOTE: All the videos below were done "quick and dirty"
to get you the information/training so please forgive the poor
audio...
Faster easier interface for textures!
There's a new switch in town and it now lets you texture any part of
any object on your set simply by dragging the desired texture directly
onto the part you want to change.
It really couldn't be simpler. Simply switch to the
texture mode by clicking the switch at the top, click on the object you
want to texture* and then drag the desired texture directly onto the
part of the object you want to have it applied to!
* Did we mention that when you clicked the object, it automatically
selects the appropriate texture category for that part of that specific
object? Yeah, we thought of that too.
This technology also works in the green Room when you're in
the color/texturing panel. Instead of having to select a part from the
drop-down menu, in Version 4 you can just click on it to select
it!
Incredible New Control over your Tweening
All new Tweening options makes your animatics and animations faster to
produce and better to view
New Waypoint Walk Override lets you tell the
program that any actor in a shot is not actually stopping in
the frame, but is instead merely changing direction. This
makes hitting marks and creating complicated movements dead easy as
is shown by this slalom movie...
New Key Frame Time Shifting allows you to position
your key frames to happen at any point within in your tweening, not
just in the middle! Combine this with the new waypoints for amazing
results.
Live Background Image Plates
FrameForge Version 4 Introduces Live Backgrounds a kind of real-time compositing where you can literally put your actors into a 2D picture!
This special compositing feature that lets you take any image of a location or set and make it fill the background of your frame, allowing your actors to effectively move around in the 3D space of the picture, as shown in the image below, exactly as they will on the real set/location.
And PRO users will even get integrated simulated shadows!
Easy Crowd creation with Object Cloning
All New Object Cloning Feature allows you to build crowds and forests, or any scene with a lot of the same object faster, and with lower memory usage.
When you clone an object it's similar to duplicating it, but has a number of advantages:
It uses a lot less memory because the program doesn't keep two copies of
the same object on the set, it only has one object, and then invisibly moves it from one position to
another, making it appear that there are several copies of it
All clones of an object are truly THE SAME OBJECT as the original, and in fact once an object is cloned
there effectively is no “original” one; no matter which one you choose, if you make any changes other
than to its rotation, position or scale, the change is applied to ALL of them. This can actually be quite
useful if you're doing a crowd scene such as the one below:
If you'll look carefully, you'll see there are only five cloned different actors, but because they are turned and tilted differently from one another, the effect is of a very mixed crowd.
Shooting Order Boards*
You can now have two distinct frame orders: Storyboard Order (which up until now, was the only one)
and Shooting Order
Once you've planned the visual look of your film in FrameForge, the
next step(after raising money and hiring actors and all that, of
course) is to shoot it... but as I'm sure you're well aware, films are
virtually never shot in order.
Well, FrameForge Version 4.0 has you covered. In the shot Shot Manager
there is now a new switch that allows you to specify which frames you
want to see.
The first time you use it to go to Shooting Order it will take you to a
dialog where you can decide which of your existing shots from your
storyboard order you want in your Shooting Order. And frames can
happily exist in only one order or both, and they can, needless to say,
be re-ordered in one versus the other!
Three kinds of Green Screens* (all with live compositing, of
course)
Physical Green Screen with real dimensions and edges
Useful for when you're trying to determine what size Green Screen
you'll really need and to ensure that all your shots will fit on
it.
"Edgeless" Green Screen
A virtual Green Screen that has no edges, so you can pan
around without worrying about how large it is. But it's still a
virtual object so actors will collide with it so you'll
know if you're trying to setup a fundamentally impossible shots
while still not worrying about the actual details (sorry,
DP's...!)
NOTE: In both of the above cases you can use
either a fixed image plate or a second live camera as the source
of the image that's being composited onto the Green Screen.
Straight "Image Plate" Compositing
In this mode, there is no Green Screen object, its simply a fixed
image that entirely replaces the background, great for when you have a
fixed plate that you will be compositing in and you need to match
camera positions
What's especially cool about this, however, is that we can
calibrate the image to the virtual world so that the"floor" in the
image maps to the floor in FrameForge, and you can then literally have
your actor move around within your image as if you were on the
location. Check out the video below:
But wait, there's more!
There is also an optional automatic camera synch option so
that as you pan/tilt, zoom or dolly your foreground camera, the
background camera is automatically synched, making your workflow even
more smooth and productive
Of course, if you're using an image plate then there will be some
distortion as it doesn't have the capability of parallax, but it still
does a pretty good job.
The large "spray" of buttons surrounding each of the major
controls has been removed and a simple, multi-function center
button has been added in its place.
