The post Getting Started with Simulations in 3D Max – Greeble and MassFX appeared first on Digital Urban.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals. We used a Go Pro HD camera in timelapse mode, taking a picture every 5 seconds.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 5 seconds pointing at the skyline of London. Capturing an image at least every 5 seconds is vital for star/aircraft trails as it allows for closer spacing between the lights in the final image.

We left the camera running for approximately 12 hours capturing 8000+ images, saved into a folder on our computer. Ours captured covered both day and night time, resulting in the following timelapse:

The next step is to open up photoshop, chose the images you want to use, and start stacking.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click ‘File’, ‘Automate’ and ‘Batch’. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select ‘None’ for the output directory.

Click ‘Ok’ and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an 2 hours to stack the images – resulting in the Start/Aircraft Trail’ below:

The line across the centre is a star and the bright line on the left is the moon coming into shot. The rest of the lights are aircraft in the sky above London.

You can view higher resolution versions via our Flickr Photostream.

The post Photoshop Tutorial: City Star and Aircraft Trails appeared first on Digital Urban.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals. We used a Go Pro HD camera in timelapse mode, taking a picture every 5 seconds.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 4 to 12 hours to capture, 2 to 6 hours to process.

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 5 seconds pointing at the skyline of London. Capturing an image at least every 5 seconds is vital for star/aircraft trails as it allows for closer spacing between the lights in the final image.

We left the camera running for approximately 12 hours capturing 8000+ images, saved into a folder on our computer. Ours captured covered both day and night time, resulting in the following timelapse:

The next step is to open up photoshop, chose the images you want to use, and start stacking.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3) In Photoshop click ‘File’, ‘Automate’ and ‘Batch’. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select ‘None’ for the output directory.

Click ‘Ok’ and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an 2 hours to stack the images – resulting in the Start/Aircraft Trail’ below:

The line across the centre is a star and the bright line on the left is the moon coming into shot. The rest of the lights are aircraft in the sky above London.

You can view higher resolution versions via our Flickr Photostream.

The post Photoshop Tutorial: City Star and Aircraft Trails appeared first on Digital Urban.

You will need:

1 x Timelapse System, you can use a simple webcam as per our previous Tutorial: Torch + Webcam = HD Timelapse System a DSLR such as the Canon G9 with CHDK , a iPhone with the free  Gorrilacam app or any camera that can take photos at regular intervals.

1 x Copy of Photoshop, you can download a 30 day trial.

1 x Photoshop Stacking Action (thanks to Deep Space Astrophotography)

Time Taken, 2 Hours (including capture and processing).

Setting Up

The concept is simple, set up your camera, webcam or iphone at a suitable location, and capture an image at regular intervals, for our example we captured an image every 2 seconds pointing down at a London street:

We left the camera running for an hour capturing 1800 images, saved into a folder on our computer.

The next step is to open photoshop and start stacking the images.

Image Stacking in Photoshop

The images will be stacked onto of an intially blank image via a simple automated action:

1) Create a new blank black image the same size are your captured photographs.

2) Load the action into the action windows in Photoshop and load the action Startrails.atn.

3)  In Photoshop click ‘File’, ‘Automate’ and ‘Batch’. Select the action you have just loaded and choose your directory with the images as source and make sure you select ‘None’ for the output directory.

Click ‘Ok’ and leave it running, our Mac laptop took around an hour to stack the images – resulting in the ‘Day Trail’ below:

You can clearly see the path of the traffic and the most utilised sections of the walkways over the hour, we simply like the effect.

We have created a Day Trail pool on Flickr if you create a stacked image feel free to add it to the pool…

The post Tutorial: Photoshop Image Stacking for Day Trails appeared first on Digital Urban.

The movie above is surprisingly easy to make, the following tutorial is aimed at creating a series of bouncing balls in a cityscape using Reactor in 3D Studio Max.

We covered the building of the cityscape in our previous tutorials – Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 1: Greeble Skyscraper and Greeble a 3D City: Tutorial 2: The Cityscape

The tutorial works just as well with a simple plane if you would like to build the city at a later date.

You will need:

1x Copy of 3D Studio Max (a 30 Day trial can be downloaded from here)

Time Required: 5-10 Minutes

Level: Beginner

Step 1:


Step one is to start with your cityscape or any scene you wish to add the bouncing balls. We created the balls by simply creating a grid of spheres, in our case 100, using Shift/Move to quickly clone a number of objects.

Once created move the balls up to a suitable distance to drop over the city – as pictured above.

Step 2

With out balls in place we now want to add the reactor settings to add basic physical properties to the scene. Select all your object and then click ‘Create Rigid Body Collection’ as illustrated in the top left, below:

You have now set all the objects up as a rigid body, we now want to change the properties so the balls bounce around the scenery. First of all select all the balls open the ‘Property Editor’ (notepad shaped icon, fourth from the left in the tool bar), we used the settings of Mass 1.0, Friction 0.1 and Elasticity 1.5, you can play around with these numbers to get any effect you require. Increasing the Mass and Elasticity makes the balls bounce higher with more energy.

Step 3

With the balls set up we now need to do the same with the scenery, select your cityscape and again open the ‘Property Editor’, set the ‘Simulation Geometry ‘to be a ‘Concave Mesh’. This will allow the balls to react to the buildings.

Step 4

You are ready to go, to preview your scene press ‘P’, the simulation will run and a preview window will appear, you can now tweak your settings until you are happy.

Step 5

Once you are happy with the preview click ‘Create Animation’ to allow max to set the keyframes for each ball, we normally have our timeline set to 1000 frames.

You should now have a movie like the one at the top at the post, quick and simple yet with a few tweaks a useful visualisation technique…

The post Tutorial: Reactor – 3D Max, Bouncing Balls in a 3D City appeared first on Digital Urban.

The interface is easy and intuitive to use, simple click on the Timelapse application and set the number of pictures you want to capture, image size, number of seconds to start after tapping and the delay between images.

We use 10 seconds delay and set the number of images to capture in the 1000’s leaving us to stop the process whenever we wish, although you do have the option to stop at a set time and date. It is then simply a case of setting your iPhone in place, clicking ‘Frame and Capture’ and then leaving it running – our first sample can be seen below:

If you are planning to capture more than 1000 images it is worth noting that at the moment the iPhone names images in sequence up to 1000 and the goes back to the start. With a timelapse you end up with a file sequence of 1000_1 1000_2 etc meaning that the files need to be renamed.

Luckily the process is relatively straight forward using ReName4U by Kelly Software. Running in Windows ReName4U allows you to list files by date captured and rename in numerical sequence, thus creating a file structure that can be ordered for a timelapse.

To rename your images simply point ReName4U to your image folder and select ‘list by ascending order’ – top right in the image below:

Once your files are listed, select the ‘numbers’ tab and chose the option to apply numbers in ascending order – then click start.

Your files are now ready to import into any number of packages to create the final movie. We use QuickTime Pro which has the option to ‘Open Image Sequence’, running at 25 frames per second you can produce examples similar to the next movie (it was snowing….):

By simply turning your phone on and running the software you can get some interesting sequences – its the easiest way we have found so far for creating timelapses. Hopefully the image naming issue can be ironed out, until then its not too much a hurdle and for £1.79 it makes TimeLapse a must buy for any iPhone owning image sequence fan.

You can buy TimeLapse directly from the Apple App Store.

The post iPhone Timelapse Tutorial appeared first on Digital Urban.

The interface is easy and intuitive to use, simple click on the Timelapse application and set the number of pictures you want to capture, image size, number of seconds to start after tapping and the delay between images.

We use 10 seconds delay and set the number of images to capture in the 1000’s leaving us to stop the process whenever we wish, although you do have the option to stop at a set time and date. It is then simply a case of setting your iPhone in place, clicking ‘Frame and Capture’ and then leaving it running – our first sample can be seen below:

If you are planning to capture more than 1000 images it is worth noting that at the moment the iPhone names images in sequence up to 1000 and the goes back to the start. With a timelapse you end up with a file sequence of 1000_1 1000_2 etc meaning that the files need to be renamed.

Luckily the process is relatively straight forward using ReName4U by Kelly Software. Running in Windows ReName4U allows you to list files by date captured and rename in numerical sequence, thus creating a file structure that can be ordered for a timelapse.

To rename your images simply point ReName4U to your image folder and select ‘list by ascending order’ – top right in the image below:

Once your files are listed, select the ‘numbers’ tab and chose the option to apply numbers in ascending order – then click start.

Your files are now ready to import into any number of packages to create the final movie. We use QuickTime Pro which has the option to ‘Open Image Sequence’, running at 25 frames per second you can produce examples similar to the next movie (it was snowing….):

By simply turning your phone on and running the software you can get some interesting sequences – its the easiest way we have found so far for creating timelapses. Hopefully the image naming issue can be ironed out, until then its not too much a hurdle and for £1.79 it makes TimeLapse a must buy for any iPhone owning image sequence fan.

You can buy TimeLapse directly from the Apple App Store.

The post iPhone Timelapse Tutorial appeared first on Digital Urban.

Step 1: Capture the Images

Use your webcam via our previous tutorial to capture a image in .png format every 5 seconds throughout the night. This will result in approximately 10,000 images which can be stacked to create a simulated night long exposure.

Step 2: Stack the Images

We found by far the best image stacking option was to use Helcion Focus. Available for both Mac and PC Helicon Focus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas. The program was designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem. It also however is one of the best stacking programs around. Other software we tried would crash above 1000 images whereas Helicon has coped well with up to 10,000 so far.

The software is available for a free 15 day fully functional trial.

1) Download and install Helicon Focus

2) Click ‘Add Images’ and point Helicon to the folder containing your images saved overnight. The software will now load them in, our iMac took approximately 10 minutes to complete the process.

3) We are not using Helicon for macro photography so we can turn off processing, allowing the stacking to run faster. Click ‘File/Preference’ and set ReSample Method to ‘None’.

4) Click ‘Run’

Our image at the top of this post comprises of 8401 separate captures, it took 12 hours to complete the stack, running on our Mac overnight. Star trails will not require such a long exposure, perhaps a few hours and thus a smaller number of images will be sufficient.

In our image the long line is a star with the crescent moon streaking on the left before going behind clouds and finally the rest of the lights detail air traffic over the London skyline. If you are in a low light pollution area you will be able to quickly and easily capture images such as the one below:

Image by e20ci on Flickr

You can view our image in higher resolution via our Flickr Photostream.

Any thoughts/comments/questions welcome as ever…

The post Tutorial: Image Stacking for Star Trails and City Air Activity at Night appeared first on Digital Urban.

Step 1: Capture the Images

Use your webcam via our previous tutorial to capture a image in .png format every 5 seconds throughout the night. This will result in approximately 10,000 images which can be stacked to create a simulated night long exposure.

Step 2: Stack the Images

We found by far the best image stacking option was to use Helcion Focus. Available for both Mac and PC Helicon Focus is a program that creates one completely focused image from several partially focused images by combining the focused areas. The program was designed for macrophotography, microphotography and hyperfocal landscape photography to cope with the shallow depth-of-field problem. It also however is one of the best stacking programs around. Other software we tried would crash above 1000 images whereas Helicon has coped well with up to 10,000 so far.

The software is available for a free 15 day fully functional trial.

1) Download and install Helicon Focus

2) Click ‘Add Images’ and point Helicon to the folder containing your images saved overnight. The software will now load them in, our iMac took approximately 10 minutes to complete the process.

3) We are not using Helicon for macro photography so we can turn off processing, allowing the stacking to run faster. Click ‘File/Preference’ and set ReSample Method to ‘None’.

4) Click ‘Run’

Our image at the top of this post comprises of 8401 separate captures, it took 12 hours to complete the stack, running on our Mac overnight. Star trails will not require such a long exposure, perhaps a few hours and thus a smaller number of images will be sufficient.

In our image the long line is a star with the crescent moon streaking on the left before going behind clouds and finally the rest of the lights detail air traffic over the London skyline. If you are in a low light pollution area you will be able to quickly and easily capture images such as the one below:

Image by e20ci on Flickr

You can view our image in higher resolution via our Flickr Photostream.

Any thoughts/comments/questions welcome as ever…

The post Tutorial: Image Stacking for Star Trails and City Air Activity at Night appeared first on Digital Urban.

Here at digital urban over the years we have got used to setting up capture systems that are low cost yet get the job done, and our timelapse system is hopefully no exception.

You will need:

1 x WebCam – we recommend the QuickCam 9000 due to its 1600 x 1200 resolution but any USB webcam will do.

1 x Waterproof Torch – see the photograph below, any torch that is generally waterproof is suitable, ours cost £9.99.

1 x USB Extender Cable – depending on length required, £15.00

1 x Roll of Electrical Tape

1 x Old Sock

1 x Webcam Capture Software, we used Booru Webcam 2.0 , £0.

Time Required – One Hour.

Step 1: Mounting the Webcam

The key is to house the webcam inside the torch, thus creating a unit you can leave outside in all weather while still capturing images. As such the first step is to take the torch apart, remove all the internals, unscrew the front section and pull out the reflector.

The webcam is housed inside the reflector, where the bulb used to be. To allow a snug fit simply thread the USB cable of the webcam through the hole where the bulb was and pull so the webcam is secure inside.

We tried various methods to secure the webcam but the best is to allow it to simply sit on top of an old sock, this allows the cam to remain tight in the housing while also allowing last minute adjustments. We know it sounds very low tech, but trust us it we reached this conclusion after hours of trial and error with a lot of glue and fixings.

Step 2: Wiring it Up

Drill a hole in the base of the torch and thread the USB lead through, screw back on the glass front and you are done. You should now have a torch with a webcam inside complete with a USB cable coming our the back.

Our webcam sits on the roof with the cable running down to the eves and coming into the house through a window. Our run is approximately 10 metres so we have linked up the end of the USB of the webcam to the computer using an Active USB extender.

An active USB extender is designed to allow cable runs over and above the usual 5m limit. Multiple leads may be connected up to a maximum of 3, giving a maximum cable run of up to 20m (with three active and one standard lead). We simply plugged the USB cable into the extender and wrapped the connection in electrical tape to keep out the rain.

The webcam is ready to go and ready to mount wherever has a good view. The torch we used is useful as it has a stand allowing it to point at the sky or to be mounted on a ledge. Ours is secured to a chimney pot using regular cable ties.

Step 3: Capture the Images

Timelapse images work by capturing a image few every few seconds and then stringing together the sequence to produce a movie. Our webcam is linked up to a Eee PC running Windows XP, the laptop runs almost silently which is a bonus as most timelapses run for many hours.

There are numerous software packages for capturing timelapse images, we used Booru WebCam 2.0 as its both free and one of the best available on the Windows platform. For Mac users Gawker is a free and extremely easy option to use, although note the QuickCam 9000 is not Mac friendly, it is worth taking a look at the Logitech Vision Pro instead.

The general rule is to capture an image every 5 or 10 seconds in .png format for minimum loss of quality. The images are saved in sequence ready to be merged into a usable movie, we store ours on a portable hard drive as it is all too easy to run out of disk space when capturing every 5 seconds over a 24 hour period.

Step 4: Create the Movie

There are many ways to create a movie from a series of images. The simplest way is to use QuickTime Pro which allows one to open an image sequence (file > Open > Image Sequence), set the framerate (normally 24 frames per second) and save. If you don’t wish to use QuickTime Pro then take a look at this easy to follow tutorial on using Windows Movie Maker.

Below is an example movie captured using our set up. The frames were captured as detailed above, opened in QuickTime Pro and then simply saved at 1280 x 720 for upload to Vimeo. The whole process takes approximately 15 minutes.

The aerial is in view throughout the movie above, as such you can use the digital zoom function on the webcam to zoom past the aerial, allowing a clearer view of the skyline. The movie below was created using the digital zoom:

Music: Let it Rain

If you do install a webcam in a torch and create a timelapse movie do let us know and any thoughts/question are of course welcome via the comments below.

Update – see our post on GIS Timelapse for Pedestrian Movement Analysis for an example using the Booru webcam software and timestamped images.

The post Tutorial: Torch/Flashlight + Webcam = HD Timelapse System appeared first on Digital Urban.