Making 3D Animated Movies
with Free Open Source Seamless3d and FFmpeg


This tutorial shows how anyone can make high quality 3d animated movies using free software. For this tutorial you must have Seamless3d 3.009 or up and the FFmpeg installer for Seamless3d installed.

The animation created for a future tutorial: Creating a Simple Realistic Animated Female Step by Step will be used as an example for this tutorial. You can download the example file from this link: simple-realistic-animated-female.zip

Unzip and put the simple-realistic-animated-female.smls file in a new empty folder and double click it to open it into Seamless3d:

Set the resolution of the frames to 1280 by 720 pixels by setting the Seamless3d window to this pixel size. To do this click settings-button to open the settings control panel and set the win3dSize field to 1280 720:

If the window size was not already set to this size, close down seamless and reopen (and the file) again for the window size specification to take affect.

Note: Other resolutions can be specified but not all resolutions will work correctly for the screenshots by the OpenGL version of Seamless3d.

Click to go into animation mode and right click on the Anim bar and select, output screenshot movie:

This will cause Seamless to generate screen shots for each frame of the movie and then run FFmpeg to create a movie file from the screenshots:

The mp4 movie file and all the screenshot files will be located in the folder you put the smls file in:

The movie file can be played by double clicking it and is ready to upload to YouTube.

The mp4 movie file has been tested on free SMPlayer, free VLC Media Player and free OpenShot video editor.


 

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