3D Animated Buttons in DVD Menus

Using COOL 3D Studio Videos in DVD Workshop Menus

By Travis White

Since its inception DVD Workshop has proven to be one of the fastest and most flexible authoring tools out there. What makes it unique is the extensive menu design capabilities right in the authoring program, instead of requiring menu layout in an outside NLE or image editor. But many users have not yet discovered the power of video compositing within DVD Workshop to take their menus to the next level.

Video composites can be done with simple squashes and stretches on video thumbnails and a little transparency applied. Videos can also be layered behind TIFF, TARGA and PNG images that have alpha info in them. But a third way is to import 32bit videos that contain an alpha-channel themselves.



In this example, you will discover some ideas on how to use COOL 3D Studio to make 32bit, alpha-channel video files for animated buttons, text and menu background objects.



Animated text in COOL 3D Studio is about one of the most brain dead tasks you will ever perform in a 3D modeling application. Here, ?The Reef? text was typed into the project and then a preset was chosen from the EasyPalette / Text Animation library to make the underwater ?wave? effect. This text object was used as the main title in the DVD Workshop menu.



The buttons in the DVD menu were made from a 3D model of a fish taken from COOL 3D Studio?s EasyPalette. Other models (3DS and X model formats) can be imported directly into COOL 3D or you can make your own using the various drawing and 3D shape tools. The fish was animated to swim using the Path Animation tool and the timeline key frames were set up to have this action loop.



Next, to add a bit of atmosphere to the DVD menu, a particle effect was chosen from the EasyPalette (bubbles of course). In COOL 3D Studio, particle effects such as fire and smoke are their own objects. They are not ?applied? to another object but rather exist on their own, providing the greatest flexibility for placement and behavior.



To make these bubbles float upward from one emitting point there are two main particle parameters to pay attention to. The first is the type of emitting shape. A Point, Sphere or Box can be chosen. This can be easily seen if you go to the View drop-down menu and turn on the Selection Indicator. A large emitting shape will make a lot of bubbles appear from many points within the shape, while a small shape will focus the bubbles to emit from a smaller source. Here, a Point shape was used to simulate air escaping from a rock crevice. The next critical control is Dragging Force. This will control what direction the bubbles will float towards. In this project a power of 5 was chosen on the ?Y? axis as we would like the bubbles to float ?up?. The number directly to the right of the axis value is how far the bubbles will spread out as they float up. Here, a value of 5 was chosen.

Finally, all three of these COOL 3D Studio objects were rendered out as AVI video files at 30 frames per second. And all three were 150 frames long (5 seconds).To get the background of these projects to be transparent, the data type option of 32bit was chosen. This generates an alpha-channel around the object so that only the object itself will be seen in the DVD Workshop menu, and not the rectangular project space in which it was created.

In DVD Workshop, the COOL 3D Studio videos were imported to the Video library and then dragged into the workspace to be made ready for navigation links. The alpha-channel automatically keys in. In fact, shadows applied in DVD Workshop will play off the alpha channel to yield very slick results, as seen on the title text.



Hope this project inspired you! Take it upon yourself to see what other impressive results you can achieve with video compositing in DVD Workshop using COOL 3D Studio and other alpha-channel image and video content.

If you don?t have these tools, click here to get a trial of DVD Workshop or COOL 3D Studio.

More tutorials and tips on Ulead product can be found here on the DMN Forums or at the Ulead Learning Center.