Special Effects for Rides

Has anyone ever done anything with special effects?

For example if you were going to make a mini movie of some sort, is there anyone that can help me learn how to simulate, say, a dark ride or rollercoaster? Or if you do not know can you lead me in the right direction.

Why don't try Badnitrus's site? He has a whole tutorial telling how he animates the coasters. He's the guy who did the Italian Job video.

Thanks for your advise, I will definantely check it out.

Is there anyone who knows anyone who has done any special effects for home movies or low budget films? I wish to learn a way that will not cost me millions of dollars, but that will look some what realistic.

Why exactly are you looking to do? Create animated Rides, or incorporate live-action footage into "Fantasy" rides (Compositing)?

Either way you are going to need to invest some money in software that lets you do this.

If you are making animations of rides, then, like Intamin Fan said, check out badnitrus's site, there's a decent, yet unfinished tutorial there, and do a google search for computer animation tutorials, you'll get a lot of good basic information that you can build upon to make what ever you want.

Compositing, where you take live action footage, and combine it with stillpictures, animations, ect(also sometimes called to as blue screening) Takes some work to make it look decent. If you're interested in trying this send me a private message and I'll help you out. I haven't found a good how-to site for this, and everything I've learned is from trial and error, and I'd be more than happy to pass it along.

I have also done a bit of workincorporating these features into home videos. In High School for a report I faked myself being on the Moon and conducting a "live"(taped a week before) interview with one of my class mates. I've made a music video for a local band, and was involved with the film club in college, we're we are working on filming a disaster movie and have a budget of $100. I've also worked for a production studio over a summer. *** Edited 8/24/2004 7:06:44 PM UTC by Danimal***

Software will do what you want to do. It won't cost in the millions, just in the hundreds to thousands depending what you want. However, you are going to need to learn how to use that software and spend a lot of time working with the software to perform the effects.

I heard there was a new computer game coming out.Sim Movie or something similar it let you make movies in a computer game i do not when it will be released .

It's actually called... get this... The Movies, and will let you produce & your own virtual movie complete with special effects, car chase scenes, love scenes and the whole 9yrds. I really don't know how well this will play out as a game, though.

Someone here made a virtuial darkride useing the tools available for makeing your own DOOM/Quake/Unreal layouts. I don't know much about how one does this, but it looked nice.

That's all I've got.

That game "the movies" looks pretty cool, the only thing is that I cannot make a real movie with that, it is only a game.

Dexter where is darkride that you are talking about I would like to see it.

I will have solidworks and some other 3-d programs, I just don't know how that would work together.

If anyone knows of any real life cheap special effects for movies I would love to hear them.