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My first Vray "fly by" animation.
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My first Vray "fly by" animation. // Roundtable
Post by Changa // Sep 17, 2007, 7:15am
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Just finished my first Vray fly by architectural animation. It cost me few sleepless nights, new grey hairs and some experience. If it is interesting I can share my “tips and tricks”. |
Post by Paul Boland // Sep 17, 2007, 7:31am
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Paul Boland
Total Posts: 383
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Can you share the animation? |
Post by Changa // Sep 17, 2007, 10:56am
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Sure. Just will try to make it smaller. |
Post by Changa // Sep 17, 2007, 1:36pm
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Project description:
2000 frames “fly by” animation of 10 villas development in PAL DVD 720x276 standard. Some 3D and 2D trees, cars, swimming pools, garden furniture. Panoramic background from the real site. GI and one Inf. light for the sun. Time limit – 5 days. Modelling from 2D drawings.
1. General comment – don’t use TS on Vista, if you not sure that can handle file system security. You can loose all your work. Ts can make files (archives, scenes, etc) which are visible from TS only but not visible from the Win explorer. If you start TS “as administrator” it gives different result in files access compare with normal start even if you logged on as an administrator. If TS crashes often (unfortunately it happens), Vista can offer to run TS ‘as administrator’, which can lead to full inaccessibility of the previously made files.
2. WS and bridge. Try to avoid concurrent use of WS and Model. Even if the bridge is on in full mode it gives disparity of meshes in WS and Model side and leads to TS crash. Another disadvantage – if you save the project done in Model from WS, TS generates new set of texture with names and location differ with the original ones. My opinion – WS has some useful tools, but it hard to use for big projects without layers and easy hierarchy and from the other hand it is hard to keep “integrity” of the project if the bridge is on. So unfortunately Modeler with bridge off is still the only solution for me.
3. Memory issue. Even in bridge off mode Ts generate WS side “mirror” of the Model side project before rendering. This is one of the reason of the increased TS RAM consumption and less room for the project itself. Another unpleasant bug – not sure about Light Works rendering but each Vray rendering blocks and never released some additional amount of free RAM. Maybe it’s not crucial in single rendering, but very important in animation. I can say that I suffered with pain each second of the animation, because TS has crashed every 30 – 33 frames. If during the first rendering total used RAM is 1.8 G (Vista+TS+scene+rendering), 30th frame rendering uses 2.32 G and the only chance to free RAM and avoid TS crash is restart and resume rendering from the last good frame.
4. Vray settings. Another method to postpone TS crash is to use precalculated irradiance map. It few times increases speed of the final rendering and uses less RAM. I have merged every 30 – 50 frame by Chaos Imapviewer for “global” irradiance map. (We need to automate it somehow) Set AA to ½ and half frame size to speed up irradiance calculation. Settings for the main rendering: AA – adaptive, GI – on, Transparent shadows – on ,Quality – high or medium. This settings and ready imap allow to spend less then 40 second only per 720x576 frame on my quad core duo machine.
5. Background. Usually with LightWorks I used shelled cylinder for panoramic background and object render settings: Cast shadows – off, Receive shadows – off. It does not work with Vray as affect Global Illumination. HDRI is useless as far it can not be easy correctly oriented. I did not find any direct solution (honestly I had no time for this) and finally rendered shelled background cylinder in LifgtWorks for the whole animation and then use this sequence as a background image for final Vray rendering. I think that it saves RAM also as far as TS allocate memory for 720x576 background image instead of 1000x4000 or about texture.
6. Output. For output I used 24 bits PNG. I can even recommend images with alpha channel for the output. In this case you are free to edit and adjust background afterwards.
Conclusion: compared with LW animation Vray works faster and the output is very smooth (thanks to better adaptive anti aliasing). Almost no flickering of grass and other small textures at all. I like it. But the main and very serious problem of Vray is the memory issue (see above).
I hope you find this article helpful.
I’ve compressed animation with Xvid MPEG4 codec. A bit lower quality but more than 10 times smaller than MPEG2 file! Codec is included. Download from here: http://changavision.com/vrayflyby.zip |
Post by Jack Edwards // Sep 17, 2007, 6:44pm
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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Hi Changa very nice render! :)
To address your points.
1.) I'm not having any problems with Vista x64. Couple things that may be helping me out though:
- install TS to drive other than C:
- Use a separate directory outside the ts directory structure for your storing your projects. I use for example: "G:\tsProjects\"
2.) VRay is integrated into Workspace so rendering VRay from Model side requires TS to send the data across the bridge to Workspace side so VRay can render it.
3.) There is a memory leak in Caligari's implementation of VRay as has been documented in other threads. So definitely render out to stills instead of AVI. ;)
4.) Some good ideas on using a pre-calculated IRmap. :)
5.) GI calculates everything in the scene and it currently doesn't have a way to exclude objects from calculations. The workaround for not including the background cylinder in the IR calculations is to delete it when calculating your IR maps, then put it back when rendering. :D Using Lightworks to do the back ground is a good idea too, but requires the render be made from Model side to get the FOV to line up right.
Thanks a bunch for sharing! :jumpy:
Only think I can recommend for improvment is to get a smoother animation you can render out 60FPS and down sample it to 30FPS to get better motion blur and smoother frames. |
Post by Changa // Sep 17, 2007, 8:42pm
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Thanks Jack,
I've need your advices so much before I started. Why did not you tell me?:D
The only thing I can not accept - 60 fps is a way to a cemetery. With 30 fps I have restarted TS 43 times to do this animation. I feel I need at least a week break for recreation. Let me go to my garden to find tools for speed model challenge.:D |
Post by Emmanuel // Sep 17, 2007, 9:06pm
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Emmanuel
Total Posts: 439
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Very nice work Changa.
Note that for PAL DVD, you don't need to render 30fps as PAL is a 25 fps format.
Personally, I have never rendered a VRay animation for architecture projects for the reasons you discovered. As it is implemented today, it is definately not suited for anims. In this context, I salute your heroism !
And, yes, WS is -at the moment- an environment for real-time projects, not for achitecture rendering.
Dribble will probably allow us to get real GI in our architecture animations.
Bravo again :) |
Post by Changa // Sep 17, 2007, 9:51pm
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Thank you Emmanuel. Honestly I do not like the project from design point of view. Next set of starling-houses from unnamed cypriot architect:(
Very nice work Changa.
Note that for PAL DVD, you don't need to render 30fps as PAL is a 25 fps format.
Yes, it is another reason to output animation to single frames. It is independant from the final video standard. In my Pal version it was 25 fps, but it could be 30fps if cypriot property developers suddenly start sell to Americans:D |
Post by Paul Boland // Sep 18, 2007, 8:31am
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Paul Boland
Total Posts: 383
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Thanks for sharing, it's quite impressive. The scene, the render quality, I really like it.
Have to say, though, your comments on using TrueSpace with Vista are a bit alarming! |
Post by Changa // Sep 18, 2007, 9:59am
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Changa
Total Posts: 187
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Have to say, though, your comments on using TrueSpace with Vista are a bit alarming!
Vista has a bit complicated file access permissions rules. Maybe it needs just a little tune. |
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