House animation

[glorybound]

How can so much work produce such little return . It took 8hrs to do the LC and IRR calculations and about 20hrs for the 900 frames.

http://whitebirchstudios.com/public_share/bullinger/Bullinger_color.avi

[sv]

what compression did you use on this? Try QuickTime with the Animation codec......or MPEG4.....or anything other than what you used.

I like the mix of trees with leaves and the bare trees - really makes a nice environment; at first i thought it was comped into video footage.

do you want to post your settings - 8 hours for the GI is way, way too long - that's a whole production day's worth of time for one sequence. Light Cache shouldn't really go above 20 mins calculation time in my experience, and GI a few minutes a frame at most. Post the settings and let people have a look - it might be that you've got the dynamic memory too low if your using proxy trees etc...

[glorybound]

House

My light cache was 2000 and my irr was animation high 50/20. I did every 10th frame. My resolution was 720 x 486. I'll try QuickTime, but I always got jumpy results so I stopped using it. I think the composition is what it is.... the png's are not much better. I'll have to raise my v-ray settings to get better results.

[glorybound]

Animation

Sweet! http://www.whitebirchstudios.com/pub...llinger/so.mp4

Thanks for the tip!

[sv]

if you post your settings maybe we could suggest what is wrong?
Are you saying your PNG's look like that video?

[sv]

oh - ok ; that's much better although the compression is still quite heavy. If you want a good tip, in the past to get the absolutely smallest but still good quality video, render out an uncompressed AVI or a HuffyUV AVI, (from your post app like AFX or VideoPost) and then compress it using the Windows Media Encoder which you can get from microsoft.com

I've found this is ok; although these days we don't have much use for it an basically just use an embedded .flv.... saves the client downloading it...

[sv]

where did you get the trees with no leaves by the way? I really like them...

[jujubee]

Looks good - really nice sky.

Embedded .FLV is the WAY to go IMO.

[glorybound]

animation

I'll post my settings tomorrow. I'll set up another animation for the weekend.

[glorybound]

Trees

The trees are from the Evermotion exterior cd 3, I think.

[dbibb]

I agree with sv. Those bare trees look quite nice.

You're losing a lot of your hard work and details to the video compression. Its a hard thing to get right--the big production houses have guys who do nothing but compression full time.

A quicktime file with sorenson video 3 compression always looks nice. We also output our final videos to .wmv for our clients and our general use. They'll play on just about any computer without the need to download a different player or codecs. After Effects got real nice .wmv compression with version 7. If you have AE I can give you some settings that'll work nice for just about any video you have. Another thing I learned through hours of trial and error is that many compression programs (including sorenson squeeze and microsoft's wmv encoder) are not good at resizing video while doing the compression. You're better off doing a lossless conversion on the frames to get them to the final output size, and then compressing them.

I think your clilp has nice motion for the beginning. The movement is subtle and natural, as if you're driving down the road. The motion gets awkward the last 3-4 seconds though.

Your LC and IRR calcs do seem on the long side. Especially as the scene is not moving very much. Fly-through LC and multiframe incremental should not have taken too long. What resolution did you render the frames out as?

[glorybound]

Animation

When I render this again what is the best output? I used png, is that as good as any?

[dbibb]

PNG if fine.

[glorybound]

Animation settings

Here are my settings.

[bob-cat]

Looks good to me, maybe some more detail in the foreground, kerbs, displacement grass, or noise in the maps to give some varied colours?

The low level shrubys look great too.

In regard to the time, I think you have calculated the IRmap way to many times, scrubing through the vid you could probally get a way with processing it at about 6 different angles.

If you are using a Vray cam you can also disable the "Max compatible ShadeContext" in system, this might speed it up a bit.

Also you might get better performance out of the adaptive subdivision sampler for exteriors.