In the style of Waro Kishi (animation)

[BBB3]

Hi guys,
I had to build an animation-ready environment recently in the style of said architect.
I had to cut a looooot of corners in order to keep render times below 10 minutes per frame in HD on a single machine.
Having done this, I thought I'd throw in a couple of recent furniture models and drive a camera through it.
No funky video editing and no soundtrack either. Just a few short sequences stuck together. The compression is not great but it's still probably worth watching it in HD.

http://vimeo.com/9682327

Also uploading a few stills (I take no credit for the car model, which came free with this month's issue of 3DWorld):

[Valo]

The animation looks really nice - beautiful rendering! The ease in/ease out on the camera movement (end shot#1 to beginning shot#2) breaks the fluid motion in my opinion.

Excellent work!

[Olli96]

They look great. I especially like the last image. How did you managed to keep the rendertimes under 10 minutes in HD?

[BBB3]

Thanks a lot guys.

Valo: The kind words mean a lot to me. I've long been an admirer of your work.

Olli: Thanks a lot. I did a lot of trial and error. In the end, I had to accept a certain level of noise, much more than I would find acceptable in a still image. One thing I did was to bring down DMC subdivs all the way down to something like 4 and up the subdivs of the specific llights and glossy mats that were causing me the most trouble. I also kept the intensity of my lights low and raised the exposure in post (I rendered to .exr sequences). Finally I dropped the motion blur and the DOF and did both in post. That pretty much did it.

[voltron7]

Wow, that was great! No crits from me, and it was a pleasure to watch. How did you light the scene?

[BBB3]

Thanks Voltron. The setup varies slightly from sequence to sequence, but generally with a Vray Dome Light using a VrayHDR map and a sun on top of it.

Hope you guys don't mind me using this opportunity to plug my revamped website (basically a very young blog with only two posts at the time of writing).

[voltron7]

Nice start for your blog.
So, you have a dome light and a V-Ray Sun?
The lighting looks so good.

Best regards

[m_hinks]

Great lighting, and cameras, and post!

Amazing to get an HD frame in under 10 mins.

[rmejia]

Nice work, the animation looks great!

[pixela]

It is a great work. Very nicely done.
Did you use Zbrush for modeling the seating in the last image?

[BBB3]

Thanks a lot, guys.

Pixela: Yes, the Togo seat was modelled in Max and finished in ZBrush. I used the decimation master plugin to bring the polycount from a couple million down to 100,000 polys.