Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

[steelers05]

This is an animation for my senior interior design project. It was a nightclub/ultra lounge called Identity, and the concept was created by the desire to help extend the "shelf-life" of nightclub design, because the turn over rate for nightclubs can be extremely high. I attempted to accomplish this by having multi-ranked V.I.P. levels, RGB color changing light effects throughout, large projection screens over the dance floor to allow for an unlimited range of graphics and effects to create the atmosphere of the club, and many other features. I wanted visitors to be able to feel a "brand new experience" each time the come to the club.

This process began back in september with a senior thesis paper that required extensive research and then turned in to a student project. We had to find a site for the project, and go through all the phases of a design project...we had to bubble diagram, develop a concept, space plan, have a fairly complete set of construction documents, specify all of our products and furniture, and do many of the other tasks that go into an Interior design project. We just had our presentations the other night and that phase of the project was very important to me so I decided to do an animation that would help market the project and nightclub. It was a very long school year and is bitter/sweet to see it come to an end, but I am definitely ready to try and enter the work world full time. I hope you all enjoy this and as always, comments and critiques are welcome and greatly appreciated. (watch in hi-quality for best viewing and I will be posting some till renderings as soon as I can)


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72m9gdMK9r0

-Steelers05

[teofas]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

like i told you on the sketchucation forum,,what a freaking goood work i just love it..its really awsome!!!!!

btw how much time did it took to make all the animation and on what machine?

again congrats for such an excellent work,,i´ve seen it 3 times now hehehe ;D

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

this is an excellent job. WOWWOOW its like an MTV. the way you plan and directed the timing of your sequencing and music is absolutely excellent. can you tell us more what software did you use from modelling, rendering, compositing and animation.. just the workflow so as we will able to grasps the context.

[artchung]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

this is crazy!!!! amazing piece!!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Very Well done Steelers... congrats on the animation and congrats on finishing up school in one piece. I understand that bitter sweet feeling of a project like this finishing. Its very evident that you've put a lot of long hours into this, so its odd to wake up the next day and not have to touch it. Again...great work

[stefanq]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Amazing....the lights, the sound, the mood.....I just feel like dancing right now!
CONGRATULATIONS!

[steelers05]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Thank you all guys for all the feedback. The same holds true as I mentioned on the SU forum...I would have never been able to accomplish something like this without the help of a great community like the on that we got on this forum and I cant thank you all enough for that.

Teo: to continue with what i mentioned on the SU forum... i wish i had the time to keep track of the hours I put into this. Like most of us, this type of work is our hobby and I really was working on it practically any and every waking hour I could. I did have to put a lot of time into all the other stuff like construction drawings and developing a concept, but a lot of time was put into this and I honestly couldnt even keep track. And my work was generous enough to let me use their computers so I had the spawner running 8-10 computers collecting footage almost every night for about a month and a half. It was a rather long process, but I actually enjoyed most all of it.

Nomer: This was all SU + Vray and then I put the frames together in After Effects. Im not gonna lie, there was a lot of post production done in after effects to get my concept accross and get everything to read the way I wanted to, but it was something I had to do, due to the limitations of SU in reguards to animation. There was a lot of time remapping for the frames, because I was using the work around the was suggested on one of the threads that allowed me to us the Spawner to collect my footage. That unfortunately only gave me 100 frames for each scene transition and if I were running at 30 frames per second, I would have been stuck with really quick transitions. So I had to stretch them out and frame blend in After effects to get the longer camera movements, because I wanted to completely avoid to jerky SU camera movements by eliminating them entirely in the process. I hope that makes sense and I hope it proved affective. An most all of the other effects, like the flashing lights and screen effects were definately done in post production.

Dalomar: Thank you for the encouraging words. I want to actually discuss this with you....I did not use the animation tutorial that was suggested in the vray for max tutorials and that has been mentioned on here about collecting the light cache and all of that. I am telling you this, not to try and prove the tutorial wrong...I am doing so to find out if you saw flaws in my animation that would have been solved by using that technique? Would my rendering process have taking less time if would have done it the recommended way? And did you see any inaccurecies in the lighting? because i remember you saying that that could be a problem. I just want to learn from this, because I do think that SU can be used for animation in the proper situation (im still not gonna say it competes with max eventhough i am an SU user). I just think it could be a good learning experience that everyone could hopefully benefit from. To give you a better idea of my process....I just set my scene up like I would for a still rendering, lowered some of the material settings to make an animation feesable and not take forever, and then used a scene transition of 100 to ensure that I could use the spawner, and then checked the animation box and set my frame rate to 1 and let it go. What can we learn from this? I am curious, because I did not necessarily go through those other steps, and this topic may help avoid all of the random questions you get about animation in vray for SU. But again, thank you for all of your help since ive been on this forum and for the feedback.

Everyone else, thank you and I am glad you enjoyed it.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Dalomar: Thank you for the encouraging words. I want to actually discuss this with you....I did not use the animation tutorial that was suggested in the vray for max tutorials and that has been mentioned on here about collecting the light cache and all of that. I am telling you this, not to try and prove the tutorial wrong...I am doing so to find out if you saw flaws in my animation that would have been solved by using that technique? Would my rendering process have taking less time if would have done it the recommended way? And did you see any inaccurecies in the lighting? because i remember you saying that that could be a problem. I just want to learn from this, because I do think that SU can be used for animation in the proper situation (im still not gonna say it competes with max eventhough i am an SU user). I just think it could be a good learning experience that everyone could hopefully benefit from. To give you a better idea of my process....I just set my scene up like I would for a still rendering, lowered some of the material settings to make an animation feesable and not take forever, and then used a scene transition of 100 to ensure that I could use the spawner, and then checked the animation box and set my frame rate to 1 and let it go. What can we learn from this? I am curious, because I did not necessarily go through those other steps, and this topic may help avoid all of the random questions you get about animation in vray for SU. But again, thank you for all of your help since ive been on this forum and for the feedback.

Everyone else, thank you and I am glad you enjoyed it.

There's more than one technique to do just about everything in V-Ray, so just because there's a tutorial on something doesn't mean that thats the only way to do it. There are a number of different workflows with animation (depending on what your actually animating (geometry, cameras, materials, etc)) so the tutorials are by no means the way you have to do everything. In fact, there are a few places in the animation where that workflow would have broken down, so no need to worry that you didn't follow them to a T.

With you're animation you actually really lucked out for one big reason...your animation is very dark. The first thing is that V-Ray samples lighter areas more accurately than darker areas, so your scene probably rendered a little bit faster because of it, thus making a "per frame GI calc" animation feasible. The second thing is that flickering/splotchiness from IR calcs tend to show up more when a surface is lighter (its easier to see the variance) and when there's a change from light to dark areas. Since most of your surfaces were fairly dark and the lighting itself was overall very dark, that kept the flickering from showing up too significantly in the renders. There were a few places that I noticed them, but it was only on some of the lighter surfaces, and I was specifically looking for them. It was fairly subtle though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.

You said that you used the same setup as a still, and that's actually what most users did some years ago with VfMax before there were some of the animation tools that were added to V-Ray 1.5. I used a more "brute force" single frame approach a long while back for an animation that had moving geometry in it. Since you had changing materials at several parts in the animation (not sure how many of them were from post work or how many were rendered), you would have probably had to use just a pure single frame setup for sections of the animation any way.

As I watch the rendering again, I want to also tip my hat to you on the post work. It was very well done an definitely pulled the animation together with the theme and the music. The right moves in post can really make an animation come together and you definitely took advantage of that to the fullest. Congrats again man and for goodness sake get some sleep ;D

[JHuman]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Steelers great work, my boss and I were feelin like dancing in the office. I just finished up a similar animation, not as good though, and I tried a couple techniques. I ultimately ended up using the same as you did so I could farm out the frames. I tried saving the LCMAP and IRMAP but would always get a lot of blotchy and black areas on my images. I only had one animation snit bit that came out OK using that method.

Also, what post production software did you use, I have been dabbling in some of the Adobe production products. Great job!

[steelers05]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Dalomar: As always, thank you for the thorough response. It is nice to know that I was not just making up some sort of workflow that only luckily work for this scenario. It is also nice to sort of confirm some of the problems or ways that this could have been improved, because I aslo notice many of the issues that you did and I thought it was due to many of the reasons you just described. Just like everything else, I guess I will just have to explore many different routes and make them all part of the workflow and apply them where need be. But I am glad you liked this, and like I said on the SU forum, hopefully we will see more work like it to try and push SU into giving us better animation & camera options, and polygon support.

Joe: Thank you for the feedback. I would like to see what you had come up with if that is possible? For the post production, I used photoshop for touching up some frames that needed it, but all of the rest was done in After Effects. It is a great program and I highly recommend it for anyone considering doing animations.

[JHuman]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

I will see if I can post it, right now we still have to hand it off to the client, once they sign off on it, it should be posted on there website. After Effects, I will start learning that. Thanks!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

... hopefully we will see more work like it to try and push SU into giving us better animation & camera options, and polygon support.

Well I hope your successful. My "gripe" with animation in SU is really about providing a proper interface to be able to effectively work and manage animations. If Google actually gets that going, then I think you'll see using VfSU for animations become an easier and hopfully more robust process. Until they get the concept of a timeline in there though, its rather hard for us to do certain things.

[nektares]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

I´m blown away, so much time and work! amazing result steelers congratulations!

[steelers05]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Dalomar: yeah im sure there are plenty of things that SU is limiting for you guys. We can only hope for some changes

Nektares: Thank you

[edonk]

Re: Animation - Identity Nightclub/Ultra lounge

Steeler, there were only 41 animation entries into this years CGarchitect Architectural Awards and I'm serious when I say that if you'd submitted that I would have given yours a 10/10 vote rating. Congratulations, it may be 'simple' but the combination of the camera work and audio produces an animation that I'd watch more than once and I'm sure others will too for inspiration.