Commercial Interior Flythrough

[DanielBrew]

Hi, I'm looking for C&C on my latest project, a 5 minute interior flythrough. I've mainly done stills for the past year so I'm a bit out of practice.

I've used Irradiance map for first bounce and Lightmap for second.



Unfortunately, the smallest I could make a 1 minute clip is 8Mb, this is at one sixth of the bitrate of the final verions so there are some artifacts caused by the codec - as well as the ones caused by me.


http://www.tskworkplace.com/3ds/test05.avi
(right click and save target as)

I know its a big file but I would be grateful if someone does take the time to download it. I have another project and want to learn from this one.

Thanks,

Dan

[natty]

cool .... how long were your rendertimes per frame... there's a few glossy artifacts ... what AA method did you use.

[DanielBrew]

Hi Natty,

Glad you liked it. I managed to get the frame times down to 1-2 minutes on a dual Xeon 2.8 but most of my renderfarm are 2-3 GHz P4s, so they took 4-7 minutes depending on the complexity of the view. I made a mistake in the first post, it said I used QMC first bounce, it should have said irradiance map. I managed to get an saved irradiance map for 2000 frames done each night - 12 hours. So the whole thing took about a week to render.

There are some artifacts in the glossies and the GI isn't the tightest but when you have 10,000 frames to render and a deadline looming you have to sacrifice some quality.

AA is adaptive QMC min 1, max 4. AA filter is Catmull-Rom, not the best for animation I know but if you keep the camera moves quite slow you can avoid flickering edges.

[percydaman]

looks pretty tight. Im sure your client was very pleased!

[natty]

yeah i agree ...nice work always hard to get those rendering times down.. congrats.

[DanielBrew]

looks pretty tight. Im sure your client was very pleased!

Thanks, the client meeting was this morning, I haven't heard back from the sales team yet, probably 'just want to make a couple of tiny changes'.

Natty, I was pleased with the rendering times, I used 1.46.10, I don't think I could have got them as low in 1.09.03 - no lightmap for a start.

[olly]

Excellent work!

I am amazed at your frame times!!

We do lots of architectural walkthroughs using vray, and we dream of frame times under 20 minutes! (On Dual AMD MP 2400's, 1GB RAM)

If you don't mind me asking, what were your QMC settings? We have tried using adaptive QMC for AA, with no usable results...

Cheers,
Olly.

PS. Did you get any feedback yet from your client yet?

[DanielBrew]

Thanks for comments Olly, I was very happy with the render times. The first few frames took a bit longer as each server caches the maps.

I left the settings in the QMC Sampler rollup at the default values. I used adaptive QMC for AA because I understood it to work better with glossy reflections.

My other render settings are shown below:



The short render times were helped by faking some of the effects. For example, if you look at the arm pad of the chair in the foreground the 'glossy reflections' are created entirely with falloff maps.

Dan

[sv]

very nice animation, i have scene far worse anti-alising - i wouldn't think your client could say anything bad about it. The Gi looks very clean, especially for 2 mins a frame!

Just a quick question - How many lights in the scene? Vray lights at the windows, and do you use Photometric or just normal max lights for the downlighters?

[DanielBrew]

Thanks for the feedback.

The Gi looks very clean, especially for 2 mins a frame!

It would be but the GI is from a saved irradiance map, the 2-3 min frame times are just for rendering. Each irradiance map took 6-8 hours for 1000 frames, rendering every 10th frame and using lightmap in 'flythro' mode for second bounce. Sorry if I confused anyone .

As for lighting, there are no photometric lights. The only lights are a 600 x 600mm VRay plane light placed 5mm below every modelled light fitting. I think there are about 70-100 of them in total. I didn't put lights at the windows, I just used the light blue environment override with the multiplier set to 4.

Hope that's clearer.

[olly]

Daniel,

One more question, if you don't mind, do you try and use vray or standard materials as a rule? Or do you not worry about it...

Thanks for the post showing you IR map setup...

Cheers,
Olly.

[DanielBrew]

I only use VRay materials (re-made for 1.46.10). I think it's easier in the long run, no coloured sploches, faster render times etc.

[natty]

As a rule Olly you should always use vray mats..