1st animation job - what to expect?

[yyk]

I need to animate a camera spin around a mall. It´s located in a place that is surrounded by a forest.. it´s gonna be a birds eye to a street level view so I have to render the trees as 3D objects. I´ve never done an animation in my life, even getting the camera to fly through the scenery in a smooth way is something I need to learn :P

I have no moving objects in the scene. The tree leaves make use of opacity maps. Can I use irradiance map for this or must I use a BF+LC approach? the animation is to be used in a presentation which will be projected to screen through a laptop, so I guess the resolution need not be anything major but, what aspect ratio is normally used in animation? also, is there anything I need to keep in mind while rendering I mean if I don´t do much post production should I render to .jpg and make an animation out of the image sequence? How many frames per second should I have?

I feel silly asking these things but would greatly appreciate any tips.

[joconnell]

If you've no moving objects, Irmap and LCmap in single frame mode, and with "use camera path" turned on for both and save them out to a file so your lighting is baked. If you're doing a really big camera move over a long distance, you might need to up your lcmap samples quite a bit and also use them in world space more rather than screen space. Take a look at http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150S...ials_imap2.htm for a good explanation why you use world space.

Turn off filtering for the opacity maps of your leaves to make things quicker, and if the leaves are tiny in your render, see does it look the same with opacity maps turned off entirely.

Resolution wise I'd probably use something like 1024 x 576 - it'll be good enough for most things and you can make a dvd after or upload to the web at nice quality. Frame rate depends on what country you live in. Since you're in finland, 25 fps is a good idea if you need to make dvds to play back on regular tvs after. If you don't need to do this, 24 is still probably the minimum. You can always change what frame rate your render plays at afterwards anyway, it'll just end up being slightly longer or shorter depending on whether you need to make your frame rate faster or slower.

Personally I'd always render out to a format that doesn't lose any detail such as tga, tif, png or exr. Jpeg is a tiny bit smaller but it throws away a small amount of detail. hard drives are cheap and if you turn on compression on any of the above file formats they won't be too huge. A 1024 x 576 frame is about 1.2 megs in tga format.

If you've got loads of small details in your trees they can be a bit "flickery" when the camera moves - to help this you could use a softer anti aliaser like quadratic, and also you could try rendering out a velocity pass so you can add some motion blur in 2d in nuke, after effects or fusion. All of these things will blur the render and cover over noise.

Good luck!

[kimgar]

very nice roundup joconnel! i've been doing animations for a while now, mostly using the same workflow as you. it's good to know things haven't changed that much and that i'm still on the right track

one thing i've been missing for all these years thuogh, is a small app that can take a png sequence and do a quick and dirty conversion to wmv.
for some reason i can't stand premiere, but i'm stuck with this chunky monster even for the simplest little thing - anyone seen such an app (preferably a free one) that actually works?

[yyk]

Wow, thanks for the advice I really appreciate you taking the time to explain in such detail! I´ll start doing tests this weekend, may come up with additional questions

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

very nice roundup joconnel! i've been doing animations for a while now, mostly using the same workflow as you. it's good to know things haven't changed that much and that i'm still on the right track

one thing i've been missing for all these years thuogh, is a small app that can take a png sequence and do a quick and dirty conversion to wmv.
for some reason i can't stand premiere, but i'm stuck with this chunky monster even for the simplest little thing - anyone seen such an app (preferably a free one) that actually works?

V-dub - http://virtualdub.sourceforge.net/ Ull love it for ever after... enjoy !

As to yyk and main topic. prepare for 22h a day of work loads of pain and fails... its a hell !!!! GL

[kimgar]

ah yes, of course, i forgot all about virtualdub, i remember it from way back, it was a bit too hardcore for me then, gotta check out how it feels in 2011.
excellent, thanks for the reminder dadal!

mmm, i want pdplayer to export wmv, one app to rule them all

yyk, yes, there will be pain. many ways to do a flyby, i usually use a path constraint on a target camera along some nurb curve, with a bezier controller on the path percentage, that will give you some nice speed controls. key the camera target where you need it, but try not to overdo the amount of keys in the beginning, you can always refine them when you've got your timing right. if you get stuck in the mud, take a break, and be glad you don't have any IK rigs in there, hehe