Possible problem with irradiance map?

[TERRA Operative]

I'm having a problem with a 1400 frame 720deg fly around of an architectural model.

I've rendered out a light cache and irradiance map separately for this animation, even going to the extent of rendering every frame for the irradiance map to try to minimise the problem, to no effect.

I followed this tutorial to the letter (except the 10th frame thing).
http://www.vfxstudios.co.uk/tutorial...gi/vraygi.html

It seems that the render comes out fine when the camera is looking at faces it could see in the first frame, but when the camera views frames at the back of the building, things get funky. You can see circle shapes, and the zigzag of the object faces.

Also, I have transparency levels set to 200, but the plants (which use alpha mapped planes for the leaves and branches) still effect the image alpha map on the final output. As we are compositing the rendered model onto a background image, it's causing a few problems. Is 200 levels unusually high, or should I just bump it up some more? I'm pretty certain that there aren't more than 200 leaves in each tree model (more like 10 - 20 planes per tree).



Front:





Rear:




Any ideas?
Thanks.

[3DMK]

Hi

Sorry I can't help you with the GI problem but I can make a suggestion about your animation path of 720 degrees.

Unless you client has specifically asked for this type of animation [& by the way they should be talked out of this at all times..if possible] don't do the classic helicopter fly around..& around...& around.
These anims just make people dizzy & bored & are unrealistic as not many people own a helicopter. Sure do a fly-over pass , but just one or two short ones, leave the rest to what a human would see walking around/through it as that is how everyone is going to see it in real life.
Try not to be locked in to making a technical animation but rather use movie techniques to breath a bit of life into it. All animations are marketing..weather it is for advertising, city council development applications, or designing for a client, they all need to be sold the project & that is YOUR area of expertise....NOT THEIRS... so kindly remind them of that [without losing your clients...lol]

Hope this helps

[TERRA Operative]

It's actually for a screen saver for an interactive touchscreen, the first half of the animation is the flyaround, followed by the building opening up, all the internal walls and furniture flying out and a flythrough of the internal detail.

The actual user interface consists of a 46" LCD tough screen and a custom Java interface, The main animatics are of the roof peeling back zoom ins of the respective areas (electrical metered zones, water metered zones, HVAC zones etc) for the display of realtime metered data for each respective zone.

This is just to loop during idle time, we sold the product months ago, the architects took care of the pre vis work.
Thanks for the suggestions though.

[TERRA Operative]

Hmm. I'm thinking it may actually be the light cache. I think I had it set to World instead of Screen. My thinking is that it may have ran out of samples or something.

I'm going to try setting it to Screen and see what happens.

[TERRA Operative]

Well, it's got me. Got a single Vray Sun, I've rebuilt the irradiance and light cache, tried all sorts of different settings, but the errors still appear.

[3DMK]

Well, it's got me. Got a single Vray Sun, I've rebuilt the irradiance and light cache, tried all sorts of different settings, but the errors still appear.

Had another look at the render & and it appears to be geometry issues ...
Do you have a smooth modifier on the geometry??? what angle threshold??

Try also doing a test with just LC as first & second bounce to isolate if it's the LC or the irradiance map causing the problem

[TERRA Operative]

Not sure on the angle threshold. The walls were created from an extruded spline, with the windows cut out with the pro-boolean modifier.
I've made the walls faces planar and set each wall as it's own smoothing group, as well as manually fixing the faces to make sure there's no problematic faces (as often happens with booleans) to try to fix the problem.

I've done the same to the other side of the building, where it renders fine, and if I place a camera on the rear of the building (not rotating around from the front) it renders fine.