V-ray Animation

[stuzzzzie]

Has anyone done animation with V-ray and would like to send me or post their file. I am really interested to see how it looks and if its worth while. Let me know.

Cheers.

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: V-ray Animation

Yep, all the time. I posted a couple of examples in my thread located here. They take about a minute to load and might look jerky until then (I shouldnt put more than 1 on a page at a time without preloaders, but oh well)

http://asgvis.com/smf//index.php?topic=824.0

[stuzzzzie]

Re: V-ray Animation

how long did those take to make? they look great by the way.

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: V-ray Animation

Both use very simple settings. Just IR map for the primary engine and no secondary engine at all. The materials created were all very fast, no glossy's, and no double layers.

Setting it all up with the fastest materials possible got both animations 300 frames down to between 20 and 40 seconds per frame. In all I think each 300 frame animation took around 25 to 30 minutes on a core 2 duo 2.0 ghz laptop with 2 gigs of ram. So no super hardware or DR going on. I am sure you could get this time reduced to half with a nice quad core.

It's important to precache your IR map so that you don't have to calculate it for each frame. First set the Don't render final image in the system optoins. That will allow you just calculate the IR solution and not worry about the final pass.

Then clear your current IR map and the set it to Incremental Add to Current Map. Take your total frames and do an animation on the same path but divide your total frame count by a large number like 10 (so 300/10 = 30 frames). This will build up the solution for the scenes shadows for you (Keep in mind that the IR only does shaddows for what is visible to the camera during that frame) If you do not cache you risk getting flickering shaddows from frame to frame.

Then, once you have those 30 frames around your path save that IR map. Set the IR map to now load from file. This will skip the calculation phase of the IR map and go straight for the final pass on each frame. Make sure to uncheck the Don't render final image before your final 300 frame pass.

Now your IR is already solved and each frame renders the final result without needing to calculate the IR for each one. This is a huge time saver!

[dalomar_cg]

Re: V-ray Animation

Check out V-Ray Utilities in the Tools and Scripts Download section. There are a number of animation tools that are included in the Utilities that can be used with Rhino's built-in animation commands. This will allow you to set up multiple animations, efficiently calculate IR maps, and more flexibly render animations.

[stuzzzzie]

Re: V-ray Animation

I really appreciate these explanations and will try to pull it off. When I'm in the process would guys mind if I e-mail questions to both of you? Thanks again.

[josh_dannenberg]

Re: V-ray Animation

Travis,

When you say that you used "no glossy's", what exactly do you mean? Did you not use reflective layers in the materials? How did you get reflections, then?

Anyone else know a way?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: V-ray Animation

glossies are blurry reflections. Generally any "blurry" calculation is going to require more sampling, and therefore more time. The reflections themselves aren't too much of an issue in terms of time. Its only when you have glossy reflections or have a lot reflections within reflections that render times really increase.