Walk-through animation tutorial

[ziddemizard]

part II, problem.

hello

i think to have a problem in the part II for my personal proyect, when I calculate the irradiance map (medium-animation) in primary engine I have to stay set the second engine to lightcache (from file: .vrlmap 28 MB) but it is very very slow calculate it I think (resolution 180x135->10 minutes 1 frame and i need a resolution of 768X576->25 mimutes*300 frame ). is it normal?. If I set the second engine to none or QMC the Imap calculate is speed (11 sg) but then it is not correct, not?

i have a AMD64 3200+, 1GB Ram, WinXP SP2, 3dmax 6, vray 1.47.03. My scene is a small exterior with a plane modifier Greeble (plugin)



sorry if my english is bad, i am spanish.

[ziddemizard]

the problem, Irradiance Map set medium-animation . If i set in High or medium the calculate is normal and speed. is it a bug? i don´t know.

[Lupaz]

Why are you using, as AA, adaptive subdivision instead of qmc?

I' asking cause everyone says that adaptive qmc is better. However I've been using it and got very noisy results with glossys, and turning global subdivisions up makes rendering too slow. So I thought may be to start using adaptive subdivision again.

[tricky]

Just a little clarification (I have always been used to Imap and QMC for animations - this Lightcache option has opened up a whole new can of worms...)

1) In Part II, do we leave the secondary engine set to Lightcache, and have that Lightcache loaded from the file we saved in Part I? In this way, the Irradiance map is being calculated from the Lightcache.

Do I understand this correctly?

2) We are producing a massive animation of a business park. There are about 30 large office buildings. The camera flies around the whole park and also goes into two or three of the buildings (it is proving to be quite a challenge!). The whole model is built in mm, so you can imagine that the scene size is many tens of thousands of units across. Should I leave the Lightcache set to Screen mode rather than World?

3) I may be pushing things just too far with this same animation. As I understand it, the Subdivs setting for the Lightcache in Flythrough mode is a number of samples that is spread *evenly* throughout the whole of the animation path. In the above scenario with 30-odd buildings on a massive business park, my Subdivs setting would need to be many thousands (?). Am I right? In your tutorial, you set it to 3300 - this is for a very small scene in comparison to the business park I am working on. This suggests a figure of 30000+ Subdivs! I assume this would either take for ever and a day to calculate or crash my system.

Is this where the 'brute force' method comes into play, and if so, the dreaded 'flicker'?

Do you think an animation like this is even feasible with Vray?

[flipside]

In part two the lightcache is indeed used by the ir map calculation to speed things up. This is the same in a single frame, the LC is always calculated first so that IR map can use this info.

In your scene I think it is best to break the anim up into multiple scenes so you don't have to calculate the LC for the whole anim at once. You would indeed need insane amount of subdivs especially when you enter the buildings too.

You can still use world scale (which should be better otherwise samples in the distance will be much larger than those close to the camera). But don't set it to 0.01 if you work in mm... You don't want samples to be 1/100th of a mm small Also here, breaking up in scenes would be better so you can use smaller samples in your interior vs exterior.

[tricky]

Thanks flipside! I'm having a play around now.

Do you use Lightcache for all animations now? I'm wondering if I should go "all the way" as it were, for both internakl and external?

[flipside]

I used it for an interior scene, but it was a pretty easy scene. I don't know if it will make much of a difference in exteriors (because there isn't much secondary bounces anyways). But for interiors it is definatly way faster.

[tricky]

Another thing: the tutorial mentions:
"Make sure that the timeline animation range matches the range which you want to render"

How do I do this? Basically, I have quite a few cameras of varying lengths from 0 to 90 seconds. If I am looking at one specific camera with a range from 20 to 30 seconds, how do I achieve this? Is it just by setting Time Output/Range in the Render/Common box?

The reason why I am thinking this doesn't work is because when it builds the LC, I can see elements in the samples from much earlier in the cameras path than I wish to compute. Does this make sense?

[flipside]

The LC animation mode should only be used for 1 camera I think.

If cam one moves from frame 300 to 1200, set the visible part of the timeline from 300-1200 and render the LC for that cam. Do the same for the other cams and save them all to different files so you can load the appropriate one when you will do the IR map pass for each cam.

I guess you know how to make a certain range visible? Just press the time configuration button next to the frame number field and set start and end time.

[tricky]

That was the bit I couldn't work out! Cheers flipside.

[askhamdesign]

Link not there?

Hi all

Cant seam to get this link www.vrayrender.com wont work?

Any one point me to it?

Cheers

Simon[/url]

[harperperkins]

sure, Simon....this tutorial is now located within the help website here:
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRay...ials_imap2.htm

ME

[DaForce]

Simon,

vrayrender.com hasnt worked for aaaaaggggggeeeeeeesssssss. As its no longer their domain name.

Its now www.chaosgroup.com

But yeah for the tut use the link above.

[askhamdesign]

Yeah sorry guys I thought I had been there many times before but forgot, found it now cheers!

[Da Vinci]

Animation Tutorial needed!

Hi Vlado,

Seems people are all praises for this tutorial! Unfortunately, I missed it and now the link doesn't work! Could you please upload the tutorial again somewhere since I am currently doing a restuarant walkthrough and it will be a big help at this moment....

Thanks and looking forward to it....