animation question

[Arkitec]

I need to create an animation of a moving wall. See images






the total animation will be only 8 seconds for the wall to move into place. Is every 5th frame enough for the precalc? Both of these images are created with a low preset... Will a medium preset be enough?

I forgot to mention that the two panels on each end of the moving wall need to rotate out 180 degs..........



Any advice or crits would help too....

TIA,

Arkitec

[panthon]

If your objects are moving, you can't precalculate your illumination.
The suggested method in this case is using QMC+Light cache and rendering each frame without precalculation. You could even try Irradiance Map+light cache, sometimes you can get acceptable results too.

A workaround would be rendering everything but the moving walls (they would be hidden), precalculating the solution. Then, u should make everything matte alpha= - 1 and receive shadows and affect alpha ticked, except the moving walls, which would be calculated frame by frame. You could render them with a region too. The u should composite them.
It´s not the same but it´s fast.

[Arkitec]

panthon,

thanks for the response....

since the camera isnt moving, I only need to run the precalc on a single image then hide everything but the moving wall with alpha applied to everything else.....

interesting thought though.... render region for the area where I see the wall from within the image...?

this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it........

tia.

arkitec

[OrionD]

this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it........

tried that once, didn't work. not sure if there is a solution for such renders (region/blowup renders)...

[panthon]

this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it........

tia.

arkitec

yeah, sure, i do it all the time. It works perfectly and it fits correctly with the background. Max will warn u though, but just click ok and u will be fine.

[Arkitec]

panthon,

seems to be working great! THANK YOU BIG TIME!

[mmikee]

this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it........

tia.

I also do this often. With the other objects not contributing to alpha it is
a snap to comp.

[Clifton Santiago]

If you want to avoid the compositing step, you can render the still, replace it as the background, and then do the matte alpha background/moving wall animation in front of it.

[Arkitec]

Clifton,

So how do I go about making the background image as an alpha? What happens to the GI of other objects if they are not set to mattes?

Could you explain a little more in detail.

Thank you for the advice.

Arkitec

[SnipeyX]

My understanding of clifton's post is that you put the rendered still of the environment in the background slot of your scene. Then by turning all of those objects into a matte that doesn't contribute to alpha, you get a rendering of just the moving wall, that has a background of the still, so the two are already composited together. not sure if that explains it any more clearly....

[Clifton Santiago]

Yeah, what SnipeyX said. It just fixes the problem of edge pixels. I often have compositing problems whether I use straight alpha or pre-multiplied alpha, so I just avoid the problem by putting the background into later passes, which for me is usually people.

It may not be a very professional workflow, but I'm arch viz and I find its often faster to do things the "wrong" way.