Tips for rendering very large spaces

[mmikee]

We have a new project starting this week. It is a huge private school.
It is by far the largest project that we have taken so far. Most of the spaces are gigantic. For example, the Basketball building is actually four
full size basketball courts, all the seating, concessions,etc, in the same
building. Basically one huge room. Can any one here give me some tips
or suggestions on rendering animations of spaces this big ? The last project we did was also a private school. The hockey complex was two
full hockey rinks, one practice and one main. The render times were around 1 hour per frame without any glossy refections anywhere exept for
the ice. I would like to be able to use vray for this project but I am not sure the timeline will allow for it.

Basically we are going to render about 20 animations for DVD, each being between 10 and 15 seconds. We are also rendering about 50 high-res stills. The stills would be no problem. But the animations are the stickler.

Any tips/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Mike

[gilpo]

My best advice would be to try to setup your shots so that they only show small sections of the site. Setup your layers so you can hide areas that aren't visible to the camera.

If you need an animation that shows the whole site, try to have simpler, low-poly models that you can swap in and out.

We have done several projects of this scale and it always seems to turn into a fiasco at render time. We always try to do every at a perfect level of detail and it always blows up in our face come render time. KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid.

One thing we did learn was that once your scene reaches a certain poly count, lightcache seems to be useless. It takes far to much time and memory. If you reach this point, do your precalculation using IrMap/QMC. Each frame that you process lighting on (like, every 15th) will take a while due to the QMC, but you shouldn't have any memory issues.

If anyone has other suggestions, I would love to hear them as well. These types of scenes are a major challenge for us.

[efx2004]

Use proxies as much as you can.

[percydaman]

Having worked on several VERY large scale projects recently, I'd really recommend you check out RPManager. Im currently working on a project so massive, there isn't a chance in hell, its going to render with everything turned on and sent to the renderfarm, regardless of proxies. So its being split up into passes. But on an even baser level, we're using RPManager to control our xrefs. It can override the max xrefs, so we will have xref scenes created for all our cameras that split up our scene.

For instance, our trees, we've got several thousand full poly trees that are being split up into separate max files where only the visible trees for a particular camera are included, the rest blown out. This is done for all cameras. So RPManager, can setup passes for each camera that will only use the geometry visible in that camera. This is done for our architecture, entourage, people, cars etc etc. Not groundbreaking, but RPManager makes it very easy.

You spend extra time upfront setting up all these passes in the software, and then when its all done, with a click of a few buttons, ALL your passes are sent to backburner all at once.

[mmikee]

Thanks for the tips guys. Percy... I will definately look into that. How does
it handle reflections ? There will be alot of reflective surfaces in this project.

Regards,
Mike

[percydaman]

well think of it more of a scene management program. To answer your question, it depends on your scene. Include in the pass whatever is absolutely necessary to your camera or pass, and loose everything else.

[tricky]

So is there an option in RPManager that automatically renders/calculates/etc only the stuff that is scene through a camera? That would be *really* nice!

[mmikee]

I just checked some examples on there website. I have to say it looks
very impressive. Thanks for the info, Percy.

BTW...nice avitar.

Regards,
Mike

[percydaman]

So is there an option in RPManager that automatically renders/calculates/etc only the stuff that is scene through a camera? That would be *really* nice!

well you create visibility sets for that camera pass, so you can create several camera passes, create different visibility sets, and assign them to specific cameras. then from within the rpmanager rollout, click on different passes, and watch your view change to the chosen camera and the visiblity set will kick in hiding or unhiding depending on the visibility set.

[percydaman]

I just checked some examples on there website. I have to say it looks
very impressive. Thanks for the info, Percy.

BTW...nice avitar.

Regards,
Mike

Dont let the UI scare you away, it looks rather jumbled, because it includes most of the render settings, including vray, and rearranges them rather strangely. Youll get used to it.