back to scanline

[tammo]

hi,
i am doing non-architectural animations most of the time.
i have moving objects/characters or at least animated slice modifiers or
animated visibility of objects.
i wasnt able to complete any project in the last year with vray.
i always start a project with vray and end up with scanline.

here is what happens:

-animated visibility: any value thats not 0 or 1 causes the rendertime to explode. scanline works perfect

-polygon barrier: somewhere between 2 and 3 million vray stops working with strange error messages. scanline no problems.

-detailed animated characters: there is always flickering in problem areas like the neck or under the arms or hair, no matter how high your GI solution is. i now use lightdomes with scanline area shadows.

-vray wrapper/exotic vray mats: doesnt work with animations (flicker).

-no "bitmap missing" errors: render slaves just render along if they dont find the textures. i dont know how many animations where lost because of this "feature". scanline: slaves give out error messages and dont ruin the animations.

-anti alias: you need very high settings in animations to stop crawling lines or details popping even with the random setting.
scanline is much faster with standard settings.

-opacity maps: vray is superslow with opacity maps. scanline has no problems with them.

-thin geometry is often flickering in animations. scanline has no errors with them.

-motion blur/DoF: unusuable in animations because of slowness.

-vray reflection maps sometimes flicker. i dont know why this happens, seems to have somthing to do with camera/surface angles. but it doesnt happen with reflective vray mats.

-all other killer features like glossy reflections or SSS dont work in animations exept for simple test scenes (flicker).

-splotches: these can be fixed but its hard.

vray is great for stills but i wont use it again for animations.
i lost so many days rerendering flickering animations and searching for bugs.

i tried out some other renderers, mental ray and even bought FR.
i think they are even worse when it comes to complex animations.
mental ray is slow and gives me memory problems and i think i dont have to talk about FR (although i havent tested newer version of it.)

scanline has been my workhorse for years and i guess it will still be for some more time.

[Long John]

i wonder how all the animation and movie studios could work with vray.

btw: your website looks like the one from soulpix.
if im not wrong then soulpix made animations with vray?

maybe ask frank how to use vray.

[Robert]

hi tammo, i really understand your post.

As long as you animate lights, objects in your scene GI is hard to use. It produce long rendertimes too. Well we need TextureBacking here as soon as possible.

The rest of the effects can be animated, but it's also lot of work. Anyhow I find the Quality worth doing it. I had extremly good resolts with blurry reflections, well long rendertime but it simple gives the extra touch to most of my animations.

So, I hardly could work without Vray, even animation. But, Vray needs a lot of improvements, specially with G-Buffer. You can do very good animation without all the special effects, but there is always a difference.

Anyhow, we will see what Vray 1.5 brings...

regards,

robert

[tammo]

frank was my partner at vector-film until the end of 2002.
thats why the website and some projects look the same
i havent updated the website since that time

i dont do music videos anymore.
you can live with some errors in videos because
you have fast cuts, lots of motionblur/Dof (all faked in post )
we hacked them together in three or for weeks-
the quality was not that high and we had to live with many of the errors because of the deadlines. we could have saved a lot of time and nerves by using scanline (and still getting the same look).

the new projects i have done after that are much more complex.
my customers wont accept some flickering or errors now.

i would like to know how all the animation and movie studios work with vray, too.

maybe they have more time to solve all the problems,
have render technicians + 500 cpus for brute force GI?

or maybe i am just too stupid for this renderer

[Robert]

tammo,

i really understand you. But it's defently a matter of rendertime.
A frend of mine, he does many more animation then me, uses Vray only on special occassions. So we doing a lot of raytracing, displacement etc.., but nearly never on GI.
I've worked in projects, where people wanted the GI look. We have done hard work both on shading, lighting etc. The biggest problem is, you need to light your environment in every camera view different, to bring the best out of it, but with GI you simple can't animate your light! We ended up in backing everything, which was hard, because the modells had no UVs at the beginning. We needed 2 days to rework everything in Photoshop and ended up with 4 weeks production with 5 people. I guess that was expensive, for the client.
A could tell you endless stories about Brazil, Vray and FinalRender, but I think you know that.

regards,

robert