How do you think this animation was rendered?

[PGD]

So I've been messing about trying what feels like a hundred different conbinations with this scene now..

One thing I've noticed, when using the Omni's I'm seeing a huge amount of noise. Never seen this before, any idea why the Omni would be creating so much noise?

On the Left the Omni's are switched On, the Right turned off - big difference ay
Omni noise by Phil Grayston, on Flickr

That is with GI, no Ambient light, Omin's at 1.3

[PGD]

Sorted the noisy lights

By un-clicking this box the Omni lights are now noise fee - the amount of time I've just spent sifting through files to get to that


Probabilistic lights by Phil Grayston, on Flickr


Plus after a lot of testing with the Ambient light and no GI I've come to the conclustion that it's not saving me much, if any render time.

On small images the render was 20 seconds quicker with the Ambient light and no GI, and looks reasonable. But that render time included calculating the GI, so if it's pre-calculated the GI setup should be quicker. It looks better with GI, and the scene lighting balance is better.

So for now at least, I'm going with pre-calculated GI

[rikou]

On small images the render was 20 seconds quicker with the Ambient light and no GI, and looks reasonable. But that render time included calculating the GI, so if it's pre-calculated the GI setup should be quicker. It looks better with GI, and the scene lighting balance is better.

So for now at least, I'm going with pre-calculated GI

I'm not surprised. With a good precal' GI, it will always be better than Ambient light without GI...
Anyway, for your final render, it will be just a matter of AA/sampling/subdiv/etc to optimize your render time and a good final quality.

[Ihno]

I'm very sorry for wasting your time.
I wanted to answer your initial question how that was rendered.

I once had a scene where I needed to render animated objects in no time and also with no importance of physical accuracy.
Ambient light plus standart lights to throw shadows was the solution for me.
But it certainly was a different situration, I would have to precalculate a full Irr map on every frame....
So the ambient light was a huge rendertime saver.

[PGD]

I'm not surprised. With a good precal' GI, it will always be better than Ambient light without GI...
Anyway, for your final render, it will be just a matter of AA/sampling/subdiv/etc to optimize your render time and a good final quality.

I have to ask, what sort of numbers would you look to use?

I still have noise around the VrayLightMtl on the suspended ceiling lights. I imagine that will flicker on the animation

I'm very sorry for wasting your time.

Oh please don't feel bad at all! Your information was invaluable and I've learnt a lot through the process, so thanks for that.

But in this case I need to stick to GI.

[Bruce Hart]

looks like it was rendered with a potato IMO
horrible horrible work

Yeah that's right....everything's horrible Probably done for a 10th of the cost Squint Opera Melbourne would charge and with a lot less BS "artistry","story telling" and stock footage.

I would surmise that whoever did this was probably told that "you need to add lots of light inside". Hence the lighting scheme. They were probably also directed to see all the different parts as a long walk-through by the client and/or architect. If that were the case I think it's fine for what it is: explaining the architecture.

[squintnic]

It's objectively awful work Bruce. What do you like about it?

(thanks for the feedback as well)

[Bruce Hart]

It's objectively awful work Bruce. What do you like about it?

(thanks for the feedback as well)

...my pleasure. It's certainly not the greatest animation I've seen. However I can put myself in the place of whoever did it. Maybe he or she worked on their own around the clock for a week or two, with no budget. Small render farm perhaps. I can also imagine the many requests/feedback items from the client and architect (that as we all know - often may make things worse). I don't know the circumstances.

Due to the trend in recent years to make animations an Alex Roman style "art piece", full of rack focus and close-ups of furniture joinery - it is perhaps easy to forget that these things are meant to tell the viewer "what does it look like?". We can debate amongst ourselves the quality of lighting/materials or whatever. While a bit long - that animation gave me a pretty good idea about the façade treatments and how the internal spaces work and where facilities are located. So in that sense I thought it was a good effort.

Even if it were bad - I certainly wouldn't describe it (or anyone else's work for that matter) as "horrible". But hey - that's just me.

[PGD]

On rendering an animation, do you have 3DS set to 25, or 30fps?

I've rendered the animation with 3ds set to 25fps, then composited in AE and rendered out at 25fps. But the resulting movie looks somewhat jerky, frames seem to jump a little and dont look as smooth as I'd like.

So I changed the Composition settings within AE to 30fps and tried again. The movie is then much smoother, but of course runs quicker (which I suspect the architects will have a little moan at too)

Anyone crossed this bridge before?

[Vizioen]

This was probably done in Lumion or similar. No effort for this animation whatsoever.

[RobH22]

Instead of trying to figure out how to replicate it I'll throw my answer in to address your initial question, I think it was done in Sketchup. It has that hallmark Sketchup look to it.