Video texture and projected light?

[Micha]

Hi,

my client ask me for rendering an animation where a projected video can be seen on a wall. Is this possible and if yes how?

-Micha

[Ashcic]

Hi Micha,

When I do these kinds of things, I normally do it in After Effects. If it's something like a phone or a laptop screen, where the video on the screen is reflected by surrounding objects, I export the video as a series of png/exr files at the same frame rate as the animation (each labelled with a prefix number), and then on each frame I switch the png/exr. The image is baked into each frame as it renders, which gives nice results, but you need to re-render it if you mess up.

Anything that is screen like or projected, I use a simple Emissive material with the diffuse set to the image, if it's projected onto a wall maybe blend the wall material with the Emissive material a little . If you wanted a kind of light ray effect from the camera, rendering out a separate fog volume with light projected through it, and then overlaying it in After Effects could be a way to go.

For the animation itself, normally I would use a different software that has an more advanced animation controls, export the objects as proxies and render it in that. However, you should be able to set up something fairly decent with Grasshopper, and the V-Ray animation tools in it. As an old hand, you probably know more about this than me.


Ash

[Micha]

Hi Ash,

thank you for your reply. Most I'm interested to use a mp4 instead and png as texture for a textured light. I need to create something like a video beamer and the video needs to be projected on a structured wall. (I want to create a panorama where a part of the scene shows the projected video. For the panorama part of the task I will find a solution.) Only I miss to use video textures. Should be a standard render feature today or? And best it should work per GPU.


-Micha

[Micha]

Hi konstantin_chaos,

could you tell some details about getting an animated texture running please.

I remembered me that I used an animated texture in the past and found how I did it - per sequence feature of the bitmap texture. At the help page I read, that the loop functionality isn't working.

My client needs the animation at the end of the first quarter of 2022. Could it be possible:

* to get a direct mp4 support?

* a fixed loop functionality?

* the sequence feature working for GPU rendering?

Or is there a work around per Bongo?

-Micha

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi Micha,

* to get a direct mp4 support?

There are 2 workflows that I want to address here
mp4 as a texture:
I'll log this as a feature request and get back to you when the devs evaluate it (there might be some technical challenges that I don't know about).
mp4 as a render output:
This is the possibility to export a rendered sequence as a video file automatically.
The problem with this is the user experience more than anything else.
Lets say you choose the video output.
Then you start rendering a long and complex animation (slow to render....).
And suddenly the rendering is interrupted.
We have to still output something right?
One of the ideas we have is that vrimages can be exported together with the video in a temp location.
If the render process is interrupted, we can point you to this folder.
Also if the animation rendering is restarted we can potentially reuse the images and skip rendering the same.
I'll have to think about this more but it'll be certainly possible with some workflow compromises.

* a fixed loop functionality?

I'll raise the priority of this one.
It is just a bug that needs to be addressed.

* the sequence feature working for GPU rendering?

Once again this is something I'll have to raise the priority of.

Or is there a work around per Bongo?

We'll look into this again as I mentioned in another forum thread.

Regards,
Konstantin

[Micha]

Hi konstantin_chaos,

thank you for logging mp4 textures as a feature request. Could be a nice feature for rendering per animation tools. I suppose so for Bongo it couldn't be used.

Mp4 as a render output isn't so important for me, I like to use a frame image output. But maybe it's nice for non-daily users and if the render speed increase more and more, than a quick mp4 creation could be cool addition.

I'm very curious for the Bongo solutions. Good luck.

Have a nice Christmas season,
Micha