Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

[juan_ant34]

How can i do an animation in v-ray using sketchup, thanks

[TOM_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

Tricky question ..

try a search in the forums, it has been answered already..

[graditec]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

This is the third or fourth i have answered this question about rendering. Now reading the instructions may be difficult at first. That is why you have to reread them again until you get the messase.

NOTE: in SU vray are 2 process in order to render. 1 is the prepass and the second is the final rendering. Now if you have dificult of doing it or not understanding then send me a file (SU) at my email so i will set it up for you.

my mail is graditec@gmail.com


So with animation the suggested workflow right now is to use a precalculated irradiance map for primary bounces and qmc for secondary bounces. The success of the animation pretty much all hinges on setting up the Irradiance Map correctly, and eventhough it may be a little foreign, its not very hard once you go through it.

After you have your animation set up there are a few quick set up things that you'll need to do, so I'll go over those really quickly and then the details on the irradiance map parameters. The first thing you'll need to enable is a parameter in Global Switches called Don't Render Final Image. What this basically does is tells V-Ray to render things like the Irradiance map (or LC if you had that enabled-but not for this instance) but not the actual rendered image, which allows you to precalculate those solutions without spending time rendering an essentially useless image (you'll see why later). The next place you need to go is to the Output rollout. At the bottom you will see the option to enable animation as well as the option to pick your frame rate. After enabling animation you will need to change the frame rate so that you're basically rendering out every 5th or 10th frame. This is not your final animation, just the prepass. For example, if you intend to render your final animation at 30 frames a second the frame rate that you will need to set is between 3 and 6 frames.

After that you will need to setup the Irradiance Map parameters. Our goal for this whole prepass sequence is to end up with one irradiance map that is calculated for the whole animation sequence, and there are several tricks that we are going to use to do this. The first one is in the Mode options and its called Incremental Add to Current Map. What this basically does is renders out the IR map for the first frame, then for every frame after that refines the previous solution and adds extra samples when necessary. This makes the calculation extremely effiecient and you'll find that after a few frames the time spend calculating each subsequent frame is very very short. This also means that you can set IR map for higher quality the you would normally because you won't have to spend that time calculating every single frame, and even if the first frame takes a little while, the majority of them will only take a fraction of the time. And keep in mind that we are only doing this for a selected number of frames, so that will speed things up as well.

There are a few other tweeks that you can make with IR, but they are relatively optional (meaning that you can get by without them, but you'd probably be better off if you did them). The major one is to change the threshold values, which basically tells V-Ray where to place the IR samples. This is going to give better coverage and lead to better quality. The color threshold should be changed from .3 to .25, the Normal threshold can be left as is, and the distance threshold should be changed form .1 to .4

So here are a quick list of checks (there are 1 or 2 things that I didn't mention above, so make sure you run through these before you run the prepass)

1. Enable don't render final image
2. Setup the output for animation with the appropriate frame rate (saving the images doesn't matter at this stage, although I believe they will be saved anyway)
3. Setup your Indirect illumination engines. IR for primary bounces and QMC for secondaries
4. Setup Irradiance Map settings
a. Change mode to Incremental Add to Current Map
b. Clear the current irradiance map by pressing RESET under the current map options (if you don't do this it will try to calculate the IR map off of the last rendered image...Not good)
c. Under Post Render set it to AutoSave and give a file path
d. Change thresholds (optional)
5. Lastly...Make sure that Batch Render is enabled as this will screw up the render process.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

That looks hauntingly similar to the tutorial I wrote...funny what happens when you search for things. ;D

[graditec]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

Well dolomar, that´s because you wrote it. I just copy and paste for future reference not only for me but to the rest of the public that still have problems of creating animation vray. Dolomar, do you know how many times you have been hearing that same topic of creating animation. You problaby lost count. So in a way i am doing you a favor of answering them the repetitive question. If you dont mind. Less typing for you.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

I was making a little joke, I don't care that you copied and pasted it. To be honest, I've stopped answering the "how do I do an animation" question because it has been asked many times before and I've answered it many times. In addition to that, there's the tutorial thats there as well. As indicated by your first response, animation is not as simple as click a button and you have an animation. Its multiple steps that are not exactly straight forward if someone hasn't done it before. Thats why I went through the trouble to make the tutorial, so that people had a resource that was more extensive then what I could type in a post. I'm fine with answering specific question within that process, because it can be a little hard to do. But the general "how do I.." question is one that takes a long time to answer and more importantly has already been answered.

Sorry if I pissed anyone off, but thats just how I feel about it.

[paulo_kulot]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

somebody might have posted this before, but i'm new here, so i'm gonna ask for it anyway... i've read dalomar's tutorial about setting up for animations, just wondering if i can just download a visopt file that is already set for this purpose? haha.. where? thanks!
and also, what computer specs is recommended to carry out the task? care to share yours? THANKS

[graditec]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

To create a SU vray animation, it takes 2 visopt to actaully create the job. the first visopt is to do all the prepass calucation and the second visopt is to create the final rendering. All of this on the SAME project.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

I can't upload things right now, so I'll just walk you through the steps.

From the visopt side of things, the prepass is not that hard.
1. Set the secondary bounces to None
2. Enable Don't render final image
3. Change IR mode to Incremental Add
4. Enable animation with a lower frame rate
If you want you can change the noise threshold to what is prescribed in the tutorial

Just before you render the prepass, clear the IR map from memory. After the prepass make sure to save the IRmap if you don't set it to autosave.

For the final pass, just use your normal settings with the following amendments.
1. Change IRmap to From file and grab the saved map
2. Make sure Don't Render final image is disabled
3. Make sure Animation is enabled with the correct frame rate.
It is suggested that you have better AA settings for the final renderings.

Make sure you save the images from the animation.

[paulo_kulot]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

2 visopts? oh i see, one for each purpose. got that! Thanks everyone.. will configure my visopts asap, still looking forward to the that visopt download though, haha, never have i attempted doing an animation here yet.. ;D Thanks again!!!

[trad3mark]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

absolutely fantastic tutorial there guys.

one quick question, when it's finished rendering, what way do i go about saving the animation? it seems to only let me save the final image as an image (eg, png). can it be saved as a gif, or even better, something like an avi?

thanks.

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

Neil,

No, but you can download VirtualDub (genuine freeware) which will quickly compose your rendered bitmaps into avi format, plus do loads of filtering, compressing etc.

Jackson

[trad3mark]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

i see. i have that actually. i use it for video presentations.

Any chance you could post a quick guide on how i go from the last step above (ie, after the rendering's done) to making it an avi file using vdub? Is there a folder where it saves all the renders like??

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

I did a full OS reinstall 3 days ago, so I haven't got VD reinstalled yet and am rendering at the moment so now's not the time to do any installing, but if I remember correctly you just go to the edit menu, select either "open" or "import", change the file type from avi to bitmap, select just the first image in the sequence and then under a menu called "video" (I think), you can select the frame rate, select compression etc. Then just go back to the edit menu and select "save as avi" and it'll save it out. It's a fantastic program. VirtualDubMod is a brilliant mod (also free) and has even more features (including editing), but I only got hold of that a few weeks ago so I've not had a chance to us it for anything other than standard VD features yet.

[trad3mark]

Re: Animation in v-Ray Sketchup

ok i understand that, but when the rendering sequence in vray is done, do i save that as bmp or are all the other frames in the sequence saved somewhere already? thats what i don't understand.

but thats for your help anyway by the way!