components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

[lciaccia]

i have generated a sequence for an animation in vray with 2D people mixed in. In sketchup these people are components that always face the camera. For some reason when i run the sequence in vray the people don't face the camera anymore. is this a bug or is there a toggle somewhere that makes people face the camera in a vray animation sequence as well?

anyone know?

[dalomar_cg]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

This is a known issue. This is because we only retrieve the geometry of the scene at the first frame, so a given object's position will be fixed at that frame. I'm not sure what exactly will be the solution to this as this is undesirable behavior in some cases.

[lciaccia]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

thanks,
i guess 3d people is my best bet for now.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

3d people is always a much better bet

[lciaccia]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

If that is the case, what other scene properties will save from the first scene into all the other scenes?
camera location: obviously yes
hidden geometry:
visible layers:
active section plane:
drawing style:N/A
shadow Setting:
Axes Location:N/A

thanks

[lciaccia]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

I just did a test and changed the shadow settings in the first scene only. It looks like it renders with the change over the first few frames but then it transitions back to the setting on the later scenes. So i guess vray doesn't take the shadow settings from the first scene. Am i correct? does anyone know of a way to overide this? i have 40 scenes i would have to change
thanks

[dalomar_cg]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

Right now only the camera transforms will be acknowledged when rendering an animation. The reason is that the way SU animates is "confusing" in terms of its goals. The same interface that is used to save these scene conditions is used to animate, so there's overlap in its function that makes it unclear as to what it really does or is expected to happen. In terms of animation, there needs to be some sort of continuity between aspects of the scene, which is something that turning layers on and off disturbs.

For instance, if I had motion blur in an animation and halfway through a layer that I had turned off at the beginning suddenly was turned on. At the instant that the layer was turned on, there's no velocity information. In other words, in the previous frame, the object wasn't anywhere, it didn't "exist" within the scene, so its not really moving in respect to the camera. This would cause an error in calculating the motion blur, which would have the objects on the layer in question not generating the same amount of motion blur as the rest of the scene.

In Max, there is a much more unified framework for understanding, dealing with, and managing scene states (and material states for that matter) in terms of animation. SU isn't set up in a manner where certain distinctions can be made, and I doubt SU ever really will.

At the moment, we only make the distinction that you're either animating or rendering a still. In order to support what you want it would require an "in between" mode (lets call it a Batch mode for now) that would think of things as rendering a series of unrelated views. This could allow for changes in scene states or an object's orientation, but would disable animation features (motion blur, lc flythrough mode...). This would probably be a fair solution as most of you guys don't tend to use those features in your animations. This is something I'll put on the wish list.

[lciaccia]

Re: components don't face the camera in vray animation sequence

Thanks for that information. i think i understand what you mean. although i found a way in sketchup to change all 40 scenes of the shadow settings at once. In scene manager you can just highlight them all and de-select shadow settings. anyways it worked. thanks