Distributed Rendering for Animation

[josephskibba]

Hello All - This is my first post since purchasing Vray for Sketchup last week. I've read previous posts about distributed rendering for animations and found that others have the same problem as I. DR works on the first frame but none there after. The work around for this is to set Vray animation fps to 1 and Sketchup transitions to a higher number (50 - 100). I really can't and don't want to load the SU file on several computers and render portions of the entire animation on separate machines. Does anyone one know if there is an update for Dr. Spawner distributed render or a best way to deal with this? Any help is much appreciated. - Joe

[thomthom]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Why would you have to load it in several computers?

[Jackson_cg]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

What do you mean by "I really can't"? Why not?

[thomthom]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

I just tried this myself - set up a small scene. Set the SU transition time to 50 (Which would be 25FPS * 2 = 2seconds) and then set VfSU's FPS to 1. I then turned on the render farm and it rendered the full animation with all the frames.

[josephskibba]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

I just tried this myself - set up a small scene. Set the SU transition time to 50 (Which would be 25FPS * 2 = 2seconds) and then set VfSU's FPS to 1. I then turned on the render farm and it rendered the full animation with all the frames.

Hey thanks for trying this out. I too got this method to work.....but SketchUp's max transition time is 100. So as long as one doesn't need more than 100 frames in between scenes, then this works fine.

This workaround is pretty limiting. No?

[josephskibba]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

What do you mean by "I really can't"? Why not?

This method seems like a lot more work and maintenance. What if you have a bunch of rendering to do? One would be spending a good chunk of time loading and reloading files. Also, Vfsu is only licensed for one computer. Right?

[thomthom]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Don't see what the license got to do with it.
You can use your license as a floating license, but only use it on one computer at a time.
But your render slaves don't need licenses.

[thomthom]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

I just tried this myself - set up a small scene. Set the SU transition time to 50 (Which would be 25FPS * 2 = 2seconds) and then set VfSU's FPS to 1. I then turned on the render farm and it rendered the full animation with all the frames.

Hey thanks for trying this out. I too got this method to work.....but SketchUp's max transition time is 100. So as long as one doesn't need more than 100 frames in between scenes, then this works fine.

This workaround is pretty limiting. No?

hmm... really? Didn't try that... So at 25FPS, you got get 4 second scenes... hm....

[thomthom]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Playing around with the Ruby API I was able to set the transition time on a per page basis to over 100.

Could be worth looking through the plugin repository at Sketchucation and see if you got some animation control plugins available.

[josephskibba]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Playing around with the Ruby API I was able to set the transition time on a per page basis to over 100.

Could be worth looking through the plugin repository at Sketchucation and see if you got some animation control plugins available.

Again, thanks for looking into this. I'll try out the ruby!

[tobias_77]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Thanks a lot to all you talented people. I've promised an animation for a client of mine and I would never have figured this out myself!

Tobias

[mjm223]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Is there a minimum transition time between scenes in order for this to work?

I have a SU model and I've created the scenes with the FlightPath ruby, so there are 75 scenes at a 1-second transition time. Basically, if I wanted to make a VRay animation at 25 fps, I could simply change the scene transition time to 25 seconds and set the framerate in the VRay Options to 1 fps.

Would this allow me to use DR when rendering this animation? Or will I have to set the scene transition time to at least 50 seconds?

(Sorry, I'd test this out myself, but this isn't my computer and it doesn't have VRay on it.)

[mjm223]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

I've just created a small scene in SketchUp, using the FlightPath ruby to create my scenes. In terms of using the DR trick for an animation when the scenes are made from FlightPath, there's some good news and some bad news.

The Good News:
The DR trick works. By setting the VRay animation framerate to 1fps, all of my slave computers were able to render each and every scene. And, it doesn't seem to matter how many seconds you put in for SketchUp's scene transition.

The Bad News:
Once you create a bunch of scenes with the FlightPath ruby, there seems to be no way to adjust the scene transition time. By default, FlightPath creates the scenes in such a way so that there's a 1-second transition time between scenes. Even after changing the scene transition time (I had tried changing it to 20 seconds) the scenes still take only 1 second to transition. Thus, when I rendered the VRay animation (at 1 fps) Vray only rendered each of the frames created by FlightPath. (For example, after using FlightPath, my model had 28 scenes at a transition time of 1 second per scene. I then changed the transition time to 20 second per scene and rendered the animation through VRay at 1 fps so that I would have a total of 560 frames. Instead, VRay only rendered each individual scene, giving me a total of 28 frames.)

Has anyone figured a way to get around this? I have two theories that might work:

1. In FlightPath, try to calculate the camera speed to compensate for whatever framerate you're planning to make the final video. This could be a pain because it may result in creating hundreds (even thousands) of scenes for a 30-second video.

2. After creating the scenes in FlightPath, go to each individual scene and click "Add Scene" to create a copy of that scene. Once you created a copy of all the scenes, delete the scenes that you made in FlightPath. Then all you should have left are the scenes created from SketchUp, thus allowing you to adjust the scene transition time (hopefully).

[tobias_77]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Guys, I have another method that works. Get the plug-in "SU Animation" from OhyeahCAD. With that program you can make camera paths and then from the path the program creates as many frames you like. I'm currently doing a 600 frame animation and it works with DR. I have 1 FPS in Vray options and 1 sec scene delay and no transition time in SU. This way every scene gets rendered and it works perfectly fine.

There is a Ruby script called "bezier curves" that can also be used for animation paths.

This also means every scene appears in the SU scene manager and therefor you can stop the rendering after lets say 300 frames, do something else, come back and ERASE the first 300 frames from the scene manager and then render the remaining 300. This is good for me since I use other peoples computers for rendering, and have to stop them sometimes.

/Tobias

[mjm223]

Re: Distributed Rendering for Animation

Not to sound cheap, but does anyone have another method that doesn't involve spending $79.00 on SU Animate? It's a cool plug-in, but since the moving objects in SU don't translate into VRay, it's kind of a waste of money at this point. (Maybe the new version of VRay will be more compatible to SU Animate?)

I was able to get FlightPath free at www.smustard.com. There's also a $15 version with more features.

As I had said before, the problem with FlightPath is that once you create the scenes you can't adjust the scene transition time, unless you make a copy of each individual scene and then delete the scenes created by FlightPath.

In terms of having issues with not being able to make more than 100 frames per scene, one simple fix would be to increase the number of line segments on the path that your camera is following. With FlightPath, it creates a scene for each vertex your path has. So select the camera path, right-click it and choose Entity Info, and double the number of line segments. Now you'll have double the number of scenes. Then, once you've copied the scenes and deleted the FlightPath scenes, you can cut the transition time to half what you had originally intended; i.e. if you originally wanted 150 frames per scene, you can double the number of scenes by doubling the number of segments, then you can cut the transition time in half to 75, which will put you under that 100 frame limit.

Clear as mud? ;D