I need to create an animation of a moving wall. See images
the total animation will be only 8 seconds for the wall to move into place. Is every 5th frame enough for the precalc? Both of these images are created with a low preset… Will a medium preset be enough?
I forgot to mention that the two panels on each end of the moving wall need to rotate out 180 degs…
Any advice or crits would help too…
TIA,
Arkitec
If your objects are moving, you can’t precalculate your illumination.
The suggested method in this case is using QMC+Light cache and rendering each frame without precalculation. You could even try Irradiance Map+light cache, sometimes you can get acceptable results too.
A workaround would be rendering everything but the moving walls (they would be hidden), precalculating the solution. Then, u should make everything matte alpha= - 1 and receive shadows and affect alpha ticked, except the moving walls, which would be calculated frame by frame. You could render them with a region too. The u should composite them.
It´s not the same but it´s fast. 
panthon,
thanks for the response…
since the camera isnt moving, I only need to run the precalc on a single image then hide everything but the moving wall with alpha applied to everything else…
interesting thought though… render region for the area where I see the wall from within the image…?
this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it…
tia.
arkitec
tried that once, didn’t work. not sure if there is a solution for such renders (region/blowup renders)… :roll:
yeah, sure, i do it all the time. It works perfectly and it fits correctly with the background. Max will warn u though, but just click ok and u will be fine.
panthon,
seems to be working great! THANK YOU BIG TIME!
this sounds silly but, can i do a region animation set to output images? never tried it…
tia.
I also do this often. With the other objects not contributing to alpha it is
a snap to comp.
If you want to avoid the compositing step, you can render the still, replace it as the background, and then do the matte alpha background/moving wall animation in front of it.
Clifton,
So how do I go about making the background image as an alpha? What happens to the GI of other objects if they are not set to mattes?
Could you explain a little more in detail.
Thank you for the advice.
Arkitec
My understanding of clifton’s post is that you put the rendered still of the environment in the background slot of your scene. Then by turning all of those objects into a matte that doesn’t contribute to alpha, you get a rendering of just the moving wall, that has a background of the still, so the two are already composited together. not sure if that explains it any more clearly…
Yeah, what SnipeyX said. It just fixes the problem of edge pixels. I often have compositing problems whether I use straight alpha or pre-multiplied alpha, so I just avoid the problem by putting the background into later passes, which for me is usually people.
It may not be a very professional workflow, but I’m arch viz and I find its often faster to do things the “wrong” way.