Exterior Animation -Day Time- Moving Objects and Camera - In the shadows...NOT GREAT

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
1

Hi Everyone, I’m on the third animation walk through at the company I work for, it’s all been an interesting learning curve!

I’ve just rendered off the first pass of it, (I finally hooked up 30 machines from around the office as everyone has received upgrades) So I can render this baby out in less than two days! (Averaged 15-20 mins a frame).

I’ve uploaded a snipit to YouTube (I’ve zoomed in to hide the current location, I’ll show it in full once it’s publicly available), to try and explain the problem I’m getting. in the day light everything looks fine, but in the shadows everything is a bit blotchy and sometimes flickering, I assume it’s because of my render settings? Below is the process I use, if anyone can point out the problem I would very much appreciate it!

Cheers…

Render settings - I’ve done this in a few attachments to show the stages I needed to do it, I started off by rendering the Light Cache as the first Stage, then in the second I rendered the IM using the “PRE-PASS” for each frame, and in the third stage I use the IM and LC file’s to back burner the entire animation. Am I using the wrong method for this type of animation?

P.S. I HATE THE 3D PEOPLE, if anyone has a better solution please, i’m all open for idea’s, I’ve learned of “Autodesk 3dsMax Project Geppetto”, but i’m not sure if it’s usable for commercial projects yet?

ANIMATION SAMPLE: - http://youtu.be/1LJcc1Cy3Y4

Stage 001 -

Stage 002 -

Stage 003 -

STAGE 02.jpg
STAGE 02.jpg1356×1163 235 KB

STAGE 01.jpg
STAGE 01.jpg1368×1187 208 KB

STAGE 03.jpg
STAGE 03.jpg898×1156 191 KB

2

Also just a after thought, but can you apply a 3x3x3 modifier to a Proxy and animate it? as in apply after it’s a Proxy, not before? I was thinking of making the tree’s slightly wave to show a bit more movement and realism?

3

No - if you put a modifier on the proxy what happens is it makes it into a max object that you can modify, but you only get the polygons that are visible in the viewport. You’ve got to animate the tree and save it as an animated vrmesh file.

4

Yea I figured that might be the case, can I over-right the existing tree proxy file or will that cause problems?

5

You certainly can and all of your proxy objects in your scene will remap to it. They might not have animation options enabled though so you might have to do a tiny bit of adjustment afterwards.

6

without going into detail about your setup, what I would recommend is to render your camera move without 3d people in it using conventional fly through techniques, and then render the people using brute force with the environment hiddent but contributing to gi, this should solve your flickering issues.

7

Thanks, I’ve heard about this before, if you’ve got a moment I would really like to hear more on setting this up. I can do the first bit fine, Light Cache for both first and second pass, then increment add to map for the second stage right?

but compositing people in a second pass is alien to me, and info would very much be appreciated!

Cheers

8

I’ve found out about Anima, by Axyz, looks very interesting, I have done some test’s with the demo and it works a treat, I can also convert the files in to Proxies to save Max Mem, The problem now is deciding do I render the entire thing in one go or do a composite of people and background, I went over this tutorial: Chaos: Industry-leading design and visualization software and it looks like this is fine for small amount of people, but I want to populate my scene with dozens of people, some walking, standing and sitting. and now I have a decent size render farm I think it would be easier to do it one pass, so can anyone suggest settings that would make this a flicker free stable animation? regardless of render time.

Cheers!

9

As morbid mentioned you’re better off doing the entire thing in two passes and comping. What you’d do is as follows:

1. Put all of your people on to one layer so you can turn them on / off easily and select them. Turn them off for now.
2. Render a frame of your main scene with irmap and lc both set to single frame and with “use camera path” turned on, and make sure your irmap and lc map are saved to disk. Render the scene using these two and you should get a totally flicker free result.
3. Now select your entire static scene and use the vray properties to turn it into matte objects with alpha contribution -1, and make sure you turn on affect alpha and shadows.
4. Unhide your people layer, and change your GI options to brute force for primary, and light cache in single frame mode with “Use camera path” turned OFF. Make sure that the light cache isn’t loading your static scene cache from disk either
5. Render the people pass to a format with alpha.
6. Comp the people over the background in whatever comper you choose.

That’s the guts of it - now it’s not quite as simple as that for example you’ll have to deal with two shadows overlaying each other and so on but it’s the rough way to do it.

10

or, the method i use, since im compositing phobic

1. hide people, calculate static flythrough imap (and lightcache, youll need both files.) for scene, make sure you have AO on, as youll need it later.
2. unhide people, and either manually or with a script, turn off “use irradiance map” in the materials of the people. - they will now be lit with brute force gi when you render. -the subdivs of which will be taken oddly, from your imap hsph subdivs setting, which you are free to adjust now, as your imap is already saved.

3. render using the saved imap and lightcache. - the scene will use the stored imap, the people with have perframe brute force gi, based on the stored lightcache for the scene, and the ambient occlusion will deal with the lack of gi contact shadows between people and scene.

i seem to be the only person who uses this method, but it works flawlessly and avoids any comping issues.

11

I’ll have to test this, as we usually have to bf a pass for people (and that ain’t purdy!)

12

It seems you are rendering with brute force by turning off use irradiance maps for the people. I normally do the same thing when blending moving objects into cached static scenes except I render a separate shadow pass which is only the direct shadows and a vray dirt put into an extra tex so the compositor has independant control over the level and colour of each shadow. Scene states in max 2012 should help with this.

13

yes, thats exactly what it does.. to be honest i think this is one of the more powerful features of vray.. allowing you to mix gi engines in a single scene, but it seems not many people use it.. should be in the spot 3d files as a method i recon, its certainly the simplest way to add small moving elements to a static gi solution..

14

The only issue with any of this type of thing is the doubling up of shadows in the comp after - totally fine if you’re doing wide open areas but in the original video linked you’d get a multiplication of the shadows which’ll require a spot of comp trickery.

15

yes but the method im suggesting doesnt require compositing at all.. you simply render the scene in a single pass, the people have dynamic gi, the scene has static. thats the main advantage actually.. no comping headaches.

16

Ah sorry, I get you now.

17

So thanks to the help of Super Gnu, I wanted to make a easy step by step for this specific type of rendering (a moving cam, with people walking about)… This is what I have so far, I am currently rendering the results so I should be able to tell everyone how it looks in a day or so (I’ll post results too, Super Gnu, If I’ve sitll posted the wrong stages pelase correct me lol)… The problem with me is that I have 2400 frames to render over 30 computers (during the night times) so there’s not much playing around with the settings as I need to see what it looks like the next day, and I don’t have long now before it needs to be given to my director) So hectic!

1) Add all 3D moving people on to there own layer and HIDE.

2) Calculate The LC & IM Solution - Add Irradiance Map to Primary, and Light Cache to secondary GI Engines, Set the Sub Divs to around 1500 for LC, setting the sample size to 100mm and the scale to WORLD, make sure the “Use Cam Path” is checked, Change the mode to “screen”.

In the Irradiance Map change the IM pre-set to High - Animation, Then changing it to custom to change the Min and max to -5 & -1, set the Hsphere subdivs to 150 - and interp samples to 30 - Make sure the Cam path is checked. Change the MODE to “Animation - Prepass”

5) Render and then change “from file” in the IM section.

6) Un-hide the 3d animated people, and use the eye dropper to select the people’s materials, going into the options in the material palette and UNTICKING the “use Irradiance Map”. Do this for all materials on the 3D people.

Render using the Saved IM files (Remember to switch off the “Don’t render final Image” and save a output destination.

only thing you might consider is now, adjusting the hsph subdivs setting in the imap will control the brute force subdivs on the people. if they look grainy, crank it up.. if they look good but render really slow, drop it down. depending on scene, between 50 and 100 should do.

thats it really.. if you want contact shadows under the feet of the people, make sure you have ao enabled in your gi settings.

18

well thats pretty close to the method id use, but your imap settings are all out of whack. you dont need to use “animation prepass” at all.. if you do you will get a seperate imap saved for each frame, and your renders will come out really wierd.

if you ever did a static flythrough before, its the same workflow as that… flythrough mode for lightcache (no need to fiddle much with other settings, maybe higher subdivs, no need to “use camera path”)

imap should be on “multiframe incremental” and again, no need to tick “use camera path” calculate every 10 - 30th frame depending on camera speed. if you have any doubts about method there are 1 million guides to flythrough rendering out there.

save both the lightcache and the imap, and load BOTH when rendering. the imap will take care of all static geometry. the lightcache is needed as a basis for the brute force calculations of the animated people. without it loaded they will come out dark.

19

I guess what I’m confused about is how can I render the LC AND IM together if I want to back burn the Calcs? or do I need to do it only on one machine? Or should I calc the LC first on one machine, then link it to the file and then Backburn the IM part to other machines?

20

well since you only need to calculate every 20th frame (or, if its moving slowly, every 40th frame even) it shouldnt be too punishing to do one one beefy machine.. ive never had a particular issue with waiting a couple of hours for the precalc.

however if you want to use multiple machines, why not use distributed rendering? you can even submit a job with dist. rendering enabled, to one machine through BB, and that machine will use all the ones youve seleted in dist-rendering, to help.

the lightcache will not be distributed, it will be calculated in full on each machine, but that doesnt matter unless one machine is much slower than the others…

the imap however will be distributed over all machines. i find you need to use slightly higher imap subdivs when distributing.. no idea why but sometimes its a bit more prone to blotchies…

to be honest though id be surprised if you really need to do it.. you have some beefy machines there.. if you cant chew through a flythrough lightcache and imap in a few of hours on one machine, there might be an issue with your scene.

you cannot use backburnr alone to distribute a multiframe incremental imap… either do it on one machine, or use distributed rendering.