my first (real) animation-project and a few questions

V-Ray for 3ds Max V-Ray for 3ds Max :: General
1

hey,
i am working on a larger architectural scene and am trying create a 5min animation. i’m allright with stills, but animations still give me a headache. :shock:

the animations is basically a flythrough/walktrough with a fixed lighting,
but with some 3d-people walking around, cars moving, a few sliding doors (glass+metallframe) opening & closing, maybe an elevator going up or down. that makes me believe that the usual strategy of calculating every nth gi-frame does not work because of the moving objects.

i thougth about rendering the “fixed” architecture in a first pass and then use this animation as background and everything as matt-opjects except the moving parts and render a 2nd pass. but there are people moving behind glass and so i think that might not work.

could rerenders “imap control” help here or will i have use single frame ir-map? which parameter i have to take into account to avoid flickering?
can i send via backburner to more computers without flickering?

since this an exterior/interior animation i decided to use ir-map + qmc for calculating the gi with these settings:

min: -4
max: -2
hemisubdiv: 75
interpolsamp: 20
col thres: 0,3
norm thres: 0,3
dist thres: 0,1

frametime with 80% gray material: around 3min30sec,
1 direct sunlight with area shadow
2 vraylights (included in ir-map on) but more lights will come 8)

one more question: what is the best aa-filter to use for a pal-resolution field-rendering? (area? video?)

thanks for your help…

2

you could render the animation first without the moving elements (people,cars , etc.) .

then in a second task , render only the animated objects with a backgroud color that you sort of use like a “blue screen” . you can then do the composition in After Effects , Fusion , Combustion ,… .

at least you should do a “Shadow-Pass” to "multiply with the 2 previous Passes , and thats it.

but there are more things that are important : people who walk behind glass walls (reflecting objects) or who pass certain objects - such as walking behind a building - disappear .

so it is kind of a complex “composition task” that you need to do , to have good results in a good rendertime . rendering everything in one image will be time-costly.

----------------------------------
the fastest technique is to “only render one camera position” of the background . then replace the material of the background and render the animation (blue or “yellow” screen /use a color of your choice) from the same perspective , and the shadow pass. then “layer” those three in composition .

3

thanks tony for your help…
looks like there is plenty of stuff to learn…

i hope i’ll work that out :shock:

is there a more in-depth look on such a composting task?