Hi guys,
Something I’ve been doing for fun on-and-off over the past couple of weeks.
The idea was to get better acquainted with some basic Max animation features and particle flow. I could have worked a lot more on this and added, for instance… a pilot. But, oh well…
PS: This was rendered on a single 8-core machine so I had to cut corners a lot in order to bring the rendering time down to manageable levels. There’s no GI there, and I had the calculate all the tiny lights in a separate pass as they were quadrupling my render time. In the end, it was down to about 5-8min per frame, which I guess is ok.
As always, very eager to hear the experts’ advice on how to improve it.
jacksc02: The haze had its own particle system, which was just white and calculated in a separate pass using a pitch-black override material on all other elements of the scene. I then used this pass to mask between a distorted and a non-distorted version of the beauty pass so that the haze only appears where it’s supposed to. Not sure if that’s how most people do it but I took this trick over from my old Blender days.
squeakybadger: Well, considering the time it’s taken me to produce 10 seconds, I guess the full-length feature should be out in about 20 years
Thanks Peter. You’re a lot more charitable than my wife, who calls me a diletante - as in someone who tries a lot of different things to make sure he never becomes really good at any of them
Sure. Sorry. The engines mix three different particle events: 1) Standard particles rendered as geometry for the sparks with VrayLight material, 2) Afterburn particles with a per-age colour and density ramp lit by standard omni lights for the flames (lights also provide illumination for the scene), 3) Afterburn octane shader used to create the mask for the haze effect, excluded from all lights.
Id probably put a falloff in the refract slot (probably would need adjustment) and then stick a color of sorts in the diffuse. Im kinda thinking like a gold/bronze like you see in an astronauts helmet. just an idea.
That was impressive to watch. One thing I didn’t understand in your description was “I had the calculate all the tiny lights in a separate pass as they were quadrupling my render time”.
Was this with a set of lights and the geometry then another set of lights and same geometry then blend of both passes?
Hi there.
I was referring to the blue lights stuck on several of the buildings. They are separate meshes with VrayLightMtl. When rendering these together with the main scene, the render time rose astronomically. So I rendered the beauty pass without the lights, then rendered the lights with a pitch-black diffuse material overriding all other materials in the scene (and no background). This pass (lightning fast) was then composited back over the main pass using a screen blending mode. I don’t get any illumination that way of course, but it was neither important nore really visible.
I’m still learning Vray so I’m not sure I know why this is happening. I thought it wouldn’t be a problem to have so many light sources since I’m not using GI here, but I was wrong apparently.
Thank you for clearing that one up BBB3. Didn’t know how dramatic that would be in render time increase, never used VrayLightMtl for it. Good tip, may save me a lot of time in the future. Again, great work.
