Collapsing terrain (now in HD - page 2)

Started by Hannes, July 03, 2012, 05:38:03 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Hannes

Here is something I always wanted to do. Two ter. files on top of each other. I animated the displacement factor of them by increasing the value of one of them while decreasing the other one's displacement over time. I then added some dustclouds which was in fact the most complicated part.
The helicopter is rendered in 3ds Max since TG has no object motion blur yet which is absolutely necessary for a helicopter. The camera move is the same in both packages.
Hope you like it.
https://vimeo.com/45155709

Oshyan

Surprisingly effective! You're building up quite a portfolio of little animation clips. It would be great to see them all cut together into a single video at some point (and all in HD, of course, hehe).

- Oshyan

TheBadger

VERY COOL! I like the first two seconds and from 9 seconds on the best. But its all very good!

Love to see it longer and HD too
It has been eaten.

cyphyr

Nicely done
Did you use the depth modulator on the clouds?

(I thought I commented on this last night ~ forum weirdness)

cheers

Richard
www.richardfraservfx.com
https://www.facebook.com/RichardFraserVFX/
/|\

Ryzen 9 5950X OC@4Ghz, 64Gb (TG4 benchmark 4:13)

Hannes

Thank you, guys.
@ Oshyan and Badger: right now I am trying to render this animation in higher resolution. For testing purposes I'll leave Detail blending at 0 to see if the flickering is acceptable.
@ Cyphyr: no, I didn't. Actually I haven't used it yet. I'll have to do some tests with it.

Some additional information: In 3ds max I rendered the helicopter and the rotors separately. First I rendered the helicopter in mental ray without motion blur which I added in postwork (MB in mental ray is very slow to render depending on the materials you use).
Then I rendered the animated rotors with the default scanline renderer with a simple lightsource that's not even casting shadows. The motion blur is a camera effect which in this case renders the blur in 56 passes per frame. Sounds much, but each frame took less than a minute and a half to render. The helicopter body has a matte/shadow material assigned to it which makes it invisible but cuts out the areas where it's in front of the rotors.
Then I comped it together and adjusted the brightness and contrast, did some color grading and added some chromatic aberration which I'm addicted to  ;)


Dune

Very cool effect. But I think the clouds are distracting from the terrain collapse, which in itself is interesting enough to get all the attention.

Tangled-Universe

Cool experiment :) Has a '2012' feel to it ;)
Hope to see this updated with a higher resolution and quality render.

Hannes

Well, I am rendering the sequence in 1920X880px right now. To make the rendertimes not too high I set the value for detail blending to 0 which is a TG-animation-sin, I know ;).
I hope that there will be not too much terrain and shadow popping.
Additionally I unchecked soft shadows and put the camera's blur value to 0 as well. The movement of it is not that strong, so maybe i can add alittle MB in post.
The rendertimes with that resolution are smaller than before. I'll see how it's going to look.


Tangled-Universe

Quote from: Hannes on July 04, 2012, 12:25:38 PM
Well, I am rendering the sequence in 1920X880px right now. To make the rendertimes not too high I set the value for detail blending to 0 which is a TG-animation-sin, I know ;).
I hope that there will be not too much terrain and shadow popping.
Additionally I unchecked soft shadows and put the camera's blur value to 0 as well. The movement of it is not that strong, so maybe i can add alittle MB in post.
The rendertimes with that resolution are smaller than before. I'll see how it's going to look.

For cheap soft shadows you can always disable the sample jitter and decrease to ~5 samples, given that there is enough camera-movement/parallax, which might be an issue here.

Dune

Decreasing the sample jitter didn't do anything about render time when I tried it, but that might be file dependent. For rough terrain or lots of veggies lower samples is no problem indeed. I often use 5 samples and 1 for soft shadows instead of 0.5.

Oshyan

Decreasing sample jitter just allows you to use lower samples without introducing as much noise.

- Oshyan

Simius Strabus

Why stop dreaming when you wake up?

iMac i7 2.8GHz 8Gb

Dune

So why is there sample jitter? If by decreasing it you get 'better results at lower cost'....  ???

Oshyan

Decreased sample jitter creates banding (the sample positions are decreasingly random as you reduce it, i.e. more regular). The banding is noticeable in cases where shadows are well-defined and not broken up by whatever they're being cast on, but in complex vegetation cases somteimes you can't really tell (the banding is still theoretically there, it's just that the shadows are so broken up it may be hard to tell). It is generally a degradation in quality, so jitter is at max by default to get best results (which is kind of the point of soft shadows in the first place). Being able to reduce jitter is a useful optimization for advanced users that is applicable in some cases.

- Oshyan