The gorge (final animation on page 2)

[Hannes]

Thank you for your friendly words, bjur.
I think you're right about the speed. Since I animated the camera in 3ds max it wouldn't be a problem to just "rescale" the animation. Also using a more cinematic aspect ratio would be nice. As you said rendertimes are a big issue in this case. I will definitely not be able to render this in Full HD in high quality. The initial image took more than nine hours in a 2400 X 1350 px resolution. I'd have to use some settings like detail blending which would increase the rendertimes even more.
Anyway I like your suggestions. At the moment I am rendering this thing with a resolution of 1280 X 720 (same quality settings like in the previous one) and it takes 30 - 40 minutes per frame.
But I think I will give it a try to slow down the animation and to use another aspect ratio. Maybe 1024 X 436 px.

[Bjur]

I'm going with "2.39" atm. for a cinematic aspect ratio for my 1st test animation including GI just right now. *lashes renderslave*

In your case, with a HD resolution of 1280x720, you would get 1280x536 with 2.39. So you could safe render time right from the start if you rly think about using
a cinematic like aspect ratio for the final render and you would see earlier what you get later. Fun thing is/beware, the whole animation and scene will appear different then visual wise.

I dont know your settings in all nor i'm experienced enough to give a good advice in your case/scene. Just try to go with AA-bloom unchecked if possible for saving more render time (i hate AA-bloom even when it could be useful sometimes).

I wish you good luck and i hope you will be triumphant! I'm very curious about your final render somewhen..

[Oshyan]

It looks very good so far. It may be slightly fast, but take a look at the actual helmet-cam videos from wingsuit flights, it's quite fast!

Render times are probably much more affected by casting shadows into clouds and atmo than by your displacement shaders (I am guessing here of course, but both those settings are very "heavy", as you know). Have you tested render time and visual results with them on and off, to see if it's worth the extra time?

- Oshyan

[Hannes]

Thanks bjur, at the moment I am rendering the image sequence with an updated camera animation (600 frames now!), but TU suggested to render only every nth frame and to use After effects to interpolate the missing images. I am rendering every second one because of the wild camera movements at the beginning. We'll see how it will look. I made some tests and frame blending worked quite well. I found a great time mapping video tutorial on videocopilot that gave me some inspirations. Andrew Kramer always inspires me 

@Oshyan: yes I did some tests and I found out that in this case the main factor is the displacement. That's why I turned off some of the smaller ones that aren't much visible in the animation anyway.
The shadows in the atmosphere and in the mist are of course making rendertimes a bit longer, but I think it's worth it. And it's not as much as the displacement does here. I want those godrays!

[TheBadger]

Its good Hannes. But is it going to be a helmet cam, or will you put someone in front of the camera? Someone in front would effect the aspect positively.

Kadri has some skydiver models he has posted before. Maybe you could get one from him?

[Hannes]

Here is the final animation.
http://vimeo.com/66543348
There's still some terrain and shadow popping. I used a value of 0.5 in ray detail region padding which wasn't enough obviously. I rendered every second frame and time stretched it in AE. 600 frames now.

[ra]

Great one! The lower fog layer gives a great atmospheric feeling to this!

[TheBadger]

From 8sec to 13sec is my favorite part. IT IS FRIGGING GREAT.
The entire thing is very good too.

[otakar]

Very nice! Very smooth. Missing the birds somehow

[Dune]

Awesome!

[masonspappy]

Well done!!

[Oshyan]

It's a really cool final animation Hannes, you do very well with the camera setup (and of course the texturing). However there does seem to be a lot of shifting/popping of the terrain (canyon walls) between frames. I would guess this is due to lower main Detail, or lack of Detail Blending or Displacement Filtering, and I suspect this is also (at least partly) the cause of hard-to-fix off-screen shadow popping - even with ray detail region padding, if your main detail is too low, the issues will be worse. Still, it's a result of compromise due to render time issues, not a fundamental problem with your work. Overall very nice indeed!

- Oshyan

[Hannes]

Thank you! Yes Oshyan, you're absolutely right. First of all the animation was rendered with the Quick render settings. I used a value of 0.5 in ray detail region padding, which wasn't enough. And I didn't use Detail blending at all, although it's absolutely necessary for animations. I know that, but rendertimes were quite high, so I decided to render it with lower quality settings to get the animation ready.

[jo]

Hi Hannes,

That is a cool animation. It would be great to see it at higher quality, but I understand the constraints :-).

Did you import the camera animation using FBX?

Regards,

Jo

[Hannes]

Thanks, Jo. I haven't tested the FBX import/export function yet .
I used Davy's plugin.