Fastest photoreal renders - help with animated matte paintings

[funkfather]

I have been playing around with Terragen for a while now - but I am still a novice. I want to use Terragen 2 to render BGs for a short film I have been making which includes 3d Jets modelled in C4d - see the attachment. I can create quite nice stills using GI and HDR skybox backgrounds in C4D but the problem with this method is that it requires a static camera. As soon as I have a static camera the jets whizz past way too fast for it to be worth doing that way.
So I need to animate the camera, which means I need to animate the background.
I have done some nice cloud renders (using NWDA pack and various other files I found on here) but the good ones are all massively long renders - more than 6/7 hours a frame. These are mainly big volume cumulus style clouds - they look great but I don't think I will be able to use them.

I would like advice on how to go about achieving fast-rendering aerial fly-overs/throughs that are also appear realistic. At this stage I am happy to have ANY terrain/cloudscape as long as it can pass off as realistic and I can render it on my i7quad core 2.66 in a reasonable amount of time. Say an hour a frame max. I am also looking at trying to raise money to put this through a render farm as a last resort.

I guess my questions are :
What are Terragen's core strengths when aiming for photo-real results?
What does it do best and fastest?
What types of terrains/cloudscapes should I be concentrating on creating in order to achieve my goal?
What terrains render fastest? What clouds render fastest?

I know this is a real rambling newbie kind of topic but I would still really appreciate any help or advice.

[Dune]

Briefly said: if you have really large, high clouds (and several layers of them) and very much detail and transparency in your terrain, as well as soft shadows, lots of objects, render time increases. So for fast movement I wouldn't put too much intricate detail in the terrain, and perhaps use no transparency in your water surface, but just the reflection. If you're not flying through clouds, and you don't need too much attention on the clouds, you might even consider using a backdrop of a cloudscape.
I'm sure there will be others chiming in with some good advice.

[TheBadger]

After you build your backgrounds in TG, take them and your model into after effects and use Element3D. E3D was built from the ground up for this exact purpose. There are even a ton of tuts to show you exactly how to do it.

The result you will get if you do the work will be vastly easier to control, and I dare say visually (aesthetically) superior to your example image. For example, your jet looks like a toy model when set against the giant backdrop. Scale will be a cinch for you to perfect in the workflow I suggested.You will also have the benefit of quick control over reflected light on your object from background as well as color. You will even be able to duplicate the objects and quickly and easily change textures for multiple variations of similar objects. Additionally, once you set up your models correctly you will be able to animate them (landing gear, pilot head, missiles, after burn, combat interaction ect.) with ease.

Use the right tool for the job. AE CS3 and up with E3d is exactly the right tool for what you described trying to do.

Terragen will give you great terrains to fly over. And if most of the shots will be blurred backgrounds, you will be able to make a ton of em' fast with infinite variety. Then you can do some high detail animations for the shots where the landscape is clearly visible in the traditional way following threads in this forum.

[TheBadger]

What terrains render fastest? What clouds render fastest?

Minimal displacement, image mapped, and just about anything from space or high orbit with no atmo. Atmo and the closer to the ground you are, with complex displacement, the longer the render (in general). There are not specific rules for this, every scene will be different. But in general a scene with no displacement and no atmo will render in no time. adding anything will add seconds to hours.

If you want photo real terrains and atmo/clouds (assuming you can make them in the first place) expect long render times. For animation, especially for a movie, you would use a farm to render, even if you have a dedicated render station. Since you said photo real I put things the way I did.

And even if you could do what Terragen can do in maya or max or houdini, (and you cant), it would take a long time to render too.

[TheBadger]

Do not make the mistake of rendering out 20-50 second animations in Terragen for a production. Unless your script exactly calls for a long sustained single camera shot, just don't do it.

Many people here post long animation sequences renders. Mostly they do that for learning, for fun, for beauty, or for the challenge. But this is not production practical for desktop work.

With regard to my last paragraph I can prove what I said.
Turn on your tv. wait for commercials to start. as soon as one does start counting out loud; 1-2-3, and again, 1-2-3. You will see that nearly every cut is almost exactly 3-4 seconds long. Some will go as much as 6. The ONLY time a shot should be longer than six seconds is if the shots needs it ie; emotion, or some kid of needed fancy long shot that SERVES the interest of the script. watch any movie to see better examples. But in cinema too, you will see exactly what I described holds true.

When rendering out a sequence add 1-3 seconds at the begin and end 1.5 or more at both. This will give you slack when editing. Or be exactly precise in every thing you do

Again, these are not rules of production.

Whats my point you ask? It takes a lot longer to render 20 seconds of animation than 3-6 seconds. 

Cheers.

[Tangled-Universe]

What's also cool is that you can animate at 3x speed in TG and then use retimer tools in AE/Nuke to slow it down.
Saves you 66% rendering
On top of that you can render without MB and apply that too in AE/Nuke.
Kronos (TheFoundry) can do both.

[funkfather]

Thanks Badger I have used Element and seen that E3d tut with the missile and the clever way of giving a normal environment map a bit of movement when the camera moves. I will look at it again. I understand what you are saying. To get really good results there are no shortcuts - but that is not just what I was asking. I am mainly wanting advice on what stuff TG2 renders quickly and that looks good, so where I should direct my attentions.  And thanks - will look at minimal displacement and no atmospheres, and orbital type shots. I will experiment with this. But I would like to try and achieve some cloud fly-throughs if it is feasible. Fast clouds for a lfy-through, anyone?
TU - I have not tried Kronos, thanks for the tip.

[Hannes]

Fast rendering clouds for a fly through? I don't think this is possible in TG. To make them look convincing they have to have quite high quality settings, which increases rendertimes, especially when the camera is close to or inside the clouds. But you'll be rewarded with fantastic real looking imagery.
If you don't really want to fly through the clouds but only pass them by, you might consider using AE, as already mentioned. Andrew Kramer of Videocopilot has some nice tutorials using camera orientated mapped planes, which can look really convincing, unless your camera isn't too close to the planes.
However, I wouldn't abandon the idea of using really large skyboxes (I prefer spheres) for the BG, maybe combined with the mapped planes.
Cheat as much as you can. You could create shots with a camera that turns rapidly following a jet passing by with the skybox method. Or create a shot from high above in TG by rendering a still of a landscape in high res, some clouds in an extra render (there are methods of doing that somewhere here in the forum) and the jet passing below the camera that's looking down. If you combine these layers in AE as 3D layers and add some camera shake, it can look really great. Try to work with single images as much as you can.
If you really want to make the jet fly through the clouds, then there is probably no other way than to render it the traditional way in TG as far as I can judge. But you might have saved some time using cheating methods for other scenes.
I hope that helped a bit...

[Hannes]

Something else: imho the unnatural DOF makes the plane look like a toy. People tend to overuse DOF even for panoramic wideshots. Forget the DOF for images of this kind, unless the plane is only one meter away from the camera.

[funkfather]

Ok cool, thanks for the advice guys. What I also thought of doing is that trick of slicing up a a nice still render of some clouds which have depth and projecting them onto flat planes in 3d space so that when the cam moves there is some parallax movement. I have done most of VideoCopilot's tutorials - well at least the first 60! so I know some of those tricks and am reasonably proficient with AE. Not so Terragen!!!

By the way - the bg in the sample image is just temporary and is what I am trying to replace! It is a fairly low-res HDRI which is why it is blurry - I am pretty sure I didn't have shallow DOF on. I will keep deep DOF for large-scale stuff which logically should have it. There also won't be any water!

I think what you say Hannes is the right idea - cheat for a whole load of the shots and then maybe render a couple of great hero animations.

Yes - and will keep shots down to 3-5 seconds to make this achievable.

OK cool - anyone else with any ideas?

[Oshyan]

I think what you're aiming for is quite do-able, especially if the jets in the foreground are going to be the main focus.

What are Terragen's core strengths when aiming for photo-real results?

Displaced, high-detail terrain. Realistic clouds and atmosphere. This is without considering render time, although for the given results, Terragen is a stand-out solution, despite sometimes longer render times.

What does it do best and fastest?

Displaced terrain is fastest. Rendering objects on top slows things down, adding complex clouds does so further. But just basic terrain rendering is extremely fast.

What types of terrains/cloudscapes should I be concentrating on creating in order to achieve my goal?

You have fairly free reign with terrains. Performance won't start to bog down a lot until/unless you're using really severe displacement and/or complex shader networks. Reflections (water) are relatively slow however, so avoid having water, or try to render it in your main app (C4D).

What terrains render fastest? What clouds render fastest?

Either heightfield or displaced procedural terrain with a few layers of procedural displacement, but not a ton. That would be fastest.

For clouds, the higher your density and edge sharpness, the more noise, thus the more samples are needed for high quality. Likewise with very tall clouds. Obviously you need to balance these factors against the needs of your scene, but do know that trying to create tall, billowing cumulus that render at high quality will no doubt take a good amount of time. They are one of the hardest challenges in computer graphics as a whole, really.

I put together a quick test of a cloudscape to fly through. Took about 15 minutes to setup the simple scene and animation, then about 25 minutes/frame on a 3.5Ghz i7 at 720p. A 1080p representative frame rendered in about an hour (it's not 4x the time because the top half of the frame has relatively little cloud; your results may vary of course). So on your machine perhaps a bit over the render time you're looking for, but if you can render every other frame and interpolate, or put up with slightly noisier results, render time comes down a lot. Attached is the quick 1.5 second sample animation at 720p, mainly just to show noise-free results.

- Oshyan