The Plan behind...

Started by DocCharly65, December 24, 2014, 06:00:20 AM

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TheBadger

#15
I just love that first shot! Really is fun. R2D2 (or C3po?) Which ever, he looks like he is really traversing the little stones! Nice movements there 8)
It has been eaten.

DocCharly65

#16
Thanks :)

Jepp - in fact I am proud of the r2d2 wiggling along the way.
I used 2 manually edited animation curves in the obj-rotations to generate wiggling that looks random.

But for better workflow in future I have two questions.

1) Is there any possibility to get a "relative to terrain"- coordinate for an object and write it into an animation curve?
It was extreme time-consuming to calibrate the r2d2 that it looks like he touches the terrain.
I know the button how to "drop" the object to terrain in the 3D preview, but I can't generate a terrain depending path...

2) I didn't find an "object path"  ---   camera-paths are shown in the 3D preview. Is this feature for moving objects hidden or not existent?



The next steps:
The viper flight over the desert is rendering in 1920x1080 with 1-3h per frame because of the many reflective shaders on the viper.
But when finished you can almost see the passing desert-ground reflecting in the cannon  8)

[attach=1]

Also the viper passing the desert-town with the 180 degree camera rotation must be composed and rendered new...

R2D2 must pass the forest... yes - that's one reason why I spent soo much time to the dog in the forest...
Some vessels should pass over the forest... Here a very early test render just for the overview:
[attach=2]
The mountains in the far will be revised later when I have time.

The starting viper will be arranged completely new... for the two shots in the teaser it was OK but since I got some more experience with the forest road, I really hate that mountain lake...

...and then I can care about the 90% rest of the plan  :P :P
...even a film Premiere in 2020 is very, very optimistic...  ::) ;)

Dune

For forest in the distance you could use a fake forest of just color and displacement.

DocCharly65

yes, depending on the distance you're right, dune.
if I come too close to that area, I wanted to use some lowpoly- or generic trees.
but first I should try your suggestion - thanks

Oshyan

The camera path shown in the 3D preview is not a general "show animation paths in 3D preview" feature, but rather a specific feature that shows it for cameras.

I don't think there's a way to control animation of an object by terrain height. TG has functional but relatively basic object editing capabilities at present.

- Oshyan

DocCharly65

two weeks later...
a small step closer to what I want:

the OLD version:
[attach=1]

the NEW version:
[attach=2]

could be improved even more, but at the projected vehicle speed of about 300 kmh I hope that errors are not visible...

DocCharly65

#21
As promised, still working on "The Plan"

After more than 2 Months I could finish 20 sec. "Viper in the desert" animation (as in real life I will only use app. 8-15 sec. of it)

Now I started work on a different view of the same scene for some fast cuts (remember the background music of the "preview"):

[attach=1]

Next steps will be new renders of the R2D2 in the"new" desert (African vegetation without cacti an more dry bushes) Then I will repeat the scene with the flyby of the Viper with tracking by the camera.

An then I can go on with the rest of the app.10-20 scenes... ??? :o
One will play in the forest (remember the Rottweiler)
One will play over the forest
...
...
...

Phuu... so much... is perhaps someone interested to join the project? I get very scared that I'll need until 2070 to finish but that's more than my life expectancy  :o ;D

However, two reasons to consider:
I would have to share the data and it came out how unprofessional I use TG3  ::)
And I would have to share the secret of the punchline... out of the question!  ;D

I hope to finish the animation faster this time. I did some experiments and found out that usual HD (720p) is good enough for watching on TV. So I will reduce render resolution to 720p and upscale frames via batch processing with XNView. So I can save more than a month rendertime. Additionally this causes a slight blur, so the animation looks more realistic.

I also checked renderfarm-prices. 500 frames of my animation in full HD at low priority would have cost me app. 70€. More than 10 times I found mistakes at the END of the renderjob so that 20 second would have cost 700 € until now. Sorry... we'll talk about it again, when I'm rich  ; :) 8)

Dune

Maybe you get rich by selling your movie  ;)  For €700 you'll have your own extra  rendermachine. It'll be awesome, I'm sure of it. This example looks very good also.

DocCharly65

Good morning Ulco  :)

I modified the threat while you wrote. Some more info now...

Yes, it's a long way but it stays my little big dream... And it's still highest priority. So I often put aside other projects, like learning a professional sea shore on Easter island...  ;)

And instead doing some jokes like "Silver Vader" (on the other side also a kind of learning to use shaders)  ;)

Dune

I know what you mean; some projects just never end. I started writing a fantasy novel in 1986, got about 400 pages, rewrote several times (first draft was partly written, partly on ancient typewriter, second draft typed again on wordprocessor, before the age of computers, at least in my world, third and subsequent rewrites on computer), but I never ended it. Well....

Kadri

Quote from: DocCharly65 on April 28, 2015, 03:33:19 AM
...
I hope to finish the animation faster this time. I did some experiments and found out that usual HD (720p) is good enough for watching on TV.
So I will reduce render resolution to 720p and upscale frames via batch processing with XNView.
So I can save more than a month rendertime. Additionally this causes a slight blur, so the animation looks more realistic.
...

May i suggest to test the "Warp resize" filter in Virtualdub? It is not "better" per see but looks different.
Actually you might no need for resize at all too. You get the blurring for free kinda anyway with natural scaling.
Try and see what way you like at least.

Oshyan

I'm curious what your per-frame render times are and why they are (seemingly) so high to make the cost for 500 frames *at lowest priority* so much...

- Oshyan

DocCharly65

#27
Good morning Kadri & Oshyan  :)

Oshyan, an hour ago I checked prices again. Seems they have cut prices. Last time  it was app. $70 (67 I guess) today their calculator told me app. 40 ($36.96 )!!! Cool!

I calculated
500 frames
55 min per frame (@ my racing PC)
4 CPU Cores (Core I7)
8 hyperthreats
3 Ghz
powersetting 0.8

The rendertime does not seem high to me, if I consider all the (I think app. 10-15) reflective parts in the viper.
Additionally the desert scene is very big area (10x10 km) with 30 populations of different plants.
Here you can see one of the slower rendered pics:

[attach=1]

This one (55 minutes rendertime) also includes the R2D2 with 5-10 additional reflective parts (the same frame as my threat above):

[attach=4]

If I find new mistakes at the end of the scene (frame 400-500) 10 times it's still $369. But anyway this take is ready for cutting  :)


Kadri, thanks for the tipp. I will check something similar with my MAGIX (I'm used to the user interface and it's in German language - most of my problems with TG3 are based on my not so good English  ::)  )

But the up scaling is a different reason: If I let the frames @ 720p, the TV will upscale them like this:

[attachimg=2]

My XNView batch up scaling does this:

[attachimg=3]

Do you see the difference?
Using this method I can reduce anti-aliasing and image size in TG for up to 3-time faster rendering and XNView does up scaling in"OK"-quality for free.




Dune

Nils, something to consider for reducing render time (for certain areas) is to get rid of the compute terrain! You don't always need it.

DocCharly65

Good morning Ulco  :)

thanks for that tipp. I thought, I must not get rid of the compute terrain, because my camera moves (fast) and every frame shows different angles and views of the terrain... I will have to check this.

Is computing terrain one of the things my computer does, when I get the message "preparing to render"?
I think during that time, TG checks the GI cache file, and calculates the terrain (and some more things and then starts raytracing. Am I a little bit right? That time is mostly 1-3 sconds or less.