Urban scene animated WIP

Started by Hannes, October 03, 2016, 09:17:09 AM

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Hannes

At the moment I am trying to animate the scene I used here:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=22193.0
I already made a camera move and want to animate the cars and the people. I attached a little test for some sort of crowd simulation. I imported a 31 frame object sequence of a walking character and used seven populations with different texture maps and different offsets of the walking loop. In 3ds max I measured the exact distance the character is walking within 100 frames and used this value to animate the population area. So there is no sliding back or forth, but if you look closer, you can see, that the feet are penetrating the ground sometimes. It's the imperfection of the skinned character. No big deal im my eyes.


archonforest

Dell T5500 with Dual Hexa Xeon CPU 3Ghz, 32Gb ram, GTX 1080
Amiga 1200 8Mb ram, 8Gb ssd

Dune

Wonderful. How about lowering the patch size to get the feet not penetrating the ground?

DocCharly65

Amazing! and cool!
I think with additional camera movement, animated cars and all the stuff in the city environment the feet not penetrating the ground will not be really visable.

(after I read that I looked closer and found a man pushing his elbow into the stomach of another man  ;D )


Hope I will learn the character animation some day in blender. At the moment too much for me ;)
Is 3DS Max easier to learn? 1900€ rental costs for only one year is not cheap! And when I think that I just scratched the surface of TG 3/4 after 3 years... I would never even touch 3DS Max!  ::) ???

Hannes

Quote from: Dune on October 04, 2016, 03:23:57 AM
Wonderful. How about lowering the patch size to get the feet not penetrating the ground?

Thanks, Ulco.
This won't work, because the "imperfection" is in the object"s animation. It's a motion capture movement and the model isn't detailed enough, so that the feet react to the ground perfectly. So occasionally the feet are slightly below the pivot. As I wrote, no big deal, this won't be visible in my final animation.
Nils yes, some instances are penetrating others. Unfortunately there's no collision detection (yet). There's instance editing, so if there's an obvious penetration, I could fix it, but hopefully it won't be
visible from that distance.

Dune

I was just experimenting with global opacity (trying to mix two antler sizes by PF) but that doesn't work globally yet (I've put down a request a year ago or so). That could also helpa bit (exclude where the other occurs), but you also can't 'opacitate out' a total part, even if it would work, so you always end up with a loose arm (kicking the stomach of the other guy)  ;D

Hannes

I decided to show you my results so far. I rendered 94 frames (9 min. rendertime per frame), and then realized that I used a V3 cloudlayer for the haze. Using V2 clouds instead reduces the rendertime to approx. 5 minutes per frame. I knew this before, but I wasn't aware which sort of cloud I was using... >:(

Unfortunately some people walk into (and through) each other or other obstacles. I don't know how to avoid that, since there is no way to guide single instances around objects. However I don't care too much about that. The camera is far away.

Dune

Awesome! The car turning that corner is a really nice touch.

Hannes

Thanks Ulco!
I just started the rendering from the start. I decided to use the advantage of faster rendertimes to increase the resolution. Now for a resolution of 1280 X 720 px it takes twelve minutes. I think it's worth it.
I'm trying to use the premade GI cache. It was done in 800 X 450 px, but it's the same ratio, so there shouldn't be a problem. The quality should be sufficient as well. The only thing I'm not sure about is the new cloud layer. Will there be flicker? I'll test it as soon as possible. If it's flickering, I'll create another GI cache and start all over. Hopefully not....

Kadri


Absolutely worth of a HQ render.

"Unfortunately some people walk into (and through) each other or other obstacles.
I don't know how to avoid that, since there is no way to guide single instances around objects."


Curious if a warping of a crowd node is possible?

Matt

Super stuff, Hannes!

For some reason I'm paying attention to some oddities in the traffic. First, I think in real life most drivers would be closer to the centre line and not so close to the kerb (curb). Second, the left-turning car looks like he doesn't know how to drive (very tight turn, very slow for no apparent reason). However, his driving position would be more appropriate if he had been waiting for an oncoming car just prior to the beginning of the shot, so perhaps you could add one and then the animation would work without any changes?

Matt
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Matt

You could get more detail on the road and faster render times by replacing the ground with a built-in Card (not Plane), or an imported plane. I only say this because it looks like the texture is rendered with micropolygons... but maybe that's just the texture?
Just because milk is white doesn't mean that clouds are made of milk.

Hannes

Quote from: Matt on October 06, 2016, 02:07:27 PM
However, his driving position would be more appropriate if he had been waiting for an oncoming car just prior to the beginning of the shot, so perhaps you could add one and then the animation would work without any changes?

Thanks a lot, Matt! I already thought about a pedestrian crossing the street. I'll see. Thanks for the suggestion!

Quote from: Matt on October 06, 2016, 02:11:09 PM
You could get more detail on the road and faster render times by replacing the ground with a built-in Card (not Plane), or an imported plane. I only say this because it looks like the texture is rendered with micropolygons... but maybe that's just the texture?

Not quite sure, what you mean. I used an image map shader for the road texture in between the city blocks. So actually the texture is on the planet's surface. Do you mean I should make the planet invisible and use a card instead?

Oshyan

Yes. Matt is saying that the planet, being a displaceable object, renders with the micropolygon renderer, which needs much higher Detail settings to render textures well vs. the ray tracer that works on objects. If you use a Card for the ground it will render with the ray tracer and thus give you higher quality ground and perhaps even shorter render time.

- Oshyan