Urban scene animated WIP

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

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Hannes

Cool! Thanks a lot!!
Although I tried to avoid starting over again, I'm glad about your suggestions, Matt. In the meantime I repositioned the cars and created a pedestrian. It was a bit tricky to get the timing right. He already had to be almost on the other side, because the car accelerates very soon. I could have changed the car's animation, but like this it was easier.

And I replaced the planet's surface (planet made invisible) by a card. The texture looks indeed a lot better. And I think it renders faster as you said.
I'll render out a sequence without the haze in 800 by 450 px to see if everything's OK.

Dune

I was just about to suggest the same about the ground, but you guys are ahead of time  ;)  If it's all objects, you can possibly lower detail setting even to zero? At least very low.

Hannes

Quote from: Dune on October 07, 2016, 03:06:42 AM
If it's all objects, you can possibly lower detail setting even to zero? At least very low.

??? Honestly? I'll try that!
Unfortunately TG refused to work after 59 frames in the night. This scene is really demanding...

Hannes

Wow! That really works. It has to be greater than zero, because at 0 you only get some weird large shapes. I tried enabling the cloud layer to see, if that works too with that setting. It seems I have to turn on defer atmo/cloud. However, the rendertime per frame at 800 X 450 px with cloud layer enabled is now three minutes and a few seconds instead of five minutes!
Cool!!
C'mon, guys, give me some more tips, until there is no rendertime at all!! ;D ;D ;D

Oshyan

This is the magic of the new ray tracing optimizations in TG4. When you're dealing with pure objects, things are very fast! Even for clouds! If you don't already have "Receive shadows" enabled, turn it on. It won't hurt performance much in an object-only scene. :D

- Oshyan

Hannes

Quote from: Oshyan on October 07, 2016, 04:56:25 AM
If you don't already have "Receive shadows" enabled, turn it on. It won't hurt performance much in an object-only scene. :D

That's amazing. Yes, I had "receive..." on, but now for testing if the cars and the people are OK, I disabled the cloud layer. I'll render all 300 frames, and if everything looks good, I'll create another GI cache and start the HD render.
When my test animation is done, I'll post it as soon as possible.

Dune

Soon we'll get rid of the whole planet and all that micropoly stuff  :D

Kadri

Quote from: Dune on October 07, 2016, 03:06:42 AM
...If it's all objects, you can possibly lower detail setting even to zero? At least very low.

That is interesting to know Ulco.
Wish TG4 came out 2 years ago.

Hannes

So, here is the result of the last rendering session: no GI caching, no haze, no HD.
In the meantime I tried to correct some things. As you can see in this movie here the newly created pedestrian walks across the street towards the building and then suddenly jumps three meters to the right and carries on walking. I tried to fix that for the next rendering. Not too easy in TG...
I then desperately tried to edit some of the instances of the walkers to eliminate the interpenetrating a bit (does that sound weird? ???). Not sure if that worked. I'll see.
During the last hour I created a GI cache file. So now I am going to render the whole thing in HD. Since this is really very RAM consuming my computer occasionally decides to stop working. So hopefully tomorrow morning I'll have at least some newly rendered images!!

Kadri

#24

Looks nice Hannes.
Not sure if it is the same related problem you mentioned;
there are some problems with other guys near the place where the fast walking guy is (they kinda pop up).

Dune

I wouldn't really bother about certain issues. You really have to watch it several times and very attentive to see some interbumping. You can also say that everybody moves at the same speed, which may be weird. No lazy bastards or joggers around. Actually I don't know what happens if you edit pops in a series of objects. To me this looks great as is, though you might throw some people out that really misbehave.

Hannes

Thank you, guys.
I really like how the animated people look like here, but as you said, all have the same speed and they bump into other instances and into other obstacles. This is nearly impossible to avoid, since you can't really preview the animated objects without repopulating each frame, which is quite inconvenient to say the least.
And there are 51 populations with animated people! So, in this case I don't really care. It would be nice to have the walkers behave more natural, but it's just not possible at the moment. As far as I know!
Right now I'm rendering frame 63 of the HD animation. The quality is good, no flicker. It's going to take some more time, since, as I wrote, TG is refusing to work from time to time. It's not crashing, it's just because 16GB RAM isn't really enough for this...  :(

Dune

You don't make it easy on yourself  ;)

j meyer

Cool animation. Especially the brake lights on the turning car and
at least one other taxi are great details.
Agree with Ulco about the pedestrians.

DocCharly65

Absolutely great animation, Hannes!

I think the little problems with the humans populations are only visible if you play the animation in an endless loop and watch detailed again and again.

Otherwise you see an amazing and realistic looking scene  - anyway I did. Thumbs up - great work!