Well, it almost took an eternity to make it out of production but here, at long last, is the final Garden of Eternity animation! The forums are getting a special early look at it, before our website is updated with the news. Enjoy!
YouTube HD:
http://youtu.be/5346KBotVaY?hd=1
Link to download the original for playing on your computer at highest quality, MP4 format, h.264 compression:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/mediafiles/garden_final.mp4 (365MB)
Congratulations and special thanks to Ulco Glimmerveen for his contest winning entry, and his help and patience throughout the animating and rendering process. We learned a lot working on this project and Terragen has honestly improved significantly as a result of issues we discovered and/or tested with this scene. It is a particularly demanding setup for TG to render well, and I believe we've really been able to make it shine with new systems like Global Illumination Caching and Blending in Terragen 2.4. We hope to do similar projects like this in the future, and we will be able to do so much more quickly and efficiently thanks to improvements in tools and process based on this experience.
Thanks also go to the NWDA crew and everyone in our community who has been waiting for this for so long. Your patience and understanding have been greatly appreciated. We hope it was worth the wait.
- Oshyan
Nice to see the end result.
Congrats Ulco :)
Osyhan can you write some more things about the technical side like the settings,render time and if the animation was all made in TG2 or not please ?
I'll try to put some more details together soon (I can say it was all made in TG2, at the least). I've got some other thing to dedicate time to at the moment though. ;D
- Oshyan
OK ! I hope the blackout will not last long :)
The animation was smooth. The new animation additions are worth it seems.
Good to see it finally out there. Great scene wit plenty of "mini" environments in it, very nicely done :)
Richard
Damn, I won't get to see this for another day or so, I'm on mobile broadband just now and I've went right over my fair usage policy so most video files get blocked for the rest of the month for me now.
The .mp4, that I should still be able to download, is returning a server error when I try, has anyone else managed to access it or is it just me?
Quote from: dandelO on April 05, 2012, 11:36:37 AM
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The .mp4, that I should still be able to download, is returning a server error when I try, has anyone else managed to access it or is it just me?
I downloaded it this morning. Tried it now ones again and got no error Martin.
Thanks, Kadri.
I checked to make sure April 1 has passed, then I went to download this thing. ;D No problems.
Ulco, congratulations for finally(!) seeing your work rendered. You can be proud, as it is a masterpiece, with the variety of scenes you have created in your garden. Nothing feels out of place or unnatural. As for the animation, it of course suffers from the static nature of a world frozen in time. Some subtle leaves movement, waves, swans gliding, etc. would have made a huge difference, but it seems some of these things are just now getting figured out as how to implement them without hurting render time too much. I thought some nature sounds would not have hurt either, but that's personal preference.
I will have to watch this again a few times now....
Just WOW! Ulco, you really deserve the first price! Just watched it in low quality and downloading the HD file now. Can't wait!
The swans do move, though no ripples in the water. ;) Also the hawk/buzzard thing at the end turns and moves... But yes, some wind motion would have been nice. Not really feasible just yet, but one day.
- Oshyan
Oh yes, I can see it now, very nice indeed! Patience really pays! Well done, Ulco. :)
Thanks guys, and many credits to Oshyan who put 18 months of hard labour in this animation ;)
As this was made 18 months ago, the quality of the environment is already dated (I/we am/are much better now). We only just found out how population variation worked when this was initialized. In the initial tgd I still worked with projection from above onto the population, so we changed that halfway.
My modeling skills were also very basic back then. If you look closely you can find some errors.
But on the whole, I am very pleased, and proud.
On to the next challenge (and contest?).......
Congratulations Ulco and Oshyan, for this gorgeous animation! I have watched this over my apple tv on the big TV, and there it looks even more like a real environment.
Granted, there is no wind and such, but I managed to get lost in the beauty of the environment anyway.
Frank
Congratulations guys. This is just plain damn beautifull!!!!!
WOW!
Incredible, really! Especially fog and reflections.
(sorry for bad english)
8) 8) 8)
amazing!
even better than I ever could have imagined...
congrats to all!
:)
Looks good Dune, really peaceful park you've created. I want to walk around in it.
Also getting an error on that download link.
The animation was stunning! Will you guys be rendering any of the other ones ?
I realy like to see that ship sail through the waves. (bether be a parrot in there also ;D).
Sorry about that, download link fixed. We have no immediate plans to animate the other contest entries, but we're working on other animation projects...
- Oshyan
Wow, clearly unbelievable! Stunning details, and excellent reality!
I can't even imagine, how much work this is... Grats!
I'd be really interested, what render settings can eliminate the GI flickering this way and so on :)
The upcoming 2.4 release has a new GI caching feature that can eliminate flicker that is due to GI (when used properly). Other kinds of flicker, such as bits of geometry or shadows popping on or off, have some other new solutions as well, though there will still be some situations where those artifacts are harder to eliminate.
- Oshyan
This turned out fantastic. Serene location and beautiful camera movement. What I enjoyed most is the variety in the park, all the hard work that went into setting up this location really shows.
Very nice to see Ulco's work finally realized! Great job
Osyhan can you elaborate what you used for AA , blur ?
Was AA 8 and motion blur more then 0,5 ?
Or did you do some acrobatic moves with the other settings combined :)
I have trouble to lower noise in my animation to acceptable render times especially with grass objects.
Clouds and trees are not so much problematic.
I don't remember the final settings, unfortunately. Let me see if I can find out... Ok, looks like AA 8, 1/4 first samples, noise threshold 0.02. I did try a lot of different possibilities across the spectrum from high AA with highly adaptive settings, to non-adaptive at lower settings. This seemed to work best for that particular situation. I think I had motion blur disabled though and did it in post with the video editor, which certainly saves render time.
- Oshyan
Thanks Osyhan , that helps!
We rendered a test of this in full 1080p at one point, and while we decided the extra render time wasn't going to be feasible in the end, it did look rather nice. Frank Basinski suggested that I post a sample, so here it is:
http://www.planetside.co.uk/files/videos/GardenRendering_1920x1080_F0001_0135.mp4
Keep in mind that this is from a somewhat earlier revision of the scene and, in particular, the animation settings were not finalized (you can see a bit of flicker on some objects that was later fixed, for example). Still, it's 1080p and minimally compressed, so it should be quite a bit nicer than watching on YouTube.
Hopefully future animations can be experienced in full 1080p!
- Oshyan
Looks great!
As i was testing my animation (very basic forward camera move actually)
and i said why can i not use 1080p and only half HD i suddenly realized
that the 720x 560 pal days were not so much ago.
Oshyan by the time we render at 1080p , 4 K will be standard-probably- :)
Oshyan , approximately how long were the render times of one frame of the the half and full HD versions ?
It really varied quite a lot for different parts of the animation. I think it was between 1 and 2 hrs per frame at 720p (1280x720) on an i7 quad core at 3.6Ghz.
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan!