Here is something I always wanted to do. Two ter. files on top of each other. I animated the displacement factor of them by increasing the value of one of them while decreasing the other one's displacement over time. I then added some dustclouds which was in fact the most complicated part.
The helicopter is rendered in 3ds Max since TG has no object motion blur yet which is absolutely necessary for a helicopter. The camera move is the same in both packages.
Hope you like it.
https://vimeo.com/45155709
Surprisingly effective! You're building up quite a portfolio of little animation clips. It would be great to see them all cut together into a single video at some point (and all in HD, of course, hehe).
- Oshyan
VERY COOL! I like the first two seconds and from 9 seconds on the best. But its all very good!
Love to see it longer and HD too
Nicely done
Did you use the depth modulator on the clouds?
(I thought I commented on this last night ~ forum weirdness)
cheers
Richard
Thank you, guys.
@ Oshyan and Badger: right now I am trying to render this animation in higher resolution. For testing purposes I'll leave Detail blending at 0 to see if the flickering is acceptable.
@ Cyphyr: no, I didn't. Actually I haven't used it yet. I'll have to do some tests with it.
Some additional information: In 3ds max I rendered the helicopter and the rotors separately. First I rendered the helicopter in mental ray without motion blur which I added in postwork (MB in mental ray is very slow to render depending on the materials you use).
Then I rendered the animated rotors with the default scanline renderer with a simple lightsource that's not even casting shadows. The motion blur is a camera effect which in this case renders the blur in 56 passes per frame. Sounds much, but each frame took less than a minute and a half to render. The helicopter body has a matte/shadow material assigned to it which makes it invisible but cuts out the areas where it's in front of the rotors.
Then I comped it together and adjusted the brightness and contrast, did some color grading and added some chromatic aberration which I'm addicted to ;)
Very cool effect. But I think the clouds are distracting from the terrain collapse, which in itself is interesting enough to get all the attention.
Cool experiment :) Has a '2012' feel to it ;)
Hope to see this updated with a higher resolution and quality render.
Well, I am rendering the sequence in 1920X880px right now. To make the rendertimes not too high I set the value for detail blending to 0 which is a TG-animation-sin, I know ;).
I hope that there will be not too much terrain and shadow popping.
Additionally I unchecked soft shadows and put the camera's blur value to 0 as well. The movement of it is not that strong, so maybe i can add alittle MB in post.
The rendertimes with that resolution are smaller than before. I'll see how it's going to look.
cool!
Quote from: Hannes on July 04, 2012, 12:25:38 PM
Well, I am rendering the sequence in 1920X880px right now. To make the rendertimes not too high I set the value for detail blending to 0 which is a TG-animation-sin, I know ;).
I hope that there will be not too much terrain and shadow popping.
Additionally I unchecked soft shadows and put the camera's blur value to 0 as well. The movement of it is not that strong, so maybe i can add alittle MB in post.
The rendertimes with that resolution are smaller than before. I'll see how it's going to look.
For cheap soft shadows you can always disable the sample jitter and decrease to ~5 samples, given that there is enough camera-movement/parallax, which might be an issue here.
Decreasing the sample jitter didn't do anything about render time when I tried it, but that might be file dependent. For rough terrain or lots of veggies lower samples is no problem indeed. I often use 5 samples and 1 for soft shadows instead of 0.5.
Decreasing sample jitter just allows you to use lower samples without introducing as much noise.
- Oshyan
Very nice :)
So why is there sample jitter? If by decreasing it you get 'better results at lower cost'.... ???
Decreased sample jitter creates banding (the sample positions are decreasingly random as you reduce it, i.e. more regular). The banding is noticeable in cases where shadows are well-defined and not broken up by whatever they're being cast on, but in complex vegetation cases somteimes you can't really tell (the banding is still theoretically there, it's just that the shadows are so broken up it may be hard to tell). It is generally a degradation in quality, so jitter is at max by default to get best results (which is kind of the point of soft shadows in the first place). Being able to reduce jitter is a useful optimization for advanced users that is applicable in some cases.
- Oshyan
Didn't have to use soft shadows. It looks quite good without. But I had to restart rendering the sequence after I found that there were some things to improve that weren't visible in low resolution. For example some PFs used as colour function in the rock textures are very small, and since the terrain is collapsing the PF stays in place which looks like the PF moves up. This produces some weird flickering where the sand layer doesn't cover the rock. This is happening with the PFs too that have a larger scale, but it's almost not noticeable. So I removed the small PFs in the textures. Besides I set higher quality settings for the cloud layers. I render the sequence now with 1280X720px which is not the same frame ratio, but I increased the overall quality settings a bit, so I think it will be OK even at a lower resolution. Rendertimes are about ten minutes per frame now.
10 min a frame ! Dark arts indeed ;)
Richard
Yes, but wait until the large dustcloud in the background will be rendered. This will probably increase rendertimes significantly... :(
Very convincing work Hannes!
OK, here it is in HD. The TG part isn't rendered with all the recommended settings to make rendertimes a bit smaller, so there's a little bit of flickering.
For some reason I called it "Large mix" on vimeo, which is the working title... :-[
https://vimeo.com/45595683
Lovely :) Much better!
By the way have you checked out Vimeo's recommended AE settings (http://vimeo.com/24027726)
Richard
The first few seconds are beautiful!! The rest is good too though.
The only crit I have is that the clouds/dust that rise up should extend back down to the surface where ever that is in 3d space.
And it probably to late now. But this would likely save you a ton of time with the helicopter: http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Choppa_Get_In_wb.mov
Its cheap and fast.
Thanks guys. The helicopter wasn't really a problem. The biggest problem was the dustcloud. @TheBadger: I totally agree. I spent a lot of time to make the cloud look like it does now. Funny fact: the cloud already drops and the density fractal is animated downwards. It only looks like rising. So I don't think I can improve that. I wish I had some kind of a particle system here...
Sorry hannes. I'm not sure I said what I meant.
The clouds look perfect! The work you did shows! What I meant was that there should be dust cloud, from the top of the dust cloud to the top of the surface.
Right now there is empty space between the clouds and the surface. But I don't think it would have settled so fast
How everything works is great! Its Just that one thing I mentioned.
Did you understand me, or did I not understand you?
This is a great project! It gives me very ambitious ideas!
I hope you are planning more things like this!
Yes, TheBadger, I think I understood (hopefully :) :) :)).
After watching the movie again, I saw what you meant. The terrain seems to be collapsing faster than the cloud drops, which results in the gap you mentioned. The cloud and its powerfractal should descent faster.
At the moment I am involved in another project, so I won't have time now to improve that. Maybe later.
Anyway thanks for your suggestions. I'm glad you like it.