This is just a practice exercise to create some animated underwater effects in TG. I will upload an HQ version in a while as this Youtube one is pretty poor quality. I hate what Youtube does to my animations...
There is some visible displacement 'popping' which was unavoidable with my current computer setup, I couldn't make it any higher quality or any larger resolution than 576x360px. Sorry about that.
*If anyone would like to try and render it at a higher quality then feel free to ask for the file. It's 480 frames and is simply a .tgd(no imported objects or other outside files are required).
My settings were;
Render detail = 0.5
AA = 4
Detail blending = 0
576x360px
Render time varied from between 6-8 minutes for the first 200-odd frames and up to 10-12 minutes for the rest(the starting frames are a bit quicker due to 1/3 of the scene being only 'sky'). This was rendered over just two 2ghz cores so, it wouldn't be a big deal on most newer computers at all.
Ideally, I'd have liked to have rendered it at;
Render detail = 0.75
AA = 4(is fine as it is),
Detail blending = 1(doubles render time, unfortunately)
768x480px(to meet Youtube 480px option)
So, as I say, get in touch and I'll supply the .tgd, if anyone is willing to help.
You can view it in the meantime at the top of my animations page (https://sites.google.com/site/d4nd310/animations-1). I will update with the HQ version later as it isn't uploaded to Vimeo yet...
Cheers for looking! :)
The canyon is actually much deeper and forks-off into two just after the end frames of this version, I'd like to have been able to carry the camera path onwards and downwards to create a really deep descent to the depths and possibly another climb to nearer the top again. I'll see what I can do about that but, for now, this is your lot.
Great underwater feeling! Superb work!
Very nice animation , DandelO!
Only the first abrupt right move feels-maybe-a little cgi .
The rest looks natural for me. Like a submarine or a diver.
Did you render a frame in high resolution? Wonder if it will look so good in high res too.
Especially one from the first half. Not that i doubt , DandelO ;)
I would love to see this rendered in high quality .
I have 3 computers at home and could use one for this.
I use unfortunately the free TG2 :(
That first right-hand swing pissed me off as well, Kadri. :D
Thanks, folks. :)
Quote from: dandelO on May 15, 2011, 03:48:21 PM
That first right-hand swing pissed me off as well, Kadri. :D
Thanks, folks. :)
:)
superb animation dandelO.
the "underwater" lighting is impressive.
Thanks, Lane. About 30 minutes and a higher quality version should be available on Vimeo...
OK. Here's the HQ Vimeo link, for anyone wanting a bit of a better look. http://vimeo.com/23761132, since the Youtube compression artefacts are far from pretty.
I've also replaced the one on my animations page(first post here) with this one now as it's so much better. It's also at the correct resolution.
Cheers! :)
Kadri; Here's frame 195, kind of in between the start portion and the canyon entrance, rendered at 1024px, detail=0.75, and AA=4(I could have raised that a little, it's a bit grainy in the rays and motion blur). Straight out of TG, no post.
50 minutes on 2 cores.
[attachimg=#]
I've just restarted that frame at 1280x800, detail=0.85, AA=6 and also with higher cloud samples.
Back in an hour or so...
Looks very nice! Thanks :)
I kind of feel the fear of being in underwater!
Well, it worked out to nearer two hours, instead, with the settings above.
Got rid of all the atmosphere and motion blur noise and 2 hours isn't so bad for a final quality render at all.
Night night! :)
Very neat! Render time isnt too bad either :P
Cool work again Martin.
Did you consider comparing AA4 non-adaptive, full samples versus AA6 "regular" (adaptive, 1/4th first samples)??
I'm saying this because when you render trees/bushes with AA6 vs AA8 then sometimes AA8 looks better.
But if you switch to AA6 non adaptive full sampling then it looks as good as AA8 but is a whole lot faster.
Cheers,
Martin
Cheers, all.
Martin. I played with many different AA settings with this, the most reasonable results(considering render times) turned out to be AA=4. Although the atmosphere is very thick, it's the displacements and the annoying lack of back face culling that raised the render times for this quite drastically, due to the micro polygon rendering of the surfaces that is required.
I ended up masking out the area to be rendered with a simple shape shader, in the opacity channel of a default shader, to only render as far as was in view of the camera and the visibility decay of the clouds. Even then, any frame where the canyons were in front of the camera(about 3/4 of the entire sequence) required the equivalent of rendering the same area twice, due to the canyons in the distance rendering before anything else did.
The atmosphere in the animation version is still a little grainy because I used 4(1/4 first samples) simply for quickness, or I'd probably still be rendering. :)
In the larger single frames, AA=6(also at default 1/4) gave the best results, quicker than AA=4(max) by about a third with RTA, and almost, but not quite, as noise-free.
The pixel sampler is great, I liked your experiments with clouds the other day, although, I've never managed to be able to argue '0.05' quality out of the clouds! Good job. I never usually use max AA samples if I go higher than AA=4, it's just too time consuming for me here in most cases. 16 samples all round is normally enough, any more and the RT renderer goes too slow.
In most cases, for me, AA=6(default sampling), gives nearly the same quality as AA=4(max), and it's quicker. It's entirely scene-dependant, though. If there's only sky, you can even squeeze nice enough clouds with AA=1! The ground will be horrid, though! :D
Ah right, funny to see that in your case AA6 default is faster than AA4 max.
In my experience the difference is mostly in favour of AA4, but in your case it seems the other way around.
The (lack of) backface culling is indeed a problem and render-intensive.
It would be cool to be able to coarsely cache the geometry which absolutely won't be rendered to remove a lot of the backfaces, somehow/something like that.
Just thinking...can't you mask out distant stuff by using a distance shader connected to your default shader's opacity input?
The projection camera = render camera, so that would move along.
Funny, I did that very thing to remove the stones from rendering in the distance too. It doesn't work in the opacity channel with a gradient, though, So I just combined the two to get a small rectangular patch in space with some blending out of the stones by distance as well.
It turned out really no quicker to blend out the stones, maybe I could have made it a closer cut off and it would have been a bit faster, you can see it reaches a bit far here. I eventually removed the distance shader blending for most of the rendering.
Yeah it's sorta "known" that blending out stones in the distance is actually slower than not doing it.
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10445.0 (http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=10445.0)
What I meant to say is to blend out any distant un-rendered terrain by a distance-shader.
V.2 can be viewed at 768x480px.
Extra special thanks to Neon22 who rendered this sequence for me at extremely high quality, with not a popping-stone in sight!
Thank you, kind Sir! :)
Watch on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/23990861).
I wonder if the shadow popping could have been avoided or, were my ray-clouds just moving too fast over each frame?
The displacements are pretty perfect from start to finish.