The Cassini satellite is a bit jaggy and I can't be bothered re-rendering with any higher AA so, this'll have to do for now.
http://vimeo.com/31307226
Cheers! :)
Very fine work Martin. Someday I'd like to see you create a snow avalanche animation.
Love it...this could be on the Discovery channel with a bit of fine tuning. :)
Enjoyed this one. NASA quality.
Really nice Martin.
Thank you, folks. :)
I'd like to re-render this because there are some glaringly nasty parts in it, namely the incorrect placement of Enceladus in the E-Ring, which is pretty much invisible as a moon and only leaves its shadow for the viewer to see, I'll rethink that area as I don't like how it turned out, I should have placed it not so directly in the light. What also confuses the eye even more is the visible moon above Enceladus which makes an appearance around halfway through, making it seem that it might be casting that shadow in contradiction to the lighting but it isn't, its shadow can be seen on the planet surface, right-hand side at the end of the animation.
The rings are also slightly different and not as sharp as I'd like, the original planet I used for this .tgd is called The Grudge and is shared here somewhere, the rings should have been left like they were there.
And the Cassini jaggies that I mentioned before could be be very much improved but to do that I'll need to raise AA to a higher minimum sample rate and this will drastically impact render times since RTA is also used to get smooth rings(the minimum setting I could get away with here is; cloud quality=15 at 925 samples due to the extreme thinness of the way I've used the layer), raising AA will result in more sampling of both objects and clouds and will take an age. I don't have the knowledge of how to render out a multi-pass and comp' it together into an animation right now, although, that would be the logical way to go. I must do some reading and experimenting...
At the settings I had for this render I was on around 10 minutes per frame over my two little cores, the whole 30 seconds took me around 120 hours to render so it will be a while before I can re-render.
If there are any offers to render it from any of you guys running beast-machines I'd happily send the .tgd file and Cassini object(a NASA model, freely distributed and shareable by the public). On a half decent computer this scene would take two or three minutes per frame at the required settings to make it clean, I'd guess.
Anyway, cheers! :)
Bob, as for an avalanche animation, I can't see me doing that any time soon, not on this computer anyway! Once I get paid for some work I'm doing though there might be some light at the end of that tunnel.
Hannes made the most stunning avalanche some time ago which is one of the best ever renders I've seen from TG2.
I should mention that I'm also working on an entire solar system render, which will be a lot quicker to render as it doesn't rely on the whole thing to be dealing with highly sampled volumetrics, could still be a while before I can share that though...
very nice!
cool sounds too...
looking forward o the next iteration...
:)
J
Quote from: dandelO on October 30, 2011, 05:55:11 PM
I should mention that I'm also working on an entire solar system render, which will be a lot quicker to render as it doesn't rely on the whole thing to be dealing with highly sampled volumetrics, could still be a while before I can share that though...
Curious how it will look , Martin :)
Love the animation Martin - very cool indeed! Presumably the satellite is part of the International Space Station that broke off because the bankrupt world couldn't afford to keep it in one piece! ;) Look forward to seeing the solar system - what a render that will be (and what a lot of frames!)
Thanks again for the kind comments, everyone. :)
Jonathan, some more information about the Cassini-Huygens craft can be found here; http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/overview/
Also, for anyone who missed it before, my Terragen 'Saturn' model(not to scale ;)) can be downloaded here; http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=9410.0
Cheers!
I'd be happy to do some rendering for you. With my new 4.6Ghz i7 system I now have 3 i7's in my house and 1 or 2 of them are usually free. I'd be interested to see if there are other optimization strategies for reducing the noise without massively increasing render time too...
- Oshyan
Thanks, Oshyan. I've a bit of fixing to do since seeing the sequence rendered out but I'll get back to you in due course with the files once they are fixed up. I imagine the 30 seconds will pretty much fly on a machine like that so it wouldn't be much hassle for you at all, I'd think.
Cheers. :)
Beautiful. I think I missed that. I'd love to see that at higher resolution.
...and thanks for the compliment! ;)
With many thanks to Oshyan who kindly rendered this for me in HD after I edited some various settings from the last one.
Updates are; Ring shadow added, planet radius a bit bigger, soft shadows enabled, moons shifted around a little, rings form and sharpness taken back to their original settings(as seen in The Grudge.tgd in file sharing) and some various other settings that I won't bore you with.
Oshyan tried hard to keep a good balance between render time and quality, unfortunately, it would have taken far too long to render with ample settings to remove the slightly popping moon-shadow on the planet face but I'm very happy with the resulting render. Looks much better than the first, mainly due to the rings, which I softened up far too much in my first video in this thread.
Cheers, Oshyan! And cheers for looking, everyone else! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL4Bu_qoVfc
A marvelous piece Martin!
brilliant!
I love this...leaves me wanting more...
Nicely done :)
Richard
That looks very nice :)
One thing isn't really correct to my eyes and that's the stars shining through the rings and saturns' shadow.
Can't quickly think of a way to fix this though.
Nonetheless it's a great animation, still :)
Cheers, all! :)
Nice animation.
Great logo,really like that one!
Cheers, J! :)
Really nice!
Hope you can show that movie of the solar system you mentioned!
* EDITED *
Replaced the HD links above with this one; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uL4Bu_qoVfc
This has a new aged-style intro/outro, there's no difference to the main animation.
Cheers for looking! :)