Okay, another planet animation -- this time with clouds and water. the original is only 500 * 200 px and rendered at a render quality of 0.5 and it still took 4 weeks to finish animating. Sadly, the camera goes through the ground in some places and because it was taking so long I just couldn't bring myself to re-render the whole thing again -- although I may go back and fix those specific areas sometime. Over all though, I'm basically happy with it. Sorry it is so small and not very high quality; I would have done more but it might have taken all year to render ;D.
http://vimeo.com/4379182 (http://vimeo.com/4379182)
Absolutely amazing! 4 weeks... man, you've got patience ;-)
Very cool. My favorite parts are when the camera passes through the clouds. How many frames long is it?
4000 frames long.
Looks great... bummer about the shadow popping in it though :(
Cool to see this. There is some nice work here, especially the sensation of movement near the middle with the high speed and extreme motion blur.
Unfortunately I think you were far too ambitious with this project, which is clear from the render time vs. resolution. 4000 frames is frankly unnecessary (IMHO, of course) for a simple planet fly-over. You had plenty of time to linger above the planet and make a slow descent, and then fly around for a while, and still make it perhaps half the length, or at most 2/3's. As I was watching it, by a little over half way through I was ready to see something different. I will say though that this was probably exacerbated by the low video quality, which muddies a lot of the potentially interesting details. In many cases I couldn't tell if there was just really bad TG2 detail popping, or significant video compression (it seemed like the latter). I think you could have had the same render time, half the running length, 50% more resolution, and it would have been a good deal more immersive (especially with higher video quality).
Regardless, on a procedural planet with still relatively little variation (compared to our real world!), even with great detail it can get a bit boring, so the video compression issue is not the whole story.
Overall a good effort, and I'd really like to see a less compressed version, if that's possible. If file size is an issue I can arrange a file space for you (try Terragen.org first, but we've had a few file upload problems lately).
- Oshyan
Pretty stellar planet. Great work on the terrain, the atmosphere, the clouds...well, the entire planet. ;D
Oshyan addressed the detail popping, but that's all I saw negative...and it was long, but I kept expecting to see another ship or something like a group of buildings, etc. I liked it. It would be cool to do more with less.
And this was incredible. Thanks for sharing it with us.
The popping is mostly due to the low render quality. I do agree with you about the length and variety of landscape -- and the length of the animation. This is still essentailly a WIP with basic test colors. From here I want to add a few more terrain types and then get some real colors constrained to terrain type areas. I think vimeo will let you download the original video if you want to see its less compressed version.
great success !
@nvseal - Have you considered including objects, like spaceships or cities or anything?
The only objects I have considered have been vegetation like trees. I've thought about restricting a massive tree population with a distance shader and a shader projecting through the camera and then repopulating every frame -- so as to not use up all the memory and crash :). Don't know if this will work though (I know Bigben did something similar once).
agree with Oshyan et al ... I really got sucked into this, look forward to seeing more....thanks for sharing!
Wow ! You have done an excellent work.
Thierry
Very well done! :o
Quite nice :).
Great work, I would like to see more or taller atmosphere.