Hi guys !
At last, a very long render ended a few days ago. The scenes have been made by Franck Doassans : http://www.7thcircle.fr/ . Animation, render and editing by myself, as usually.
You can find it here : http://www.nicolas-hoffmann.net/source/animations.php (about 28 Mb)
Thanks for viewing and commenting ! ;)
great animation Nico ! ;D
Love it. Great sense of drama.
What in your opinion is the best way to solve some of the flicker issues? There's been mention of increasing the "GI Blur Radius" to about 400, is this something you applied to this animation, and the previous two ("sea_clouds_final_divx" & "moon_who_ami_i_divx")? Also it's a shame about that exploded rock.
Saying that, great camera moves, and fantastic sound edit realy compliment the very good images.
Fantastic! Love it! When seeing scenes like this animated the realism really pops more than the still images :)
The exploded rock is indeed a bit of a pity, but certainly doesn't spoil it at all for me.
You probably know you can fix this by disabling "blend as stone density" in the fake stone shader.
How long has this one been rendering?
Cool atmospherics, you can really feel his pain as he reaches the summit only to be greeted by miles and miles more terrain to cross !!
:o)
Richard
Really great work Nico and Frank Franck!
Nico and Franck ;D
i really like what you did Nico... thanks again for that !
Very cool!
Impressive!!!
All : Thanks ! ;)
Seth : oops Franck, I'll correct this as soon as I can. BTW, thank you for the nice scenes you've made ! :)
Hetzen : I don't remember the values... I'm gonna check this out asap and I come back to you.
Tangled-Universe : the first part is the longest : about 2 months on my 2 PCs : a Core 2 Duo 2Gb (very low, about 3 frames per day) and a Core i7-920 9Gb, which was rendering 2 frames at the same time (about ~10 12 frames per day). I could render it quicker, but I didn't want to decrease too much the quality of Seth' work.
The other part was very quick to render on the i7, 4 or 5 days.
Hi Nico,
That's really impressive stuff, the whole package together. I apologise for the glitches! Congratulations to Franck as well.
Regards,
Jo
Quote from: Nico3333fr on July 27, 2009, 01:55:28 AM
All : Thanks ! ;)
...
Tangled-Universe : the first part is the longest : about 2 months on my 2 PCs : a Core 2 Duo 2Gb (very low, about 3 frames per day) and a Core i7-920 9Gb, which was rendering 2 frames at the same time (about ~10 12 frames per day). I could render it quicker, but I didn't want to decrease too much the quality of Seth' work.
The other part was very quick to render on the i7, 4 or 5 days.
You're welcome, again, it's great work.
However, did you take a close look at Franck's file prior to rendering? I also have it and I remember he had GI surface details enabled back then and also some other "unnecessary" settings cranked up.
Probably a stupid question, since the rendertime is too valuable and you probably looked into it very well, but still I find it a bit slow.
Jo : thanks ! :)
Quote from: Tangled-Universe on July 27, 2009, 06:45:51 AM
You're welcome, again, it's great work.
However, did you take a close look at Franck's file prior to rendering? I also have it and I remember he had GI surface details enabled back then and also some other "unnecessary" settings cranked up.
Probably a stupid question, since the rendertime is too valuable and you probably looked into it very well, but still I find it a bit slow.
To be honest... it was 2 months ago, and I don't remember. :-\
Just let me have a look, and we'll see which values I've used.
yeah Nico did change some values, and at that time, i wasn't very aware (and concerned) about optimizing my renders :)
There it is :
-Quality : 0.8
-AA : 5
-GI relative detail & sample quality : 3
-GI Blur radius : 6
-GI Surface detail is checked
-Detail blending : 1
-Cloud samples (athmo) : 128
You're the most experienced TG2-animator here, but do you really need the GI surface detail with animations? It doubles to tripples rendertime.
Also, in general I have faster and as good results with GI 2/4 instead of 3/3, but I guess you really need these GI values to prevent shadow-popping, correct?
Just thinking out loud along with you.
.. also, given the fact that all the very small scale detail get lost in the divx conversion and the motion blur, I would render these frames at a lower resolution, like - 0.7?
Frank
The GI blur radius is also less than the default 8. Any chance of confirming whether your cloud animation had similar settings. This is very interesting.
Tag to TA's post. I'm not sure the GI detail and sample quality is the problem with shadow popping, I'd hazard a guess that those items of geometry are off camera, or are just out of the claculation area, hence the snap on/off. Again, very useful to know. If I had to set off an animation render tomorrow with low sun settings, I may want to extend the frame width to deal with such problems, to then crop back in. Nico's work is seriously good proof of concept.
Quote from: Hetzen on July 27, 2009, 04:26:23 PM
Tag to TA's post. I'm not sure the GI detail and sample quality is the problem with shadow popping, I'd hazard a guess that those items of geometry are off camera, or are just out of the claculation area, hence the snap on/off.
Could indeed be, I simply don't know.
If it is unrelated to shadow-popping and you still want decent GI-lighting then GI @ 2/4 is really the most bang for buck to me.
I fully agree. Accepting your findings, these are the settings I tend to use on GI centric renders.
Wowzers was not expecting a soundtrack and such quality detail in an animation, first time I've seen an animation from TG2, you guys are just showing off now ;D
Quote from: Hetzen on July 27, 2009, 04:26:23 PM
Tag to TA's post. I'm not sure the GI detail and sample quality is the problem with shadow popping, I'd hazard a guess that those items of geometry are off camera, or are just out of the claculation area, hence the snap on/off. Again, very useful to know. If I had to set off an animation render tomorrow with low sun settings, I may want to extend the frame width to deal with such problems, to then crop back in. Nico's work is seriously good proof of concept.
Increasing the "Ray detail region padding" will do that for you :)
Matt
Good, it is interesting ! :)
(that's why I try to animate : to find good parameters ! :-D )
I didn't want to use too low values, because I want to send an uncompressed version to the author, Seth.
So if I sum up : GI detail to 2/4 is enough, a detail between 0.7 and 0.8 is enough too. Detail blending is needed to prevent ground texture popping, if I remember well.
For light popping in my previous animation in the Clouds, I don't really know where it comes from. If I remember well, Matt advise me to set up higher GI values ? Matt ? ;)
BTW Matt, which value I could use for "Ray detail region padding" to prevent problems ? Could you explain me how to use this option ?
Oh, WOW!
I cannot believe I missed this in the Summer! I was in a transitional period of turmoil in July and was off for a time.
I only came across this via YouTube since I just made a channel there, I went browsing TG stuff. Absolutely fantastic, Francke, I loved this as a still render and to see it like this is just great! Well done, you, on the scene and well done, Nico, on the Animation!
:o
:D