Dark Skies (http://vimeo.com/7835160)
Here's the animation I was having the problems with GI flicker with. Thanks to Oshyan and the guys I have sorted the issue by using two fill lights at 120 deg to the sun and set an a very low value (0.15 strength). I'm pretty happy how this turned out, GI flicker always stopped me animating with clouds, something I had always wanted to try. Got quite a few ideas now for further projects.
Also this time I rendered out the entire sequence as EXR files so I could have a bit more control over brightness, hue and contrast etc.
C&C welcome as always
thanks
Richard
Nice work! There is a great sense of motion. Would be good to see this at higher quality.
I do see there is still some remaining flicker. It's hard to tell with the compression artifacts, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to all be in the clouds. If that's the case it may be an acceleration cache issue. If you can reproduce it on a small number of frames, you could test with the accel cache turned off.
I've been wanting to render animations to EXR as well but I don't have a movie editor that can handle the files. What did you use?
- Oshyan
Cool! It needs to be longer! 8)
Nice rays ...
I like the clouds...
N.KAID
Well done! I especially enjoyed the Fakestones and the rays. Good work!
Thanks guys :)
Yes there is still a little flicker, most noticeable in the clouds. Their seems to be a slight change in the structure of the cloud in the illuminated area at the top right of the frame in the latter part of the animation. The actual "tonality" of the clouds seems to be steady with the fill light setup, I'm no longer seeing the whole sky area changing tone on a frame by frame basis.
I'll try rendering with the Acceleration cache turned off. Is this done by setting the Acceleration cache to none? At the moment each frame is taking about 10 min to render, it'll be interesting to see how much extra is added to the render time. (ok I'll see how long I can hold out, lol, its now rendering at 30 min a frame!)
I was worried about the EXR rendering to start with, I had assumed that Photomatrix would be able to batch convert them and run its rather good "Tone mapping" tools on them in batch mode. Unfortunately Photomatrix wont load EXR files in Batch mode and I didn't fancy manually converting 300 files :( Photoshop CS3 will open them but I couldn't figure out how to get it to batch convert with an action script (however I'm sure it can be done). Finally I just fired up Afterfx and to my surprise it loaded the EXR easily, although I couldn't find any "tone mapping" settings in AE.
Thanks again
Richard
ps: the render settings are Detail 0.8, AA 8, GI (0,0). Cloud: quality 0.9, samples 626. Atmosphere: samples, 128
pps: The HQ Quicktime (193MB) can be downloaded at the bottom of the page (http://vimeo.com/download/video:12343061?v=2&e=1259274916&h=a51a337d649592d7e85f2520381d7b28&uh=4c61c56114b3a678aaba3227a6cd48e2)
Nice, thanks for the additional detail. I bet you could get away with less detail, maybe 0.65 or so. That would help render time. I assume you've tested with less atmosphere samples and found 128 necessary for noise reduction. I imagine the heavy shadows and rays in this make the high samples a requirement.
- Oshyan
Yes, in fact I'm even thinking of increasing the atmo samples, the most visible flick is in the rays themselves. I'll try at less detail (0.65) and I'll also see how it looks with slightly lower cloud octaves.
Richard
Try turning off Accel Cache before increasing atmo samples.
- Oshyan
I really like the camerapath, very e(motion)al :D
Sorry, can't download the file from the link you gave, Vimeo doesn't even display a page. Just an error with my system or do you have it as well?
I can see a plane that we follow somehow in my mind :)
It is like a scene from a movie. But i would like to see the HD one. I can not download the link too.
I think registration required ...
Kadri
Ah yes, maybe registration is required, sorry :)
Yes I have plans for something with some animated models flying past the camera ...
:)
Richard
Hi, I get a blank page when I go to the link.
Dark Skies 5 (http://vimeo.com/7893914)
Well I changed the cloud structure somewhat, its quality is at 3 with samples set to 249 and Acceleration cache set to conservative. The "flicker" is gone and the rewnder time is not too bad either.
Looks like increasing the cloud density is what pushes up the quality most. So this time I set the density to 0.005 and the sharpness to 30. Obviously a wip still but comments always welcome.
:)
Richard
That's a great shot, almost too short at 10 sec.
What's the final render time you got? Still 30 min. per frame?
With the density so low I was able to set the quality quite high (3) and still have respectable render times (aprox 12min).
:)
Richard
Looks good! Interesting sparkle on the ground in the 2nd half. With render times that comparatively low, why not a 720p version? ;D
- Oshyan
This version looks rather dark, is this due to the increased cloud density? And I too see that sparkle on the stones which irritated me a bit. Are they supposed to be wet? Otherwise the render time and the quality is very good and you're right, there's no more flickering anywhere so this could be ready to go. I wonder where you're going with that scene? What do you have in mind as the final result? :)
I downloaded the full "Quicktime" version of the video (RLE encoded apparently) and re-encoded it to h.264 (AVC). It's only about 7MB now and very high quality. A lot nicer than the Vimeo one for some reason (though usually vids there are pretty high quality).
Anyway, I do see some popping of terrain elements and fake stones. Are you using Detail Blending, Microvertex and Detail Jitter?
- Oshyan
Hi Oshian
I just used the defaults for my QT anim, maybe it would be worth while using a different codec :)
Detail blending is set to "0" and Micro vertex and detail jittering are both "ticked".
The high spec on the stones was a mistake, it don't work too well and is quite distraction to the rest of the scene.
For the next stage I need to build some models (once my house guest gives me the time :( ) and create a longer camera path.
Thanks for the feedback :)
Richard
nice Job Richard!
I book marked the page. I think I might download a couple and run them through Blender to recode them. I am sure DIVX will play much smoother. Besides, it will drive me to get the animation package. It should be fun to render 900 frames of animation on a P4.
I'd suggest turning up Detail Blending to 1 for animations. Turning off the specular on stones will probably drop render time a bit too.
- Oshyan
Ok, I tried rendering with detail blending set to 1, it tripled the render time from 7 min to 22 min (I have got rid of the spec on the stones). The result is slightly visible, really I'll have to render at least a seconds worth to see how it changes animation quality.
Quote from: Oshyan on November 30, 2009, 02:56:19 PM
... With render times that comparatively low, why not a 720p version? ;D
- Oshyan
What are the settings for "720p"? At the moment each frame is 720px x 412px but I don't understand video settings at all, lol
:)
Richard
http://www.equasys.de/standardresolution.html
Of course there are many more sites you can find about this :)
Cheers.
Kadri.
Triple, really? That's a bit of a surprise. But I did see some popping and whatnot in your original video that it could resolve. If you'd like I can point out a specific timeframe where the problems occur and you could test those frames to see if it helps.
720p video is 1280x720.
- Oshyan
Update:
Modeled a ship, still some work there I think :)
Now rendered at 720p in 20min+/-, not too bad I think as far as time is concerned.
More modeling and still the cam path to sort out :) One thing at this size, I'm wanting to add more details in, lol ;D
:)
Richard
Richard, the ship is cool looking. It would be awesome with some more color. Nice work, but then I have enjoyed all of your images. I recoded and sharpened your anim here. It is really impressive. Looks so much better at full screen size.