Sorry - was some days offline... had a new idea how to realize an old project.
Since Ulcos work on his herd of reindeer I have a new weird dream: I want to animate a stampede in my film.
The first step is to practice a little with small animated animal populations. So I unpacked and modified my old Safari TGDs. The animation render jobs are already running.
Unfortunately I have to shock all vegetarians and vegans deeply: Grass HAS BONES!!! - 50 per tuft of grass ... (so that it can bend in the wind)
::) 8) :o ;) ;D
Animation still 1 (sunrise):
[attach=1]
Animation still 2 (late morning)
[attach=2]
... to be continued in the animation area :)
Before I forget:
all animals by 3DRT
all (original) plants by xFrog (some rigged and animated in blender3D)
Cool!
Looks great.
Oh so clever! Can't wait. ;D
Love the sunrise image!
Nice distributions, both versions are very well done
Thank you all :)
The late morning version could be almost ready when I come back from Dusseldorf on Sunday. And even the first 30 frames look promising so far.
The Sunrise will be a 500h render job (on the old i7 it would be 750 ::) ) because the usage of "receive shadows from the surfaces" and the "glowing sphere in front of the sun - technics"
Also I hope the landing stork will look ok - the animation parts didn't fit 100% so I'm curious.
All in all I hope to get a plausible though not really 100% authentic look :)
Can't wait, good luck on render times heh heh
Great stuff as always!!!! Can't wait!
Oh how did I miss this? This is great! I think I like the sunset version the best as far as layout of the animals with the substance of the scene together.
So wonderful my friend, looks great!
Can't wait to see this. Stills look terrific.
Thanks to all of you :)
Some good news and some bad news:
When I came back from Dusseldorf I found one PC with a successful update of the security software and a render error in a bucket... pfff! ::) :-[
Checking details I found out that It had stopped rendering half an hour after I left my home! :( :( :(
In the other animation (the sunrise scene) a tree in the foreground was not looking as I wished so I adjusted some things and restarted.
But the good news: I started a 3rd animation render job...
First 11 frames give me hope it will work. Just guess what it will be ;) :
[attach=1]
Ah, a stampede. Nice. Who gets trampled?
So your render machine is online, pff. I thought you'd have a different offline machine for those jobs.
Unfortunately I have not yet organized a useful control for online access. The PCs are all in a network because since I do these animations via hundreds of GB obj-sequences I share the models on a NAS for all machines to save HDD space. Works good but so all render machines are online too.
But if the problems only appear so seldom, I am too lazy to care about a complex network solution.
I see. Well, I hope win 10 will keep quiet then next time ;)
:)
Oh yeah! between 26th and 5th of every following month I check almost every evening for Win Updates. Mostly I can intercept them in time and then update all PCs.
But not so seldom Mr. Murphy does best of his work: I check for updates - no updates availlable - I go to bed - I wake up in the morning and half an hour after going to bed all updates came and all machines show the log in screen... :P ::)
...now I reckon always with all... ;D ;D
They're just waiting for you to go to sleep and then grinningly to their update thing 8)
in fact... ;D
While waiting for the render results, I'm just starting to get bored ... And you know what that means ...
I warned you!...
:)
[attach=1]
streetsigns somewhen somewhere from archive3d
Rail Road Crossing Lights by "yourTurboModeler" on Turbosquid
;D ;D ;D You might get bored, but with you around, I won't :D
Quote from: DocCharly65 on November 20, 2018, 11:27:24 AM
While waiting for the render results, I'm just starting to get bored ... And you know what that means ...
I warned you!...
:)
[attach=1]
streetsigns somewhen somewhere from archive3d
Rail Road Crossing Lights by "yourTurboModeler" on Turbosquid
What Dune said and LOL at Crazy Cattle Crossing...
Very well executed and your humour is excellent! :D
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D I love this!!!
Brilliant
Thanks :)
Just to share my happiness about first not so bad impressions of the animation I have already started the thread:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25986.msg258097.html#msg258097 (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25986.msg258097.html#msg258097)
Quote from: DocCharly65 on November 20, 2018, 11:27:24 AM
While waiting for the render results, I'm just starting to get bored ... And you know what that means ...
I warned you!...
:)
[attach=1]
streetsigns somewhen somewhere from archive3d
Rail Road Crossing Lights by "yourTurboModeler" on Turbosquid
Finally, the Lion King/Starwars crossover we've all been waiting for! Lets be honest though, Rafiki would be awesome with a light saber.
Thanks cocateho ;)
... oh you can't imagine what happened when I was in the 3DRT webpage yesterday when they had their Black Friday sale... ;)
... and what is planned next...
Every madness can be increased :o 8) ::)
Another little addition which is already at the state of rendering the animation:
A little cockroach runing on the traffic lights. Cockroach again from 3DRT.
I also changed some details of the traffic lights because the former settings didn't work for this close up.
I recolored a bumpmap of my "Riddicks Viper" -lights to get a more detailed illumination mask in CorelPaint.
[attach=1]
This detail is very realistic! Nice metal shaders too. Will such a small cockroach be visible in a movie, with all movements and such? I hope so.
Thanks Ulco :)
In fact I had the same doubts when I had the cockroach idea - so this time I did a short first "RAW-Test"
And the little cockroach is even visible in this low Quality :)
Sorry for showing this here and not in the animation area but I did not want to take it out of context.
[attachmini=1]
Oh yeah, great! Thanks Nils.
Very cool!
Stunning!! There are some highlights flickering on the traffic light's glass. If you don't need the highlights, switch them off, I'd say.
Thanks :)
Thanks Hannes for the suggestion :)
Setting the highlights to low values and/or to a high roughness is one of the first things I usually do using reflection shaders.
In this case I wanted to keep them because in this way the reflection looked less blunt and artificial in my tests.
One of the seldom cases where I did a bit postwork with corel.
Only some seconds work with the correction stamp in Corel and the tests look perfect so far. :)
Very nice result!
Your attention to detail is insane. In a good way. :D
- Oshyan
Really great and beautiful renders !
David
Thank you :)
.
.
.
The story now goes on ...
May I introduce the little cockroach in detail? We will call him Pete... He is the conditioning warden of the traffic lights... ;)
Here only a little still shot...
[attach=1]
...but the real story happens in the animation thread:
https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25986.msg259116.html#msg259116 (https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,25986.msg259116.html#msg259116)
Only a little update for today... After a longer break for the Matrix-ideas the safari animations are rendering at full power again (except one PC that is still working on space scenes).
The sunrise closeup is the the bottleneck. a.) it is as I told a 2-3h/frame-render with the extreme atmosphere settings, b.) I added another camera angle for another 250 frames.
The others are rendering quite fast within 0,45 - 1,15 h /frame. They have just to finish. The last animation demo I showed here was about half of all.
Ther'll be some more camera angles of the stampede and a (I hope so) funny little animal story.
Here comes one shot of an added morning scene with my new beautiful model of an African Woman by Brainlogin on Turbosquid:
[attach=1]
Wow, cool!!!!! The lady looks excellent!
Hey, Like that!
Another beauty. Your movie will be epic!
Looks great!
oooh she is stunning...keep on keepin' on man...y' can't rush rendering so we patiently await the movie
Last render is awesome. Like the pov.
Probably too late now, but remember we are always happy to help people optimize render times on difficult scenes. I bet we could make it render faster. :D
- Oshyan
Thanks Oshyan :)
In fact it's not really too late because there're still 5-7 years of ideas to render, and it's never too late to learn something :)
For my two problem kids of the safari scene I already have approx. 4-6 seconds animation from both and I think they are ok enough to not re-render them...
They have both a thick atmosphere and receive shadow on surfaces neseccarily (clouds and atmosphere) ON.
AA is set to moderate 5 and no reflections to render, so I think 2-3 h per frame was adaequat.
[attach=1]
[attach=2]
Fortunately I saw the slightly frayed look like the blurred grass in the upper picture in some real shots of sunrises and sunsets too. In motion it looks even a bit better so I had no I had no scruples to ignore the "GI + DoF combination problem"
And to take it not too much out of context one of the two animations right here on my clouddrive:
https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgrdlyuteb3m9fHfW1Q (https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEpmvBUHi6qgrdlyuteb3m9fHfW1Q)
Fantastic! I love the insects. The only thing that bothers me is the static trees. Makes the background look a bit like a single image.
Thanks Hannes,
Many African trees (especially acacia and some palm species) are extremely stiff and don't move in the wind.
Oshyan told my that some time ago and I was astonished when I found that confirmed in some documentary films: No movement in acacia despite quite moving grass (The movement of the elephants came about through their own participation. ;D ).
Ah, that's interesting. Good to know.
...I checked in some other youtube dokus... ::) ???
I must have understood only partly or even wrong. It seems that all the small leaves and small branches move in fact but not bigger branches - the wood is too hard.
What I saw on TV was some acacia a bit far away and the grass quite close.
I hope I have not too many animations with acacias too close so that you should see leaves movement... though you won't :o ::) :-\
Animating just the leaves should not be too difficult I think, with a Mesh Displacement shader. It could still look fairly natural, whereas larger displacement of e.g. branches, etc. is much harder using procedural approaches.
- Oshyan
Wonderful look Doc!
thanks to all :)
Meanwhile the safari scene consists of more than 20 individual animations, which I don't really want to re-render to get animated acacia leaves (and other hardwood leaves).
So I hope you forgive me this inconsistency and imperfection...
...here another "last second addition":
The stampede will begin with a close look to only many feet and then zoom out a bit... had the idea some days ago...
You don't see much more than feet grass and dust...
[attach=1]
Another two animations needed ;)
I did a test last weekend and saw that the transition from the sunrise to the morning mood was too fast... at least I didn't like it so I started two new animations.
The animals and the plants are the same but I used a quite nice and affordable tgd from NWDA store: The NWDA Sunset Pack. (winter cold sunset - cirrus) I immedeately loved the look of these little clouds billows.
I didn't change too much. Just modified the ground a bit for my steppe-like look added only a minimum of little hills and adjusted clouds and atmosphere to best animation settings. The back light picture got enabled "Receive shadows from surfaces" only on atmosphere to avoid the sun (elevation -1) to shine through the ground. Rnedering is fortunately still fast (approx. 30 minutes per frame with AA 7 but details only 0.3 (nothing interesting to see there :)
The animation with the sun in our back is almost the same but the sun's elevation is +1
In some day's I hope I 'll see how it looks like animated including two small flocks of birds.
sun in front:
[attach=1]
sun behind us:
[attach=2]
both animations are expected to blend into each other for quite some time... 2-3 seconds (quite long in a film)
Yes the Sunset pack looks great in your scene. Good choice! 8)
still knocking it out of the park I see...this is gonna be an academy award animation and we're getting to watch it grow by increments...thanks so much Doc...keep em coming.
Looks promising. But it also looks like you are perhaps not using Defer Atmo? In which case the clouds will be subject to the 0.3 Micropoly Detail and will look a bit blocky (and may flicker as well).
- Oshyan
A pity - you got me ;)
In fact the original tgd by FrankB was originally set to Defer Atmo OFF. I tried to compensate the blocky look by the AA 7 setting but it didn't get much smoother.
Last night I restarted both render jobs with using Defer Atmo.
Advantage:
Much better and smooth clouds especially in the distance.
Disadvantage:
Rendertimes now:
1h45min instead of 25 min on the 12-core i7 (look into the sun still incl. "Receive shadows from surfaces")
45min instead of 30 min on the 8 core i7 (sun behind us)
For increasing render speed I extremely reduced the original values for clouds quality:
aggressive acceleration and quality 0.2 (from FrankB's original settings: highest detail and quality 1.2)
With FrankB's original settings I had Rendertimes of approx. 1-2h only per bucket! I guess with these settings and using Defer Atmo I would have needed 7-8 h per frame...
Because these will be two of the last animations for the safari episode I think it's worth the effort:
The new versions:
sun in front:
[attach=1]
sun behind us:
[attach=2]
I don't think with a (thin) cloud like that you really need defer atmo. What if you only raise quality a bit? It may also be that you need to clamp the black in one of the masks (if there are any). It looks like there's a little noise away from the clouds, and that sometimes happens when masking, or doing other strange cloud combinations.
Thanks for the suggestion, Ulco.
No masks in there but I am doing one test at this moment:
It's a render sequence without defer atmo but instead: Micropoly Detail "animated" from 0.3 up to 1.2 in 10 frames, AA set to 5
(I changed the resolution to 1920x1080 but cropped to the critical area around the sun)
At the end I can determine the change of render times with the help of file info and I can see the quality in a direct comparison.
The benefit of Defer Atmo has little or nothing to do with how thick a cloud layer is. Also AA has minimal effect on sky (atmo and cloud) quality when Defer Atmo is OFF. AA *dramatically* affects sky quality (and render time) when Defer Atmo is ON. So trying to increase AA to compensate for low micropoly detail when Defer Atmo was off would not do anything really.
If you are not already using Robust Adaptive Sampling (in AA sample settings), and a higher level of adaptivity (e.g. 1/256), I would suggest you do so, especially with Defer Atmo enabled.
We can help you optimize scene render times if you need. Just email support.
- Oshyan
I found that Robust Adaptive Sampling (without any other adjustments) is much faster, but also much grainier. I guess I didn't yet grasp the benefit of it.
Thank you for the suggestions and support.
After a complete day of experiments I found hat rendering it as is (the suggested Defer Atmo ON) is the best way.
I found that there are no time savings in setting it to OFF. To get an adaequad quality like Defer Atmo ON I had to increase Micropoly Details so high that the rendertime was the same but some rest noise still remained. If I took Oshyan's warning of possible flicker into account, my decision was probably right :)
Just examples from yesterday:
No Defer Atmo
Micropoly Detail 0.3
AA 5
1920 x 1080 cropped to an Area of 544 x 340
Rendertime 17 minutes
[attachimg=1]
No Defer Atmo
Micropoly Detail 0.8
AA 5
1920 x 1080 cropped to an Area of 544 x 340
Rendertime 96 minutes
[attachimg=2]
Defer Atmo ON
Micropoly Detail 0.3
AA 5
Complete frame rendered (1280 x 720)
Rendertime 105 minutes
[attach=3]
I should meniton that I have the impression that rendertime is very variing, depending on the cropped area. I often had the effect that I have very huge differences in render time if I move the cropped area only some pixels... especially in my most frightening renders: in the face of sun and a dense atmosphere and "Receive shadows from surfaces" ;)
... little addition: still working on 4.1.24 because my maintenance days expired. I'd like to wait until some great updates for my personal interest (sorry may sound a bit egoistic :) ) These were eg. grouping objects, handle lghtsources like objects and group them with objects and stuff like this. But let's see what is coming next I fully trust Matt's and Oshyan's phantasy and talent :)