Quick animation

[old_blaggard]

Hey everyone! I've been away for a while distracted by other things, but I've had a little rendering going on in the background. It's not a fantastic scene, but I wanted to see how well TG2 could hold up with large object populations and high quality settings when animating. Unfortunately, I still got some GI flicker in the shadows in spite of cranking up the appropriate settings.
Check it out: http://www.craftycarpenter.com/tree.mov
It's 60Mbps 1080p, so you'll need a reasonably quick computer to watch it.

[Henry Blewer]

I had to save a copy. Nice work. The motion blur for the extreme foreground grasses is very good.

[Draigr]

Wow, that's really nice. It wouldn't look out of place in a feature film. How long did it take to render?

Also, background needs a bit of work, the plants sort of homogenise back there.

[Seth]

very realistic.
the ligthing is great, I love the blur and the smooth camera move.
very very good job

[Tangled-Universe]

Great animation, despite the small technical issues
Nice camera move and motion blur. I suppose you performed the motion blur in post?
What were rendertime/machine specs?

I hope you continue making these and/or still renders. Been missing you here!

Cheers,
Martin

[Kadri]

I like it!
There are some things you could improve (more variation in green , some flowers to add other colors and wind) .
But you obviously know them i think and it looks much more then a test as it is . Very nice , Old_blaggard !

[swissAdA]

WOW, great animation!

[red_planet]

Excellent, nice animation...very reminiscent of the South Downs near where I live....

[inkydigit]

I almost got hayfever watching this!!

very cool work O_B!

[otakar]

How you been, OB? Nice movie, disappointingly short, but that's understandable. Quality seems fine to me, I guess it depends on the level of perfection you are trying to attain. Cheers!

[freelancah]

Very nice! The populations and everything looks very nice! Some slight movement of the leaves would certainly enhance this a bit but I assume the render times were quite high also?

[Tangled-Universe]

Very nice! The populations and everything looks very nice! Some slight movement of the leaves would certainly enhance this a bit but I assume the render times were quite high also?

Movement of leaves is a nice suggestion, but.....that's only possible without using ray traced objects and thus to get high quality as this you'd need to render with AA12 or AA16 (wondering if that would be enough though).
If the motion blur is TG2 as well then this would be another factor which would in total have sky-rocketed the rendertime.

[freelancah]

Hmm yeah..or a looped object sequence? I havent seen anyone doing it yet so Im not sure how well it would work out.

[old_blaggard]

Thanks for all of the compliments, folks. The render was done on a Mac Pro 2x4-Core Xeon i7 running at 2.26Ghz, with a total of 14 rendering threads. Each frame took about two hours. The blur was entirely done within TG2, I had several million objects, and rendered at quality of 1.2 with AA of 10. That was the only way to get the blur smooth enough, and it also helped out with the GI.

I got the idea for this after watching "The Thin Red Line" at the Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis. It's a great film in itself, but it's also worth studying for ideas on how to portray nature with a moving camera.

I've been busy these last few months finishing up school (hooray/eek) and doing other projects, from programming to film production, but I'll try to pop in with a new render every now and then .

[ndeewolfwood]

a real achievement. Congratulation.