Kelston Tump Animation

[Jonathan]

Hi All,

I took Kelston Tump and rendered 423 frames at 1200 x 650 (took approx 23 hours). I used a simple animation path that seemed to avoid too many tree trunks and am reasonably happy with the result. Hope you like it too. Jonathan

http://vimeo.com/31837237

[Zairyn Arsyn]

(claps hands) 
this is good, like the part where the cam flies through the trees & spins around, very nice.

[TheBadger]

When I saw that the camera was going to move through the trees I thought it would look bad, but it looked really good! Nice work.

[Tangled-Universe]

Nice animation liked the fly through as well and it turned out pretty well and above expectation as Badger pointed out.
There's some flicker though which you could try to solve, but that depends on whether you like to move on or give it another try
This rendered pretty fast actually, what were the settings (roughly) and your system specs?

Cheers,
Martin

[inkydigit]

very nicely done Jonathan...I like it alot!

[Jonathan]

Thanks all for your kind comments. I decided to keep AA and detail low as I felt detail was less important in an animation. PC is 3.2GHz, nVidia motherboard (780SLi), 8Gb RAM, 1.5GHz GeForce 580GTX Graphics card. I was also pleased with the fly-through through the branches. Had to do a number of low res renders to get it right. Not being able to see any detail on the preview render makes it tough. Thanks again....and any ideas on how to reduce the flicker? Would also like to know how to get some branch movement too

[Dune]

Martin (Dandel0) did some fine experiments with moving branches. Search the forum, and you'll find it.

[TheBadger]

Martin (Dandel0) did some fine experiments with moving branches. Search the forum, and you'll find it.

Yes, and if you can understand it well please explain it to me! 

[Tangled-Universe]

Thanks all for your kind comments. I decided to keep AA and detail low as I felt detail was less important in an animation. PC is 3.2GHz, nVidia motherboard (780SLi), 8Gb RAM, 1.5GHz GeForce 580GTX Graphics card. I was also pleased with the fly-through through the branches. Had to do a number of low res renders to get it right. Not being able to see any detail on the preview render makes it tough. Thanks again....and any ideas on how to reduce the flicker? Would also like to know how to get some branch movement too

Well actually, AA and detail ARE important in animation.

I'll give you some short examples and explanations:

If you use GI then use settings like GI 1/6/48 to avoid flickering.
Accuracy/detail of GI is linked to the detail setting, so there's the first reason why detail is important

When it comes to rendering terrain and other non-raytraced rendered elements all is dependant on the detail setting. The lower the detail the less accurate the calculation and the more likely there will be great differences between frames. That's the second reason
Detail blending is an algorithm which blends geometry/subdivisions between frames. Default = 0, you might need to increase it to 0.5 - 1.

To avoid flickering of populations you need higher AA settings.
Jon (Hetzen) quite recently posted about using AA16 up to AA32 to get noise-free animated populations.
Very important is that you use adaptive sampling to keep renderspeed ok.
Set AA to 16 and set first sampling to 1/16th and set threshold to 0.1 to avoid the render from applying unnecessary AA everywhere.
You can find more information on these settings by advanced searching for "adaptive sampling" + my username or Hetzen.

Other sources of flicker can be jittering of shading points and detail.
The latter you can find in the renderer already.
Jittering of shading points can be disabled in the "render subdiv settings" node.
Search for it and you'll find how to access it.

Further there are two must-read topics on the rendersettings:
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=8300.0
http://forums.planetside.co.uk/index.php?topic=6442.0 => honestly, I think this topic should be updated, but there's still a lot of useful information in it...

This should keep you going for a while

Cheers,
Martin

[Jonathan]

Thanks Martin - I will give it a go on my next animation I will also do some research on making branches / other vegetation move. Onwards and upwards they say!

[dandelO]

Very nice, Jonathan. Just got a chance to catch up on all these recent animations that have been posted. This looks very much like our camping spot at the Wickerman Festival every year, if I can find any photos of the place on my HD or phone I'll pop one up to show the similarity.
Nice glide through the branches, too. Good luck not to have crossed a single one on your camera path!