JUNGLE ~ 14 sce animation

[cyphyr]

I haven't posted anything new in a while so to put that right here are the partial fruits of my latest personal project.


JUNGLE ~ viemo link

JUNGLE 2~ viemo link ~ New version

A short 14 sec animation testing out some ideas for light rays streaming through foliage. On two I7's running at 2.6ghz and 3.5ghz it rendered at 720p in 4 days. Models are my own and tweaked XFrog models. Lens flare and a bit of lens croma added in AE. For some reason the mov seems to have become slightly de-saturated from the original frames; there's still 2 sec worth rendering so on the next up load I'll try to have figured that out.

Hope you like it and c&c always very welcome.

[swissAdA]

WOW! Nice.

[inkydigit]

excellent!
now with some foliage movement, and steam, this will be perfect!

[N810]

Amazing! 

[Jo Kariboo]

Beautifull!!!

[Seth]

nice job Rich ^^

[Oshyan]

Superb result! The lighting is just excellent. Clearly very nice models too. I'd love to see it with less compression. It seems so hard to know what most video hosting sites will do to your video, it's a bit surprising, many people seem to have problems with quality despite uploading HQ source files. Vimeo at least lets you download the source in many cases, which having done now, I see is much better compression-wise. I do see a bit of noise/aliasing in the downloaded version, but considering the render time, it's not bad.

- Oshyan

[Dune]

I echo the above. I like the slowness and the light is really beautiful. But the lens flare is not necessary, IMO. Especially since it doesn't move, and it would if you're angle towards the sun would change, if only a bit.

[chris_x422]

Very nice job Richard.

The only thing I'd recommend, (and it's a personal taste thing really) would be to get a bit more depth into the shadows, it could pull out the definition of the closer vegetation and increase the sense of depth.
Of course, some subtle animation of the veggies would also bring this to life.

Chris

[Tangled-Universe]

Cool animation Richard
Like the atmosphere here and nice camera move as well.

Very nice job Richard.

The only thing I'd recommend, (and it's a personal taste thing really) would be to get a bit more depth into the shadows, it could pull out the definition of the closer vegetation and increase the sense of depth.
Of course, some subtle animation of the veggies would also bring this to life.

Chris

Yeah, to me it looked a tad bit flat'ish to me because of that.
Animation of veggies would be nice of course, but without RTO this would become unmanageable I'd think
Wishing for is always good of course

[reck]

The quality of the models and lighting is excellent. Unfortunately I don't think these types of scenes will ever look right until you can realistically animate the trees\foliage. With them being unnaturally static it gives a sort of model tree feel rather than something from real life.

Other than that, great animation

[Tangled-Universe]

The quality of the models and lighting is excellent. Unfortunately I don't think these types of scenes will ever look right until you can realistically animate the trees\foliage. With them being unnaturally static it gives a sort of model tree feel rather than something from real life.

Other than that, great animation

Is it? I'm not sure. Just look at some Planet Earth episodes where you see dead still forests which, logically, are amazingly looking.

The key to realism in animations like these does not lie in moving vegetation. It's a mix of atmosphere, lights and shadows which mostly "sell".
Therefore I think Chriss hit the nail on its head, as this does look very very good at the moment for sure, but still has this uncanny thing and needs just something extra to make it work 100%.

[reck]

It really stuck out to me Martin. There's always some kind of movement when you're walking through the forest like that. Whether it's the wind, animals in the trees, birds, or just the cameraman moving foliage as he's walking through the forest. It just seemed really unnatural to me to pan through the forest like that and and not see the slightest movement.

If you look at any Pixar film featuring a jungle or forest, or avatar or even the cryengine come to think of it, they all feature some movement in the animation and not totally static objects as it adds to the realism, in my opinion anyway.

I'd love to see how dandelO "blowing trees" technique would look in this scene but i'm not sure how good it would look on these models and how close the camera is to them.

dandelO's video - http://vimeo.com/32110058

[Tangled-Universe]

The examples you made are quite contrary to the one I made: Planet Earth. There you see 'frozen' scenes with zero movement of vegetation.
I agree with you it may sell easier if things were to move, but like I tried to point out I think a lot by itself can be achieved by realistic lighting and atmosphere and that it shouldn't be an obligatory requirement to have moving vegetation in order to create something realistic/persuading.

In regard to using Martin's moving vegetation trick: great as it is, it is unpractical to use in high quality animations like these. It uses displacement and therefore disqualifies for rendering with the RTO function. Consequently it needs a lot of AA for good quality and rendertimes will skyrocket up.
But, for moving vegetation alone it would still be the best option, yes.

[dandelO]

Great looking scene, Rich! Very crisp and smooth.

* My video just shows the effect so, don't rely on that for a quality level reference, I really can't render in extreme high quality and that's why it looks so rough! I think my AA was only at 3 or 4 for that.
With 2 i7's hitting it out simultaneously it might be an experimental idea to give a 480p set of frames a run without RTO checked and some really tiny foliage movement effects, Richard. Using high AA can sometimes be quicker in to render as opposed to using RTO with the equivalent AA setting(probably most times, as you wouldn't need to use such a high AA setting if using RTO anyway), the ray tracer doesn't need to render each pixel of object and with RTO checked this can be quite slow sometimes, depending on how many minimum samples per pixel are required. I imagine using an AA of 8(non-adaptive) without RTO might make for a nice level of AA here, while relying on the render detail for the actual rendering. I'd go for it if I could...