The Island ~ Light and Shadow - 20 Sec Animation

[cyphyr]

Here's the animation I've been working on over the Christmas break.

The Island ~ Light and Shadow

I'll not be rendering it again (must be over a 1000 hours so far!) but this is still the first iteration. There's still about fifty frames worth of "Extra output images" that didn't render for some reason, so I'll be able to play with lighting levlel's and atmospherics a little once their done.

For some reason my After Effects quicktime "Make Movie" output is making very desaturated renders at the moment, so this was encoded via the After Effects "File>Export>Quicktime" menu that has fewer options but gave a better result. Strangely however this is now much darker on Vimeo which I know re-encodes its videos. I must look for a tutorial that explains vimeo's re-encoding.

C & C welcome as always.



Richard

[Tangled-Universe]

That's great Richard
Sweet looking render. Great lighting and cool volumetric rays.
The boiling clouds are sweet too. I suppose you had a final density modulator kicking in there?
What were the render settings for this one? Always good for the record

Can you elaborate a bit on the way you will achieve better shadows in the next version?
I have my ideas, but I guess others are curious too.

Do you have wind-electricity at home? 1000 hours, wow! I suppose that's total rendertime for all 3 slaves...?

Cheers,
Martin

[cyphyr]

Thanks

The "better lighting" will come from the extra render layers I have output.
Once their done and as everything is rendered as an exr I'll be able to pull and push the lighting levels at will. Well that's the theory if I can figure the comping out properly anyway.

Render settings were GI disabled, 4 fill lights, Detail 0.8 and AA 8. The Atmosphere was at 64 and the cumulus layer Quality 0.8, samples 52. Oh and no Final density modulator, they're pretty vanilla really. Or a lucky seed!

My latest beast was pumping them out at 1 an hour, the old i7 (my workhorse that I still do everything on) was pushing them through every two hours and my poor little quad core managed about 1 every eight hours. I figure I had to top up my meter once during that time (£40) so I'm not complaining.


Richard

[Oshyan]

Very nice work! Great quality, though I am curious to see what you can do in post with the additional render layers. Posted to Facebook and G+!

- Oshyan

[Tangled-Universe]

What are you going to use for comp?
Depending on what you're going to use it might be not too hard, actually.

I suppose you animated the cloud's fractal parameters for the cloud boiling if you didn't use a final density modulator.
Sweet work anyway

[TheBadger]

For some reason my After Effects quicktime "Make Movie" output is making very desaturated renders at the moment

I run into this often too! If you come across an explanation and solution on the internets please let us know.

Also, great work! If you happen to have the time and energy I for one would love a step by step on how you animated your clouds! I know there are some materials out there already, but I need to see it done first to understand the explanation later. Besides, what you did in the video above is pretty much exactly what I hope to understand how to do.

Thanks for showing!

[Dune]

Super, Richard!

[Franco-Jo]

Superb, Richard! The clouds are outstanding (usually one of the things that looks fake to me) and inspiring.

I am assuming that rendering a scene with clouds like this with a locked off camera for 20 minutes would take...say...about 5 years? Would this even be a remote possibility in your estimation? I ask because I have a project where I would need to render stormy clouds for a long static shot. 

[freelancah]

Very nice work!

[Kadri]

Very nice animation , Richard 
Just curious, the animation looks as it is 640x360. Did one frame of 640x360 render in that time frame or is the original bigger?

[cyphyr]

@ Kardi
The original is 720p (1280x720) and is downloadable on the site. On the right hand side about two thirds of the way down the page is a box named "About this Video". below this is a link "Download this Video". If you right click on this and choose "save link as" you can download the original 40mb video file.

@Franco-Jo
Err yes it probably would !
And, "20 minutes" !! Holy SFX Batman!
However what took the time in this shot was the volumetric rays. They needed high quality and render settings to avoid noise. Without that the frames were rendering at about a third of the time and still "boiling". If its locked off you may be able to get away with putting in any rays in post.

@ TU and Broc (sorry )
The boiling cloud setup is very simple, three nodes total. All I did was add in a transform node between the Density and Cloud node. This was then animated in the X and Z direction to move the clouds to and from where I wanted them and the +Y direction to get them to "Boil". (next time I will try -Y). Technically I don't see how you can get "proper" cloud boiling in terragen. In proper boiling clouds small cells grow, expand and overlap to become larger cells (something like this Terragen could do) but they are also constantly replaced by smaller cells (which also grow, expand etc) and this second part I can't see how to do in Terragen. You cant constantly re-seed a low scale PF and have it growing to a large scale PF AND have it constantly replaced by lower scale PF, or can you?

@TU and Oshyan
I'll be using Nuke to blend the layers and AE to make the final. I'm having some success working out all the blending nodes already. The posted version has a very small amount of de-noise applied. And thanks for the FB and G+ posts

Cheers

Richard

[Kadri]

Thanks Richard . I had to log in