Short 10 sec Animation ~ Dark Skies

[cyphyr]

Dark Skies

Here's the animation I was having the problems with GI flicker with. Thanks to Oshyan and the guys I have sorted the issue by using two fill lights at 120 deg to the sun and set an a very low value (0.15 strength). I'm pretty happy how this turned out, GI flicker always stopped me animating with clouds, something I had always wanted to try. Got quite a few ideas now for further projects.
Also this time I rendered out the entire sequence as EXR files so I could have a bit more control over brightness, hue and contrast etc.
C&C welcome as always
thanks
Richard

[Oshyan]

Nice work! There is a great sense of motion. Would be good to see this at higher quality.

I do see there is still some remaining flicker. It's hard to tell with the compression artifacts, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears to all be in the clouds. If that's the case it may be an acceleration cache issue. If you can reproduce it on a small number of frames, you could test with the accel cache turned off.

I've been wanting to render animations to EXR as well but I don't have a movie editor that can handle the files. What did you use?

- Oshyan

[TheBlackHole]

Cool! It needs to be longer!

[aymenk2003]

Nice rays ...
I like the clouds...

N.KAID

[ra]

Well done! I especially enjoyed the Fakestones and the rays. Good work!

[cyphyr]

Thanks guys

Yes there is still a little flicker, most noticeable in the clouds. Their seems to be a slight change in the structure of the cloud in the illuminated area at the top right of the frame in the latter part of the animation. The actual "tonality" of the clouds seems to be steady with the fill light setup, I'm no longer seeing the whole sky area changing tone on a frame by frame basis.
I'll try rendering with the Acceleration cache turned off. Is this done by setting the Acceleration cache to none? At the moment each frame is taking about 10 min to render, it'll be interesting to see how much extra is added to the render time. (ok I'll see how long I can hold out, lol, its now rendering at 30 min a frame!)

I was worried about the EXR rendering to start with, I had assumed that Photomatrix would be able to batch convert them and run its rather good "Tone mapping" tools on them in batch mode. Unfortunately Photomatrix wont load EXR files in Batch mode and I didn't fancy manually converting 300 files Photoshop CS3 will open them but I couldn't figure out how to get it to batch convert with an action script (however I'm sure it can be done). Finally I just fired up Afterfx and to my surprise it loaded the EXR easily, although I couldn't find any "tone mapping" settings in AE.

Thanks again

Richard

ps: the render settings are Detail 0.8, AA 8, GI (0,0). Cloud: quality 0.9, samples 626. Atmosphere: samples, 128
pps: The HQ Quicktime (193MB) can be downloaded at the bottom of the page

[Oshyan]

Nice, thanks for the additional detail. I bet you could get away with less detail, maybe 0.65 or so. That would help render time. I assume you've tested with less atmosphere samples and found 128 necessary for noise reduction. I imagine the heavy shadows and rays in this make the high samples a requirement.

- Oshyan

[cyphyr]

Yes, in fact I'm even thinking of increasing the atmo samples, the most visible flick is in the rays themselves. I'll try at less detail (0.65) and I'll also see how it looks with slightly lower cloud octaves.
Richard

[Oshyan]

Try turning off Accel Cache before increasing atmo samples.

- Oshyan

[MacGyver]

I really like the camerapath, very e(motion)al

Sorry, can't download the file from the link you gave, Vimeo doesn't even display a page. Just an error with my system or do you have it as well?

[Kadri]

I can see a plane that we follow somehow in my mind
It is like a  scene from a movie. But i would like to see the HD one. I can not download the link too.
I think registration required ...

Kadri

[cyphyr]

Ah yes, maybe registration is required, sorry
Yes I have plans for something with some animated models flying past the camera ...

Richard

[Henry Blewer]

Hi, I get a blank page when I go to the link.

[cyphyr]

Dark Skies 5

Well I changed the cloud structure somewhat, its quality is at 3 with samples set to 249 and Acceleration cache set to conservative. The "flicker" is gone and the rewnder time is not too bad either.
Looks like increasing the cloud density is what pushes up the quality most. So this time I set the density to 0.005 and the sharpness to 30. Obviously a wip still but comments always welcome.

Richard

[Falcon]

That's a great shot, almost too short at 10 sec.

What's the final render time you got? Still 30 min. per frame?