Basic questions about animation

[phile_forum]

I've been asked to do a fly-through animation of an interior. It's not something I usually do so I'm here asking the Collective for tips.

Can someone recommend good settings for animation in Kray?

- Presumably I use a shared GI file. How will the camera movement affect the efficiency of this? I will be moving through several rooms.

- Lightmap or photon map? Bearing in mind the movement from room to room.

- Can I get away with lower FG settings given that the picture is moving (less opportunity to spot bad shadows)?

All tips and suggestions gratefully received.

Cheers,

Phil

[jure]

- Presumably I use a shared GI file. How will the camera movement affect the efficiency of this? I will be moving through several rooms.

It should work just fine. This is what shared GI file was created for.

- Lightmap or photon map? Bearing in mind the movement from room to room.

Lightmap definitely.

- Can I get away with lower FG settings given that the picture is moving (less opportunity to spot bad shadows)?

Yes you probably can get away with less FG. See attached file for a settings I used in my appartment animation.

Make sure you use enough photons. Since you're doing animation you need more photons than for a single still, because photons will get distributed accross the scene. So the longer the camera path the more photons you need.

If your camera is moving slow you can probably get away by rendering every 5th or 10th frame with shared GI file set to BOTH and with AA OFF.
After this is done and GI file is saved you can switch to "LOAD" and set prerender on FG tab to 0%, set your desired AA level and render should be very quick.

[phile_forum]

Excellent advice. Thanks Jure!

Phil

[phile_forum]

Is there any news on network rendering for 1.7?

[jure]

Not much else than what has allready been posted...

[phile_forum]

Part of my animation involves looking through a glass wall, and it's killing the render times. Are there any useful things I should know about Kray to reduce the overhead that transparent polys impose?

The polys are single-sided, 95% transparent and 5% reflective. 10% diffuse. No reflection or refraction blurring.

I've turned FG rays right down and unchecked FG reflection & FG transparency/refractions.

Anything else I can be doing to help things along?

Cheers,

Phil

[jure]

Hmm, no.. I think you've tried it all. There's one more thing you can do though: addd recurse command to limit bounces...

This slow glass must be a bug because in older version it worked faster i belive...

[phile_forum]

This slow glass must be a bug because in older version it worked faster i belive...

Is it a known problem then? To be honest, the render times in themselves aren't awful - it's just that they're twice as long with the glass in the scene as without it.

Since I can't farm this animation out to several PCs (yet) I have to really tweak it to get it going as fast as I can.

Thanks for the recurse suggestion though Jure. I had set it, but hadn't thought of turning it down any further. I'll give it a go now.

Phil

[jure]

Yes it's a known issue. I need to talk about it with G. though... I'm sure he'll find a bug there and fix it.

[tajino]

hi jure, just did a search a found this thread.

Which rc is having the slow transparency bug? has it been fixed now in the latest rc? Which is the good rc before the bug hit?

Need to know, Thanks.

[jure]

I belive both OB1 and OB2 suffer from this.

[Captain Obvious]

Turn off diffuse for the glass. Glass doesn't really reflect any light in a diffuse manner, and it will increase your render times.