Animating an object with GI

[vsele]

Ok...My problem is: How can I animate something (other than a camera)in an architectural scene with Gi without having noise issues or high time per frame issues? I have tried with the Interpolated option but if I use the above Cache irradiance I get different illumination for every frame otherwise I have rendertimes very high even with low settings...and I have a dual quad 2.66! Could some of you Gurus help me in getting nice and smooth results without getting older? And in the meanwhile any suggestions about a nice a fast AA setup?

[Captain Obvious]

I would typically recomend rendering it in a separate pass, along with some shadows and occlusion and whatnot for compositing. That's what I usually do.

[Pavlov]

I agree here, Grzegorz should allow item animation even without updating their GI during the animation.
So moving cars and characters will have same GI in the whole movie, but usually it's not important and it's something one can live with.

Paolo

[vsele]

....Doing some compositing is not an option for me.....and I would say that more then "sometimes" is important to have something moving in scene as cars or people or something else....Said so i think that this issue has to be solved before we have the final version of Kray....

[Leftover]

With V-Ray we exclude these objects from GI and mimic GI with own shading, and additional "dedicated" lights. Works well with walking people, opening doors etc.

But since Kray doesn't support light excluding, shadowmaps and other handy features, seems you don't have much of choise.

You can try to check "Unseen by Radiosity", apply KraySurfaceOptions shader to surfaces of excluded object and switch to Raytrace Diffuse model. Maybe it will be enough in your particular case.

[Pavlov]

KLeftover, this is exactly what i'm asking for a long while.
I really hope we'll see this asap, since it's Kray's N.1 limitation for animation... i would use Kray in dozens of productions if it wasnt for this exact issue.
I read you come from Vray.. interesting, can you draw your comparison between the two ?

Paolo

[silverlw]

Next release of OB will have cached GI but still ability to move objects. We even plan to further than this like separate irradiancemaps for static and moving objects but that will be in future releases.

[Leftover]

I read you come from Vray.. interesting, can you draw your comparison between the two ?

Im LW user. We're running small archvis company and have people using max.
So i can make detailed comparison. But from my experience i can tell V-Ray is more universal. It allows to use most of Max features as lights with shadow maps,non-vray materials and so on. Way ago (in non-GI times) we developed a way to lit interiors in LW using lights with shadow maps only(i attached a sample of such render, of course it's not impressive nowdays, but that time it was OK) . It worked very well with animations. Main idea was to use group of lights to "mimic" indirect lighting. With number of inhouse scripts it was fast to setup. Then we transferred this workflow to 3D Max + Vray, replaced ambient group with low-res irradiance map. This worked well.. OK quality, very fast render times, fust production time. With Kray we have less space for faking something. but seems it has world fastest blurred refletions in the world
--End of offtopic--

BTW i tried to to what i suggested and seems it doesn't work. In "shared for all frames" mode Kray doesn't read animation from scene. THough Silverlw says it will in future releases, it will be really good

[except]

BTW i tried to to what i suggested and seems it doesn't work. In "shared for all frames" mode Kray doesn't read animation from scene. THough Silverlw says it will in future releases, it will be really good

It works for me using time-interpolation
Look here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?a5mhucu2d9d

Full GI using time-interpolation mode.
Please do NOT distribute, this is supposed to be semi-confidential...

Cheers, Tom

[Captain Obvious]

Neat. It is still flickering a bit, though. What were the render times like?

[silverlw]

Really nice work exception. Tell us when we can add it to gallery if you want that There was some flicker but nothing that higher FG can fix. Yeah what was rendertimes about? Did you use adaptive AA or Fullscreen?

[except]

Really nice work exception. Tell us when we can add it to gallery if you want that There was some flicker but nothing that higher FG can fix. Yeah what was rendertimes about? Did you use adaptive AA or Fullscreen?

The most pronounced flicker is in the Tv screen, which is due to it being luminous I think...
This wasn't easy to make because, as you can see, there are object fades, they had to be done by hand... (please please please add object dissolves!)

The AA was bad in this scene at level 4 FS, so what I did was render at level 3 FS at 1440x800, and downsampled everything to 720x400 in the end. That worked much better than higher AA.

The first quarter was rendered with static GI, and the render times at the resolutions stated were about 7 minutes then, with time interpolation they doubled in render time. I could have done this faster if Kray had allowed me to move objects in static mode, as some don't affect the lighting solution much, but in the end I was very happy I was able to do this at all. And it looks the way I want it, not the way the renderer makes it look. Vray would have made it look vray-y...

I'll ask permission to make this public.

[except]

????

Why is the word 'p r o n o u n c e d' removed from my post?
That's really weird.

[erwin zwart]

????

Why is the word 'p r o n o u n c e d' removed from my post?
That's really weird.

maybe it's a curse word in polish? I have no idea indeed.

very nice anim, I wish time interpolated would work on my farm, then we could turn up the AA and FG and all that to make it perfect and still have it rendered fast.
Time interpolation is the only good way to have FG irradiance cache with animated objects and animated light. The way it could work on farm is let every node preprocess one frame and save an .fgi file for that frame on network disk. After that all nodes take the .fgi files specificly needed for the final rendering of a frame. This way the whole farm can work on the GI solution simultaneously. With Shared GI file now (in Virtualrender and soon LW9.5) you have to wait for one computer to generate the needed cache.
I hope G will take some time after his present coding to look at all of our production quirks with caches and I hope this can be fixed fast, f.e. let objects move inside a Shared GI file like you and Paolo crave for. Dissolve should also be easy one, maybe even 2 modes, one like LW and one like I want it (render layer)

[except]

I'd be perfectly happy if dissolve is what you prefer, eg, like a layer that fades. I agree that the way Lw does it is hardly useful for anything over what you prefer. But it's probably easier to code...