Help! Rendered Animations

[Fletch]

Ashcott, this is a very tight deadline.

You will need to render 15 frames per second or even 10 to meet your deadline.
You will need to render as small of frame as possible. 640x480 is standard TV
You will need to render with as few lights as possible, yet what lights the scene best (in short, creative lighting is key)
You should try the Animation Low setting on a few test frames to see if it's any better for your application.

You can load Kerkythea on any number of machines and set up your animation using Kerkythea as your free 'net render' tool.... but learning that tool, if you don't already know how to use it will lose more time for you than it will save.

Licenses for Twilight are run by an actual human in Colorado, USA during daylight hours, so... getting additional TWL licenses before 4pm EU time will be difficult.

AA time will vary depending on the scene, the closer the objects, the more AA.

[Fletch]

Creative lighting for Gymnasium....

One way to render light from a skylight in the scene you show above is to create a flat rectangle in the skylight and set it to be a light emitter, I would try 500w/m2 or more. Unfortunately an emitter rectangle renders much longer and more noisy on low settings than a spot light.

so, you can set that emitter to be a 'fake emit' in the pulldown type menu for the light emitter template. (assuming each skylight is a component, and you only have to change one to change them all, this should go quickly...) then place a single spotlight inside that same skylight component (assuming each skylight is a component, and you only have to change one to change them all, this should go quickly...) at radius 1in (2.5cm) 5in (15cm) below the plane of the skylight with falloff:170 hotspot:140 and try power of 5 = approx. a 500w bulb (very loose rule of thumb not technically accurate at all!) set color of light to be warmer (light orange or yellow) to give nice/more realistic "look" effect.

Turn off sun/sky completely if you never actually see outside, because now those spots are 'pretending' to be the sun/sky light... and they will render much faster for you.

about 8 evenly spaced point lights (omni lights) floating centered top-to-bottom AND left-to right in the space with CAST SHADOWS OFF radius 10, power of 2 or 3, will light the space additionally even MORE, and possibly lead to faster rendering because they will throw more light into the indirectly lit places, but they can also lead to slower render, and may not help much - it's something that would take some testing.

[Fletch]

also, AA increase when there are metals or specular reflections on materials (aka the Plastic or Paint template in Twilight). If you are under crazy deadline and desperate for speed increase, I would remove any template from all materials possible, go with straight SU default flat materials. This will render most quickly (but loose much 'realism'.)... but it will save time.

but most importantly, render only 15fps will save much time. and rendering small frames as possible.

After rendering the frames, you may be able to batch process a frame resize using Photoshop or Irfanview or FSviewer to be able to take the 640x480 size frames up to 800x600 without much loss of quality if you are desperate and need them larger.

[Fletch]

just saw thisby Ecuadorian to you... it was word-for-word what I would tell you.
I see also now that Chris told you about render time increase for each material template you apply. (not a problem with progressive settings, but big problem rendering animations)

But BE SURE TO TURN OFF SUN AND SET SKY COLOR TO BLACK so that these useless photons are not being calculated each frame.

as Ecuadorian mentioned, be sure that REUSE LIGHTING INFORMATION is checked - it will calculate the light cache for the first frame and re-use it.

[ashscott]

Cant say how thankful I am, have learned more in the last 24 hours about rendering than in the previous 24 days.

Thanks very much to all who helped, the final product isn't exactly what I envisaged but it is my fault for leaving it so late. I will hopefully make some PC time and re render and post the results

[ashscott]

That was tough, had to submit to client partially un-rendered but he acknowledged that he had mis-informed me about time constraints. Had I been warned and started earlier the whole shabang would have been well rendered.

I am currently finishing rendering the whole thing so will post here when done.

On a slightly different note, is there any service where we can submit scenes to be rendered in Twilight on a 'grunty' machine?

I understand that network rendering isn't a goer with Twilight yet but what if someone has access to a minor supercomputer and charges by the project to get animations etc rendered??

Good idea or bad idea??

[Fletch]

We should have an availabilty sign-up of some sort so that anyone willing to do this could have a compensation system in place... and it can be a community thing...
I know many of us have 8 cores so... definitely possible.

RickW on Kerkythea forum just rendered an animation on Amazon Cloud ... that's an option for the hard-core geek.

[ashscott]

Here is the final video, 3300 frames, on low render settings (any more took too long on my dual core). Comments are encouraged but please understand that time constraints caused a reduction in quality.

I cant seem to get it to embed so just hit this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1uLGvEhBek

[Fletch]

Hey Ash! Good work!


since you asked for input...
Why does the camera in general have you looking 'down' instead of 'straight ahead'? Was your cameraman embarrassed or sad?

For those of us that are curious - what sport is played here?

What are the rooms with the glass doors used for?

Generally the movement of the cams was very very quick. (too quick)

The spinning around at the beginning made me dizzy.

If you are not busy, I would try creating this fly-thru the way 'you would do it' instead of how the client wanted it... so that in future you can show the two versions to potential clients and avoid things like having to walk down the stairs or navigate past half-closed doors with your camera.

[ashscott]

The cameraman hadn't noticed that he was looking down till you mentioned it, but now that you have mentioned it, he is shocked

Not even I know what sports will be played here, but I assume netball, indoor cricket, etc (all New Zealand games for the un-initiated)

The glass door rooms are a creche and a storeroom, client wanted them left bare.

Yes movement was too quick, that is partially due to me cutting back the transfer times between scenes in a last ditch attempt to cut back on total frames to be rendered, but it is also an oversight on my part.

The initial rotations aren't smooth enough either, i didn't establish a path for the camera to follow and now regret it.

All frames took a long time to render so once things got started It was too late to fix the things I noticed right away.

Your suggestion about re doing it 'my way' is a good one, however, computing and time constraints make it difficult to do a re-render.

By the way, and this could be totally unrealistic, is it possible to get external processing capacity for PCs? For example a high power cpu that you can submit renders to through a USB port? Is anything remotely like that possible?

The other thing I wondered was whether you can create a render farm and somehow convince twilight that all the other processors are simply additional cores to the main processor? IE run more threads?

Potentially dumb questions but I'm not completely hardware savvy.