Animation vs. Rendering Process & Quality

[Claudio Branch]

A few architectural questions for consideration:

 

What percentage of your architectural work is animation?

 

How does your process vary (if at all) if the final product is an animation?

 

Is the standard for quality different for a single rendering vs. a single frame?

[John Dollus]

standard of quality is the same regardless of the deliverable.

 

Process is very different since I can't paint 30 images per second

 

Like an old quote from the Simpsons 'We tried doing a live show but it was too hard on the animators' (or something like that).

 

Both rely on render passes but add the additional complexity of motion and depth to animation. If the building changes, I don't want to have to run the vegetation again. Instead of Photoshop, I use After Effects or Combustion.

[Devin Johnston]

It depends on the firm doing the work, some places give you movie quality animations and renderings but they have large studios with lots of people and the budgets to do that kind of work. Then there are the small firms who can produce the same quality renderings as the big guy's but their animations aren't as flashy due to time and budget. Generally speaking thought I would say that animations are simpler than renderings because it's much harder to get all of that detail into an animation when it all has to be done in 3D.

[Claudio Branch]

It seems to me that a majority of the work posted and techniques discussed in this forum is renderings and very few animation sequences (IMHO of course...).

 

Is it an industry standard (or personal preference) that a frame from an animation should standup on its own against a single rendering?

 

Things done for a single frame (like GI, grass/fur/displacement, mass foliage, etc,) obviously get computationally prohibitive within animation...

[Devin Johnston]

The reason you don't see many animations is because they are still more expensive to produce than renderings and they take much longer. Most clients are happy with one or two images but for those that want to see their project as a whole, or want to sell their project to prospective buyer’s animations give you a lot more information. In a rendering you can do a lot of post work with Photoshop to really make the image look sexy, it's a lot harder to do that with an animation and that is one of the reasons why animations usually are less detailed than renderings. You also have to deal with the limitations of your render farm, mainly memory and speed. If you want full 3D Grass, Trees, People, Cars, Environment as well as a stunning building it's going to take lots of time to put all those elements in and you’re going to have extremely long render times. There is no industry standard for either renderings or animations; it's all about what the client wants.

[Claudio Branch]

I come from a different discipline - civil engineering visualization - but I deal with the same issues found within purely architectural visualization.

 

Most of my work is animation and on a rather large scale at times. I really appreciate the responses...they reaffirm what I experience regularly...

 

More nodes, I need more NODES!

 

[Mario Pende]

Claudio, Im interested, wich software do you use for Civil eng. visualisation?

[Claudio Branch]

Here is my tool set...

 

AutoCAD 2006 w/ EasySite 2.9

3DS Max 9 (x64) (+ plug-ins)

Adobe Photoshop

Backburner

Adobe Premiere

Adobe Encore

[mahorela]

I almost exclusively do animations as well. Everything I have ever posted on this forum have been frames from animations. My philosophy is to achieve the same quality of work in full 3d as can be achieved using 2d assets etc. Even when a client only requests an image, at some stage in the future I will render an animation to add to my reel. I personally don't think I'm achieving that goal yet but that's what I always strive for.

[dinhtuan]

We have to do some architect animations now but We're small studio so the qualiitie of animations can't compare to renderings. Like Maxer said all times are sort and budgets are low so we must reduce the detail of the buildings to make render faster. You can see some big studio like Neoscape, Lighthub.com... their animations and single rendering are the same qualities.

IM experience process is diffirent. When we do the renderings, we modeling all the detail but only what we can't see in the camera. Animation can be the same but clients here still love fly though way so we model all the building but lowpoly, put all the detail on the street, trees ( 3D for near and mapping on Plane for far), ....