Stumped: walkthrough lighting; 3dsmax

[ajbancroft]

I've hit a wall on interior lighting for 3dsmax while doing a 3d walkthrough. I've gotten my MR lighting times down fairly low (around 10 minutes a frame), but even a 2 minute video would take hours to do.

 

I dont need a step by step process as to what to do, just a general idea. I guess a tutorial wouldnt hurt, but anything that anyone wants to share would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks everyone.

[Tommy L]

Thats just the way it is. 10 mins a frame aint bad for a scene with GI. Thats why people use render farms rather than one machine. Show us a test render and its easier to help.

By the way, that would be 600 hours (25 days!) for a 2 minute animation at 30 frames per second rendered on one machine. Even if you get your scen down to 1 minute a frame, it will take 2.5 days to render.

2 mins is quite a long animation. Is it for work or a hobby/study?

[ajbancroft]

I'm working on a render to show right now. So, for a two minute video at 24fps i'm looking at 2880 frames @ 10 minutes each, or 480 hours of render time? Can I use GI and get general lighting?

[Tommy L]

I dont quite get what you mean by general lighting. If this is for work, maybe they'll pay for an online farm. If its a hobby........well its gonna cost $300 for a day rate on a farm. Why do you want a 2 min animation? Whats the project?

[Tommy L]

I dont quite get what you mean by general lighting. If this is for work, maybe they'll pay for an online farm. If its a hobby........well its gonna cost $300 for a day rate on a farm. Why do you want a 2 min animation? Whats the project?

[ajbancroft]

Ok, heres a test render, minus a bunch of materials for now. This one actually took 21 minutes

 

The walkthrough is for a client at my office, I was told I'd have X amount of time, really got z amount, and now its time to crunch.

 

By general lighting, I mean something along the lines of using a skylight, and a few lights to wash the interior. At this point I'm looking for something simple to speed up the rendering process. A render farm, either set up here, or paid for online isnt out of the question either - is there a good one to deal with?

 

MR is new-ish to me, I feel like I'm getting a better grasp of it for reading, but with our dealine on the 15th, I need a way to fake some even lighting, and use what I've learned with MR on the next project.

 

Thanks again

[Tommy L]

I think your enemy is going to be noise. I havnt used MR since I was using Viz2005. Are you using Max9? If so, MR has changed alot since my experience.

 

OK, thinking out loud: the only way that I know you could render it on your own in time is if you texture-bake everything. This will bring your render times down to next to nothing, you can render it in scanline once youve baked the lit textures onto the geometry, BUT, you'll have to learn uvw unwrapping and texture baking and good lighting techniques in a week, then do the work. So I guess thats out.

 

So you'll have to use a farm. Search here for 'online farm' or '$300 day rate', you should find a thread or two.

 

Rendering with GI as I remember it in MR is tricky. I dont think you will ba able to do it. Thing is, unless you really know your stuff, you need to run some test animations. Otherwise, you will send your file to an online farm and it wont come back looking like you think it will. Then you'll have to send it (and pay) again. And most likely, again.

 

My advice, would be do it in scanline so you make your deadline. But there maybe a MR user out there that can help you out much better than me.

 

You never said why it had to be 2 minutes? That is very long.

 

Look up this thread

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/22366-animation-mistakes-no-nos.html

 

thats very helpful.

[ajbancroft]

I'm not stuck to using MR, scanline would be fine. I guess I've gotten used to the fancy lighting techniques, and have forgotten thet best way to light a room - honestly, as an industrial designer I'm used to modeling and rendering single objects; I've been thrust into this walkthrough, and had my timeline cut from 14 weeks down to three (one and a half weeks remaining).

 

So I go with scanline, do I need to simulate sunlight using a daylight system

 

 

that thread you posted is very informative, going through it now.

[Tommy L]

No, I wouldnt use an in-built system. Id fake it with strategic non-shadow casting fill lights and a few well placed spots (for internal light fixtures). For sunlight coming through the windows, use a direct light. To keep your rendertimes down so you can test animations, dont use any raytracing. Any glass, just tell it not to cast shadows in its properties. Keep things real basic. When you know youre going to hit your deadline using the basics, you can try some other fancier stuff. Do you have access to any other machines? It would be worth your while setting up backburner across any machines that are in reach.

[ajbancroft]

reading through, yes i have doors opening. the movement is painfully slow; yes its all been requested of me. i've come up with a solution that involves maybe 30 still frames rendered very nicely, and not two minutes of video - i'm not even going to start to kill myself like that.

 

back to lighting for walkthroughs. i see some that look really nice, and i still wonder how they get the lighting to look like that, baking like you mentioned maybe? Heres an example of what i've found recently that i thought was done fairly well:

 

http://www.3dlabz.com/3D-walkthrough-animation.html

[Tommy L]

Thats a much better solution.

 

Animations with soft lighting can be done wth most render engines. Most use the technique of storing the light information as a seperate file so the algorythms do not have to be calculated every frame. It all depends what software and how much RAM/Processor power you have at your disposal. Vray is very common on this forum. "Storing Irradience Map" in Vray calculates the lighting every 10 frames and then uses tracking and mathematics to fill in the gaps. This gives smooth lighting rather than accurate frame by frame, because frame by frame GI takes longer and tends to flicker.... Thats one example, but there are many methods.

 

It takes experimentation to find what works for you.

[foxlee]

I think wheteher you will do animation or not take a look at Montree or Smoke3studios tutorials under resources. They use scanline faking gi techniques which should give you a good result very quickly for interiors.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/resources/tutorials/smoke3d/tutorial3.asp

Sometimes GI is just not worth it use the time to model or texture extra .