int animation w/ LC + skydome ??

[BrianKitts]

I'm working on an interior patient room scene that I will be animating and I currently have the scene set with a skydome and treeline that is off in the distance through the windows.

 

In the past I have always resorted to brute force for my animations, but I really want to give LC a go this time. But my question is this, to do a flythrough precalc with LC as a secondary, you have to use world scale and not screen scale RIGHT? Which means if I used world scale I would be wasting 90% of my subdivisions on the skydome and not the actual interior??

 

I've tried it so far and even going as high as 3000 subdivisions with LC I am yet to get a usable solution for the animation :-\

 

So I guess the simple question is.... Is it possible to use LC for an interior animation with a skydome. And if it is.... am I overlooking something?

[Chad Warner]

What are you using for primary? We use LC for secondary all the time with IR as the primary. You just have to make sure you use the "flythrough" option on the LC.

[BrianKitts]

What are you using for primary? We use LC for secondary all the time with IR as the primary. You just have to make sure you use the "flythrough" option on the LC.

 

yes of course I'm using IR as the primary.... I'm only referring to the secondary and the ability to use world scale as opposed to screen scale when you have such a large real world sized object in the scene.

 

I've been running tests today at screen scale instead of world and have been getting decent results even though I really thought you had to use world scale for LC when doing flythrough....

[Ricardo Eloy]

Not really. Real World will prevent objects from flickering once they are too small in screen, but it's not like every flythru needs it. Personally, I only use it when I have an animation with trees (the leaves flick a lot from distance).

[Spooner04]

Are you using a fixed filter or nearest? what are your LC settings?

 

We did a series of interior fly throughs using LC with IR and got pretty good results. we used between 1500-2500 subdivs: sample size of 6" @ world scale: Used light cache for glossy rays: filter was set to fixed @ 3'-0":When we rendered the LC we set both primary and secondary to LC and rendered it separately from the irr map.

 

I'm curious to know what you figured out. Please keep us updated.

[BrianKitts]

I left the LC filtering on nearest.

 

As for the world scale, I could never get decent results with it, I really think it's wasting too many samples on the skydome surrounding the scene and not enough on the actual interior.

 

Rick was right, and leaving it @ screen scale seemed to work fine. So I just went full out @ 3000 subdivisions, at a 0.01 size. Teamed with IR set to high-animation I got great results. I just got a new system which tore through the irradiance passes so I didn't mind taking the settings a little higher than I used to.

 

Ended up with about 5 min renders per frame @ 720x480. I'll try to post the animation (if I'm allowed) once it's completed, so far I've just been doing testing to make sure I can get the quality I want into the final, and then ported out to dvd for both standard tv and widescreen plasmas. Technical side is all working smooth, now I just have to finish rendering out all the camera passes.

 

the attached image is one of the frames out of my test segment....

[Spooner04]

Very nice image.

I'll have to keep those settings in mind for later on down the road. Did you use one bounce on your Irr map or more?

[BrianKitts]

Just one bounce.... the real key is using the vraySun/Sky/physical camera in conjunction with Reinhard color mapping to get the right amount of bounced environmental light into the scene, but being able to control the burnout.

[Spooner04]

I'm still trying to sell my supervisor on using vray sun/sky/cam. He says they're to expensive. I think that means the frame times take too long.

 

Reinhard color mapping is one I haven't messed with yet. I will have to experiment.