Help Needed On First Animation Project Of Housing Estate

[nickbailey]

:confused:Hi all,

I am in the process of bidding for a project which involves creating a 30 second external walkthrough/animation of a housing estate. I have never done an animation on this scale before but I really hope to get this job and use it as a showcase for future work. I am using 3D Max with VRAY. The finished output size will be about 800 pixels wide. My PC is a Dell Precision 470 32 bit, dual 3 Gig Xeon Processor,3 Gigs Ram, so its by no means a power house. The site needs to be fully landscaped and also contain cars, people etc. What is the best type of 3d plants to use for such a project. What is the best type of 3d cars to use. I am assuming that I would need to outsource the actual final rendering to an online render farm? What are your feelings on this, Who would you suggest? What type of price roughly would such a 30 second animation cost to render? Also, how woudl one price this type of project? I assume per second? Any guideline price? HEEEELLLPPP PPLLLEEEEEEASE.......

[JonRashid]

Pricing is a tricky one as it will be regional. My one suggestion would be to storyboard your animation and avoid one continuous shot. This will allow you to break the animation up into smaller component parts, thus allowing you to remove any un-needed geometry from each shot. This helps to make the rendering way more manageable. It also assists in the approval process. You can have different sections of your animation signed off before completing the entire thing. It also helps prevent the usual client "could you just add?" comment if a shot has been approved. This also allows for you to set up your post process whilst still rendering. I assume you would have done a preview animation render ie no textures and basic lighting. When I do this it produces the same amount of frames I would envisage having in the final render version. So from this I can set up all my transitions etc using the actual finished file names and frame count.

That way once you have all the finished frames at the correct resolution your post should be as simple as pressing a button if you use Video Post or Combustion. Whatever you choose to do the storyboard is key to any animation management and should be standard procedure

[ihabkal]

it is only 30 seconds so what kind of storyboard? as soon as the camera flies in for a peek and it is over. If you want me to cooperate with you on this project for a fee send me a private message, I own my own render farm of 20 quad core computers with 8GB Ram each, and I have a huge animation portfolio. I will save you a lot of headaches for not much money.

[kippu]

i am always interested in seeing animations ihab ...can you send me a link too

[ihabkal]

i am always interested in seeing animations ihab ...can you send me a link too

 

Hi there, I sent you a link on your business e-mail.

Thanks for asking

[Jimy]

If you're sensible with your scene setup you could probably do that in house. It's only a render of 750 frames so not much at all (25fps), and 800px is low res.

 

Use minimal polys for everything you put in and use vray's proxies which are brilliant RAM savers, remember everything adds up. Keep materials simple but use diffuse, specular and bump maps to make everything pop out more at the limited res, but keep map sizes low.

 

Make a guestimate of how long it'll take you and double it; times by your hourly rate... done. Good luck! It'll be a good learning experience.

[BVI]

Do some research into multiple irradiance maps - you can cut your render down to a few minutes a frame. Don't render every second IR map as some may suggest, you can get away with a few key IR maps - but I suggest you do the research and understand what they are and how they work in detail.

 

I assume the render will be at PAL, 25 fps - more than doable on a single PC - you might want to bank on 5-10 minutes a frame, more than this and you are going to be pressed for time.

 

If possible try and get them to approve several sequences for your animation, rather than a single flight path. This will cut down your lighting time because you wont need a single lighting rig that works for the entire path.

 

Render out each frame as a tga or related format, then you can render over night and pick up wherever you left off - compile in vegas or some NLE.

 

Nic

[BVI]

One more thing, for a 30 second, I'd render it myself rather than outsource, esp when you are doing this for the first time - you will learn volumes, you also have that extra level of control to make it awesome!

[nickbailey]

One more thing, for a 30 second, I'd render it myself rather than outsource, esp when you are doing this for the first time - you will learn volumes, you also have that extra level of control to make it awesome!

 

Thanks for all your help guys. Much appreciated! In relation to the 3d landscaping and cars etc, who would you suggest? Obviously they will have to be as low on my memory resource as possible?

[luckyluc]

Use planes with images of trees and bushes.

If you want to do it nice you van use 3D-foliage (vray proxy maybe).

But then the foliage would cost you more time and money then the whole building.

Also watch out for the terrain. Is it flat or do you have to make a scenery with hills?

[ihabkal]

One more thing, for a 30 second, I'd render it myself rather than outsource, esp when you are doing this for the first time - you will learn volumes, you also have that extra level of control to make it awesome!

 

for 30 seconds at 30 frames per second, that's around two weeks of rendering time if each frame takes 10 minutes, and if he renders by night only so that he can have his machine to work on during the day.

Maybe it is time to buy an i7???

[JonRashid]

30secs at 25fps(pal) is just over 5days. Plus once he has storyboarded (which I would do for even 30secs if multiple shots included) he may be able to remove unnecessary geometry and thus reduce rendering time. It's a balance of time available against cost. Plus once you have sent to render farm you can't always jump in and fix that mistake you have only just noticed. If rendering a frame sequence(which I would advise) you notice a mistake, the only time you lose is the time it takes to fix and set render off again.

[Noise]

Hi Nick

 

What you have described is not for the faint hearted (I speak from alot of experience) especially when you are learning during the project.

 

Ihab has made an offer to help, I would suggest that you should invest in help because it will make the process alot faster and much less stressful if you can draw on someone else's experience. I don't know what the deadline on this is but if its tight, then all the more reason.

 

I also think that the brief for 30 seconds of animation is suspect - does the client really know what they are after? To me, there are alot of questions to be asked because if you get the project and the client starts to change their mind during the process, you have to protect yourself in your terms and conditions agreement. Believe me - this is as important as the final product itself.

 

Whatever you do, get paid in full on delivery (possibly do it in stages) - don't do the invoice 30 days nonesense.

[ihabkal]

Noise (Niall), thanks for your post. I really don't need a job right now, plugging along a little busy, but I only asked because of what you said. The client might get upset if things don't work out. plus what you said about getting sepcifics from client is right on the money: when clients ask for too little time it is either because they want to cram a ton in 30 seconds, or they will drag the artist by sweet talking him (works with me every time as I am a sensitive soul) into doing more work.

 

Jon, I tried 25 fps and it really isn't as smooth as 30, I really didn't like it. plus 5 days is really 10 if you need to work on the rendering machine during the day. I just finmished a 1 minute animation, the client barely gave me 2 days to render it. People can't waste 5 or 10 days today. with my render farm it is only one day or less.

About if you find a mistake and you fix it, if you are using IR maps you will have to redo the whole thing since you will need to recalculate the map anyway, and when you render only the frames with mistakes the flicker will happen at the beginning and end of the new segment of fixed frames.

if he uses proxies he won't have to plan that much to hide things because if it doesn't show it won't load.

[Noise]

Rendering in house is one thing because you know how it all works but, to send the project to a third party render farm can be very expensive especially if its automated, it could absorb the entire budget if you don't know what your doing.

 

If I was you Nick, I would ask the following questions to the client;

 

1. What is it that you want the animation to do?

 

2. What is the time frame?

 

3. What is your budget?

 

From these three questions, you will be in a much better place to understand how you fit into the process of doing the animation and also how much to charge.

 

Don't be afraid to ask the budget.

[BVI]

Jon, I tried 25 fps and it really isn't as smooth as 30, I really didn't like it.

 

30 fps will be smoother, heck, 60 fps would be very smooth. PAL is 25fps - so you are safe with that.