Animation Woes

[Jock]

Since I started to freelance I've only ever done still images and with no bother at all. Then the other week a client comes to me wanting an animation for a very large house, both external and internal. Now I'm not too sure why but straight away it makes me a bit anxious, I think because stills I can do no bother at all, animations seem for me to still have a lot of unknowns about them, which is probably more down to experience, but there seems to be a lot that can go wrong, and mainly to do with hardware etc rather than the actual model itself.

 

Now as a tiny bit of history my dual-quad core xeon with 8 gig ram machine recently went bust about 3 weeks ago and to replace it I have an i7 machine with 6gig ram so wasn't sure how it would fare.

 

Well anyway so I start modelling the thing, getting 3/4 done and crash. Then I load it back up and 5 min later, crash. When I look at the resource monitor the free ram drops to 0 so I'm guessing it's to do with that. Thing is I've only done one floor so It's not like I can split it up any more, though I will have to put the second floor on another file. I just can't get anything done and it's so frustrating with a deadline fast approaching. Every 5-10mins it crashes and the ram just disappears. Is 6 really that bad?

 

It really does seem to handful of times I've done an animation it brings nothing but problems, and always hardware related. It's at the stage now where I really think I'll need to scratch it off my list of services as I don't think I can honestly handle them. Am I the only one who has such issues with animations over stills or is it fairly common? As soon as someone mentions animations, I begin to sweat....I just don't think it's worth it until I suppose I can buy some super rig that can handle them with no issues. Though having said that I had expected 6 gig to be fine.

 

Also maybe worth mentioning that I also have another job as well as freelance so its not quite as bad as my livelihood depends on offering animations as a service.

Edited November 11, 2010 by Jock

[ihabkal]

I am almost 99% sure you have a bad stick of ram. Try restarting your system with onbe stick trying each stick once and see if windows fail to load on one of the sticks.

6GB ram and i7 are great, I have a 1100 MB file I am working on now with 8GB ram on core2Quad, no problems...

[Jock]

Thanks for the response, I'll give that a go tonight and see if it comes up with anything.

[Speaker]

This definately sounds like a RAM issue. I would suggest to run memtest86 and see if thats really the case. If thats so, then just find the bad one and replace it. If you don't know for sure if this is because of RAM, then test your machine with some RAM that you know is OK.

Edited November 11, 2010 by Speaker

[neil poppleton]

Stewart,

 

Have I not seen that logo somewhere else...maybe you should have a word with last pixel for copying your logo....!

[Jock]

I'm assuming the constructive part of your message is too well hidden for me to decipher...

[neil poppleton]

http://www.lastpixel.com.au/

[Jock]

I realise what the sarcasm was reffering to and yes one of the words are very similar....

 

I assume you have nothing constructive to mention about the actual ram issue?

[neil poppleton]

Nothing on the ram, but animations, and certainly interior animations do seem to take much longer than one would expect. We are lucky and have a render farm internally and are looking to hire out.

[Jock]

This specific problem isnt the length of time as i allowed plenty for that, its that somehow the computer cant handle the model being animated. It crashes when in the viewport not when rendering.

 

It has been suggested both here and on a computer forum i frequent that it sounds like dodgy ram so I'll find out tonight for sure. I kind of hope it is the case then at least i know where the problem lies.

[Jonathan Sanchez]

also.. u r using 64 bit windows and 64 bit max right?

[Jock]

Yep 64x for both.

[Devin Johnston]

Well you know what they say, imitation is the highest form of flattery

 

I think the hardware problems have been addressed, speaking to your apprehension about doing animations if you've never done one before you are smart to be weary about doing one for a paying client. Animations can be tricky for all kinds of reasons, even those of us who have done hundreds of them still run into problems from time to time. I'd suggest the first thing you should do is nail down your camera path and get your clients approval before proceeding too far. After that you can more clearly see how much work you'll need to do, hopefully it won't be more than you though.

[Jock]

I've done a few before at my 9-5 job but even they have been quite troublesome, but the jump from doing one for my own client as opposed to my companys client seems to have been a bigger shock than i would have expected. Theres a lot more at stake it feels like.

 

I phoned the client this morning to explain the situation as i didnt want to drop a bombshell on the deadline and i've been lucky that this was for a person i used to work for and he was very understanding. Weve came up with a comprimise whereby rather than have a walkthrough, there will be small animations in individual rooms, letting me split the rooms into seperate files. This will see me by until i can get the ram issue sorted at least.

 

Although i do still wonder if i'm taking on too mcuh trying to do animations at the moment and should mabe stick to stills. Stills so far account for probably 95% of the work considering this is the 1st animation. Though i also dont want to limit myself to extent that clients will simply go elsewhere because i cant do what they want.

[FlytE]

Unless the animation model is extremely heavy, which would drive your ram to oblivion, your machine spec is definitely good enough to handle doing animations.

 

If you ask me, it sounds like some kind of stupid anomaly in your model, a piece of corrupted geometry perhaps? Try doing some trial and error seperation of your model to weed it out. Other things that can cause rediculous crashes are hardware accelleration and graphics driver issues. This is currently happening to me on an occasional basis and has only started happening with max2010 - i am trying to get to the bottom of it. Make sure you have neatly organised your textures and you dont have any that are a whopping great size in your scene. It sounds daft but sometimes the sheer effort for max to find your resources over a network, or load a huge texture into ram, is enough to crash it.

 

For what its worth, in my experience when it comes to animation the most important thing (much more so than still images) is to be REALLY organised. Keep everything your model organised and well named, proxy whatever you can our your model, keep your materials, cameras, grouping, references, xrefs, and project folder well named and organised etc. You cannot be too organised when undertaking an animation. That way you know what everything is and where it should go... and you can troubleshoot your project faster if problems arise.

 

good luck.

[aaronrumple]

...and have a backup 3rd party rendering farm waiting (and the money to use the service) when the deadlines are tight.

[Jock]

Cheers fot the words of wisdom guys its much appreciated.

[Tommy L]

Weve came up with a comprimise whereby rather than have a walkthrough, there will be small animations in individual rooms, letting me split the rooms into seperate files.

 

This is not a compromise, its the best way to work and will give a much more interesting animation than the old 'walkthrough' routine. Gives you a chance to work with DOF effects, vistas, macro photogrpahy, sweeps etc. Have a search for the 'what not to do in animation' thread thats on here, its full of tips about what makes arch-vis animations look amateurish.

 

So far as your crashing problems, this is not related to it being an animation rather than a still image. Yes, you have to model more geometry because more is 'seen' in the final product, but your machine should be able to handle it no probs. Do you have a rogue model, probably downloaded, that has something wrong, such as a 5 x turbosmooth applied? That may crash your graphics card.

 

If you are uncomfortable doing the animation, dont do it. Sounds like you have an existing relationship with this client, you dont want to spoil it. Your other option is to outsource it and oversee production. You can be upfront with your client about this. For example, if you were to outsource to a freelancer in, say, Chicago.... called, say, Tom... then he could do everything and you take a 20% off the top + exchange rate. Just sowing seeds here....

 

And as regards to Neils' comment about your logo, I'd have to agree, there's a striking similarity. There's a company in China who lifted the whole of Neoscape's website, I certainly dont think you've been that cheeky.

[Jock]

Outsourcing is certainly something i'd consider in the future for a number of reasons, though i am slightly sceptical of being dropped in the crap by someone and left looking embarrased telling a client i dont actually have the finished product, though i suppose that would ease with familiarity with whoever is doing the work.

 

As for the logo, i'd be lying if i said i didnt think of their logo when i put it together, but i felt the whole logo was different enough to warrant it. I've posted numerous times in their threads at another small 3d forum, most recently with their new demo reel with the sig well on display and they have never batted an eyelid so if they arent bothered which i didnt imagine they would be, I dont see someone else would take some unforseen offence to it, and post to that affect in a totally unrelated thread. But i digress...

 

Edit: I may drop you an email over the next couple of days to talk more about the possibility of outsourcing.

[Noise]

I would suggest changing the Display Driver in your Viewport Preference Settings.

[Brodie Geers]

For a split second I thought the thread title was Animation Hoes. As it turns out this topic is decidedly less interesting, no offense.

 

-Brodie

 

p.s. It must be Friday, I'm feeling snarky.

[Noise]

What does snarky mean ?

[Brodie Geers]

sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner