Animations - techniques and advice...

[mbr]

I was wondering if anyone could let me know what settings, files, compressions, etc., that they use for walk throughs. I just completed a rather large animation (720x540) and was disappointed at how much it flickers and distorts, with no compression. Compressing it just makes it look worse.

I rendered it as an .avi file (mistake?) at their request. I've converted it to a QT, but it looks even worse. Should I have just rendered it out as individual .tiffs or .jpegs and saved it out once it was composited as an .avi?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

[Ernest Burden III]

Originally posted by mbr:

I just completed a rather large animation (720x540) and was disappointed at how much it flickers and distorts, with no compression...Should I have just rendered it out as individual .tiffs or .jpegs and saved it out once it was composited as an .avi?

If saving directly to avi then the software (which?) may have added some compression at that pint, if it was jpeg based, then that could account for flicker. You really should save as a numbered series of TIFF files, because these are not compressed. Also, you have much more flexibility with post effects, either as an action in Photoshop applied to all or some frames, or in Premiere or After Effect, or whatever you use to save the animation.

 

Also, your post suggests that the animation was one camera pass. It can be really tough to get one perfect camera move. It's much easier to save shots and composite/mix/fade later.

 

How long was this animation? The resolution suggests a PAL format. Since TV resolution is only about 525 lines at best, why the high res? A recent animation I did was set to PAL resolution and mastered to DVD, five minutes long. This produced gigs of data (pre-compression).

 

Ernest Burden III

[mbr]

Thanks for the response. The client is going to be projecting it onto a screen and requested a 720px width. Much of what you said went over my head (PAL = TV, NTSC = film?), any suggestions for good readings to get up to speed?

The animation was one camera (at the clients request), and yes, it was difficult to moderate the speed, etc. It was 1300 frames, 150mbs uncompressed. I am going to rerender it as TIFFs and bring into Premiere to see if it would make a difference.

I couldn't seem to get any compression that didn't destroy the image (from Premiere - it was rendered as an uncompressed .avi). I used Media Cleaner and Premiere, but nothing helped.

Again, any help or suggestions are much apprecited. Any good sources for learning the nuances and techniques to making high quality, smooth motion animations out there?

[nisus]

Hi mbr,

 

Try to figure out if your flickerig was due to compression or rendering artifacts instead.

To control the first, render to individual frames and try different settings in *VP or premiere. I recommend to use *.tga, as split alpha's can be handy to work with.

If your flickering is made up of rendering artifacts, a lots of things can be pointed out as a source. Here are a few:

 

- bump: it can be a good idea to turn off any bump mapping (or use *SS at a cost of additional rendertime)

- bitmap filtering: turn to summed area instead of piramidal (beware of memory and rendertimes! --> check your manual)

- bad modeling: two coplanar faces with different materials (max tend to choose betwee the two in a very irregular manner)

- wrong anti-aliasing settings: turn to video instead of area, although this gives a blurry effect

- too much detail: due to lowres rendering, max can have for example only one pixels to represent 3 materials (windows glass/frame/wall in backgrounds)

 

Anyway, run a smal test of 25-30frames with different settings before you render the whole shot.

 

rgds

 

nisus

 

*VP = video post

*SS = supersampling

[mbr]

Thanks. The flickering was mostly the shadows of the RPC people (all raytraced). I probably could have gotten away with not using the bump maps, but it is a brick building (10 different kinds and colors), so for the hi-res printed images I wanted it to look as good as possible. Maybe that would have helped with the slight moiré patterns?

I'll do some more reading about the SS and the antialias settings.

Clients were very happy with it (went out yesterday), and more work is coming in, so that's good. That's always good.

[nisus]

A script for turning on/off all bump would be great than... so you can switch between stills and animation rendering ,

 

rgds

 

nisus

[Chris_A]

If the shadows (of the RPC people) are flickering on and off that would be a rendering artifact. Raytracing seems to do this more than mapped shadows because there is more chance that the shadow to not be calucuated correctly, raytracing recalculates for each frame. If you're rendering over a network this can be made worse simply because different machines may be seeing things differently.

 

As for the video related questions...

PAL is the broadcast standard in most of Europe, while NTSC is standard for the USA, Canada and a few others. Film uses much larger image sizes. A good reference link...

Standard Video and Film Format Aspect Ratios

 

A significant issue when you intend to show your animation on a Television is that they don't display "square pixels". That's why we actually need to generate an image wider than what the actual screen resolution. If this isn't done things will be out of proportion. Squares will look like rectangles and circles will be oval. In addition to this the TV actually doesn't show the entire image, and thin lines may flicker because of the way that TV's scan the image to the screen. Confused yet?

 

Adobe has really good 'primers' on the subject of digital video which should answer just about all of your questions. I'm sure there are others out on the web.

Adobe Motion Primers

 

Enjoy,

--Chris A