Urgent help for Animation

[maurocaruana]

Hi all,

 

This is my first posting on cgarchitect forums. Next week I have a project to finish and the days i have available are only 6. This project involves an area of around 42,000 Sq.m. and is all for agricultural use. I will have offices, stores and buildings for farmers. I need to do an animation to move around the buildings and show all the areas to our clients.

 

I would like to have some help or link for tutorials regarding the light i need to use and also Radiosity to have the rendering time as fast as possible. My processor is a Pentium 2/1.8Ghz/512mb RAM/Geforece2 64mb/

[maurocar]

Anyone around please?

[Frosty]

With only 6 days, I would seriously reccomend against radiosity - especially with the processor power you have available.

 

Whats your poly count? Map sizes? How many frames?

[Buffalo Bills]

Just curious... Wouldn't calculating radiosity be faster. That is of course if you animation doesn't require other objects to be moving in the scene. Once calculated, then the animation would render out the frames without recalculting the lights. But I think to speed things up even more is to not have any raytrace materials in your project at all. That is depending on how detailed your project has to be and how long your animation is going to be too.

[maurocar]

If not using raytracing materials and using radiosity what setting shat i have to get a very good looking glass material?

[Jason Matthews]

You need to sketch it out. In other words, show (on paper) how you want to put things together including movement, camera postion,angles at which you want to view things, how close up you are going to be to the reflected items, etc. I would then go to the raytrace globals menu in the rendering pulldown and set the amount of bounces to be low, like 2 or 3 instead of 9. How many frames are you going to have? How many cut scenes? How many cameras? Think about all of this. Then put it together.

 

I would try the following settings:

Initial quality 80%

Refinements 15

Filtering 3

 

Of course you do not want to regather. And you might not even want to render direct illumination. It is up to you. Also, think about resolution. Since you are not going to print anything, you can use a smaller resolution like 600x800 or something.

 

Good luck,

 

-Jason

[maurocar]

Here I posted my first quick rendering wit radiosity. My problem is getting the light as real as possible and also as you can see I cannot manage to get a good glass material.

 

I placed the trees using photoshop in order to fill up quickly the surroundings. I appricate all comments and ideas.

[Jennifer]

If you are using photometrics, then you should certainly use the advanced lighting radiosity feature, which can also speed up the rendering. The photometrics can be incredibly slow to render without that, and produce innacurate results. See Ted Bordman's article on exterior radiosity here on the CGA site, or get his '3ds max r6 Fundamentals' book, which goes into more detail on radiosity.

 

Not using photometric lights at all will be quicker, and will require more traditional lighting techniques. Create a sun Direct light, a dim Omni 'bounce light' below the scene, and a medium intensity Omni opposite the sun to fil in the back of the scene.

 

Reflections on the glass would make them look more realistic, but use the "Flat Mirror" map rather than the Raytrace map or material. Flat Mirror will render MUCH faster. Generally, the Raytrace map/material should only be used for curved objects, or when you need some of the special features of the RT material.

 

Good luck!