Radiosity in Animation

[fewlo]

Hello All,

 

Well, I feel a little bit out of my depth here after reading some of the other discussions, so be gentle with me!

 

I work in Viz 4 and have recently tried using radiosity in visualisations, and feel I am progressing fairly well, but some of our clients are asking if this technique can be used for animations.

 

We have various objects moving in our animations, door handles, doors etc, and as I understand it this would mean calculating radiosity at every frame where there is movement. Is this correct, as it seems a very time consuming process!!! or is my understanding incorrect? I need some help/advice/input as to whether or not to try animating radiosity or if there are other programs/plug-ins I can incorporate.

[psyanide]

I use Accurender, and for animations with moving bits, either you need to calculate radiosity for each frame, or, tag the moving objects ar raytrace only. Small things like door handles won't affect the radiosity solution or the output much anyway.

[michael juice]

one way of over coming this issue is to use texturebaking for large complex objects that do not move in your scene, once calculated the radisoity solution is applied as a texture...very handy

 

 

Im am not 100% if Viz 4 supports this though ....F1

[michael juice]

correction to my previous post, texture baking would apply to light traced animations, where rendering times are usually massive....as far as radiosity is concerned, you may, as stated earler have to include the main mesh only as part of the radiosity solution and use normal lights for the rest...

[John Dollus]

If you recalculate the solution for each frame, you will end up with large render times and artifacting. Texture baking is a much more productive solution and you can exclude the moving bits from the calculation and light them independently.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Originally posted by michael juice:

one way of over coming this issue is to use texturebaking for large complex objects that do not move in your scene, once calculated the radisoity solution is applied as a texture...very handy

 

 

Im am not 100% if Viz 4 supports this though ....F1

We tried texture baking for the last animation we did in Lightwave. We left a room to render and bake on a Friday, and it was still not done on Monday. I would try test baking some files before you devote to this method.

[michael juice]

Hi

 

did you attempt to texturebake the entire scene in one?

 

I usually texture bake object by object over many machines and save out the completed mesh to a file to be recomposited later....

 

texture baking can be a lengthy process, but will save time when rendering large animations

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

more or less i guess. it was my first time trying it, so i may have done it wrong. we were trying to bake the walls, floor, and ceiling at the same time on one machine. i have never used viz, and i am not yet verse in max (finally learning) but in lightwave, i don't think you can bake over multiple machines.

[dnlhatton12]

Think back to the original post.

 

I dont think he has access to multiple machines.

 

I would personally try....and i know this maybe not an option, but build another machine. Then render the animation on that. You can leave it a week if need be. Because lets face it. We wanna use the machines we work on cos we love 3D. We cant be waiting for hours on end waiting for anims to render. Build a new machine using cheaper component parts and wait. Remember.. this is just my personal option and does not reflect the way other people think. Although the major disavanage to this is purchasing another licence.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Originally posted by dnlhatton12:

Although the major disavanage to this is purchasing another licence.

purchasing another license depends on what software you are using. i use lightwave for the majority of my animations. on my host machine i use a free third party render que to send the scenes with. if i only had one extra machine, i would set the que up, and set up to nodes on that machine, and have the que send the info to the two nodes. essentially creating a renderfarm, that only had one computer. no second license required, and i am not breaking the license.