Cheat's parralax / faking 3D for small dolly / jib shots

[Tom Bussey]

I have a small interior scene. I want to do a few dolly/jib shots with the camera moving less than 1m either fore/aft in the scene or up and down. There are not a vast number of reflective surfaces, so I'm wondering if I can do something clever with texture baking and/or camera projection to cut down on render time.

I've seen an old colleague do something clever but I was not heavily involved in the process unfortunately so I'm not too up on the process. I know he used Nuke and I thought what he was doing was basic camera projection, but having discovered the Camera-Per-Pixel node in max thought I'd have a play around with camera projection.

My issue (predictably) is where occluded areas are revealed as the animated (non-projecting) camera moves through the scene. This happen at either the near or far edges of objects depending on whether I place the projected image at the start or end of the animated range (see attached).

Now camera projection seems like it's going to work well enough for the walls, but I'm thinking maybe I need to use texture baking or similar for the objects within the room?
Ideally I'd like to use something quick like scanline to render the final sequence, so I'm going to need to bake the final RGB Beauty in to the geo really, this is going to involve unwrapping each object isn't it?

Any pointers would be appreciated. This is the video I've seen it done with. You can see that the reflections are baked in places which is a little disconcerting, but the parallax effect works well. Like I say, I know that this was rendered still in Corona and animated in Nuke, but that's all I know (I don't use/have Nuke)

Any pointers appreciated.

 

[Tom Bussey]

I see, looking at the Vray docs, that what I really need to do is bake the textures of the furniture items. Might get away with projecting to the floor/walls still. Not something I have a lot of experience in, but probably worth getting better at!

[Francisco Penaloza]

Long time that I have use camera projection, but for what I remember creating a clean background image. then inserting the object in the foreground, to avoid that overlapping. Now the distance of movement still has to be small. You can do the same in After Effects, or Fusion ( now Davinci resolve).

For camera projection you don't need to bake textures or unwrap, just render your scene then project it back to the objects.

If you need more dratic camera movement then bake the lighting (yes you need to unwrap each one of them) then you can render without GI or any light, this saves time, no need to go Scanline actually, in V Ray just turn off GI and you'll render very faster actually.

Having said all these, you  should look into Unreal, or any other real-time options such Chaos Vange, with today's technology and hardware doing those old trick are more time consuming that using a real-time tool.

Still if it is quick setup, then is the way to go, but if you will be unwrapping your whole scene and baking lighting to render an animation in V_Ray, mind as well just send it to Unreal or Chaos Vantage and render directly there. For interior D5 is also a good option.