I am considering getting Vue 5 infinite to produce animations ( such as the landscape type animations on Philippe Bouyers website www.belino.net , but at 720x576 pal size) that are about 20 - 30 seconds long.  I obviously want to optimise & tweak the render/lighting settings to get best quality ( possible radiosity look, global illumination ) and quickest rendering times.

We intend using Vue's full animation capabilities such as animated atmospheres, animated water, wind etc ( also the possibility of using Poser 6 to render moving animals is not out of the equation )

Our aim is to be able to render these animations overnight - we would need to use network rendering, wouldn't we?

Any tips on how to set up optimal render settings? - I am a beginner, but willing to learn.

You would definitely need network rendering, even consider a renderfarm! Overnight? Hmm, I don't think so!

Radiosity is a rendertime killer, I guess you already know that. In Vue, for outdoors, best is to use global illumination ( yes, Vue makes a difference here, GI in Vue is more an effect that produces and spreads realistic shadows, and radiosity is well, radiosity, with colour bleeding and all) Vue also has a lighting setting called global ambience, a less efficient GI, but not really like ambient occlusion either, that renders faster. Guess this is getting confusing, sorry.

Also, you will need a lot ( and I mean a lot) of anti aliasing if you intend to use wind on ecosystems in animations, in order to get rid of light flickering produced by GI on plants, another rendertime killer.

Animated water can be done various ways, either by animating water textures ( faster), or by creating a special procedural terrain on which you apply a water shader. procedural terrains are very realistic ( and especially for ocean effects), but they are, as you might've guessed already, another rendertime killer.

You will get very realistic and pleasing results with Vue, but overnight, hmmm....

So how did Philippe Bouyer do it?  Folks at e-on software said that he only does the rendering at home on 3 not-so fast computers - If I could get renders like his I would be pleased - did it take him days to render these do you think?

OK - if I have an apple G5 and a network of 10 pcs all with render cows at work, what is a reasonable time for rendering such things as Philippe has?

ps - thanks for your help

I think it did take days to render, plus bear in mind Philippe makes extensive use of After Effects for post production, which adds to the global production time. As for your network config, it looks fantastic. I don't know what render times you would have to expect with this network, but I'm sure it would  be fast!

Philippe also does trade offs; doing small renders and checking quality. If it doesn't meet his approval, he'll bump up the setting he thinks is needed and, if possible, reduce another setting to compensate. Once he's happy, he renders out to his intended framesize.

Quote - Animated water can be done various ways, either by animating water textures ( faster), or by creating a special procedural terrain on which you apply a water shader. procedural terrains are very realistic

 

What and how do you apply a water shader?

By water sahder I meant a Vue water material, or  one you create yourself.

I use global ambient for architectural exterior fly-arounds and it's plenty good for our clients.  the wind looks great.  I do use antialias on the objects, but not the texture.  Basically I import the broadcast settings into the 'user settings' then I turn off motion blur, and texture antialias, blurred reflections, maybe drop the number of glass refractions down to 5... but then I am rendering as 720x540 pixels and of course HDRI or Radiosity or even GI would look even better, but what I produce already makes my boss and clients and co-workers quite impressed.

Belino's work is far beyond what I need as an architect... but they are incredible clips and very very very well done.  My bosses don't want the fancy camera jiggles and spins, but then, I'm focusing on architecture, not on 'looky what I can do w/ this camera'.  My hat's off to Belino.. .and I look forward to what he will produce in the future.  his 'tests' show me that theoretically one could produce an impressive animated movie on one's home computer using only the tools he does.

Hi Grayhem,

if you want to take a look at some of the animations I did (http://renderfred.free.fr/animations.html), you'll see that some are in HD video. The shortest ones can be rendered overnight with a reasonably powerful renderfarm, but in HD a few days are more common. There are readmes and making of for some, maybe it can be helpful to you.

Does 'Fuzzy Vision' have any screen shots of images he rendered so I can see what they look like?

Does louguet know how long these animations may take if they were 720x576 (pal) - and also - would a pal size animation look OK on a 40-50inch plasma screen?

Thanks for the help that you are offering

Quote - Does louguet know how long these animations may take if they were 720x576 (pal) - and also - would a pal size animation look OK on a 40-50inch plasma screen?

Thanks for the help that you are offering

Mmm sorry no I can't tell you a precise estimate, it depends on too many things. AndI had not the computing power I have now when I rendered these anims. In fact it all depends on the effective power of your renderfarm. You should do a few tests yourself with a simple anim.

 As for the 40/50 inch screen 720x576 (DVD) should be ok if people who watch are far enough, but I would recommend 1280 x 720 (HD 720p).

I was in another thread asking this question - and bruno said I should ask louguet

"We have 5 x celerons, 1 x celeron laptop, 2 x pentium 4, 1 x Pentium 4HT, 1 x G5 MAC (which would be the main computer with Vue software ) - we have other PCs networked around the building, but not in our office.

Is this going to be an effective render farm for animation at good quality?"

Also, could realistic motion blur be added to a 'non-motionblur' animation afterwards - in a program like Apple Motion2, by just importing in the animation and then re-rendering it from Motion, with added motion blur? ( would this cut down on total render time?)

I don't know about Apple motion2, but in Vue, motion blur can be achieved 2 ways: one is raytraced motion blur, that takes very long to render and needs a lot, a lot of anti aliasing, bit is 100% accurate.  The other way is hybrid motion blur, it's less accurate, but a lot faster and doesn't need extra AA ,it's a post effect that can be network rendered for animations. You can use multipass render in Infinite, which means you can render a mask for the object that has motion, and use this mask to apply the effect in ,say,  Photoshop.

Quote - I was in another thread asking this question - and bruno said I should ask louguet

"We have 5 x celerons, 1 x celeron laptop, 2 x pentium 4, 1 x Pentium 4HT, 1 x G5 MAC (which would be the main computer with Vue software ) - we have other PCs networked around the building, but not in our office.

Is this going to be an effective render farm for animation at good quality?"

It depends on your definition of 'effective' :) The Celerons are definitively no monster machines. Well I think you'll need to do a few tests yourself to evaluate : render a simple anim on your fastest machine, and then render the same anim with the entire farm to compare. And don't forget that you'll need an additional licence to use more than 5 computers for network rendering.

Also if you plan to do some benchmarks with your machines to compare render times, you can take a look here http://www.cornucopia3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1509 . You will find many different results on various hardware architectures.

VUE and I have major issues right now in our relationship.  My 5 cows seem to milk quite slowly, and since VUE in its infinite wisdom (pun intended) decided that one should have to be logged onto the computer in order for it to be used in the farm, instead of just having it run as a service in the background like VIZ or Max... well, now I have to run and log in to every computer I want to use for Hypervue render farming.  And if a coworker beats me to work in the morning and logs me off and then logs in, all the supposed .jpgs in the form of .tmp files that computer rendered are unable to be converted to real and official .jpgs by VUE.  THIS IS THE SERIOUS DRAWBACK TO USING VUE IN A PROFESSIONAL OFFICE SETTING.

here's something I did with the settings described above.  http://market.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/media/folder_7/file_341714.jpg

We did have issues when it's played... projected huge on a screen in our conference room it looked very pixelated, washed out, and crappy.

On our large TV monitor in our conference room it looked pretty big and pretty darn good, crisp, clear, and maybe too color saturated.

On my decent computer screen... no bad at all!  But in all cases, we decided that we need to do something to decrease the 'sparkels' or 'pixelation' effect that really can't be seen much in the still, but in the video is obvious, but only annoying on the projection screen.  Problem w/ increasing the aa is that render times seem to increase seriously.

Color reproduction of the same DVD on all those mediums was incredibly and disturbingly diverse.

My advice to Architectural firms looking into using VUE5i?  Wait for VUE6i... or use MAX and teh xstream plugin... that would be the option we would have used, but we use VIZ2006, not max 7 or 8, and so the xstream plugin doesn't work w/ VIZ yet... they say it is in the works 'someday'.  Plus, they are only useful if you are using the Mental Ray render engin in MAX.

all the best,

Fletch

btw

render time w/ my settings....

two 20 second sequences at 30fps, then we stretched them to 30 seconds in premier.

each series took about 48hrs on my machine.  I have a Boxx at work... its got 4 processors and 3gigs of RAM.  VUE crashed on me constantly even w/ all that.  And it crashed when I tried to render to the farm... so then I got the beta 10 update for VUE5i right after it was released and i can now render to the farm with the issues I mentioned above.  But Vue still crashes a lot, not as much as before.  but I generally avoid pressing the undo button at all cost... never know if it will work or just crash it - 90% of the time it crashes it.

in the update for Vue 5i called version 9.05 or something, there was a memory leak when you render to screen... so if you have that version, I suggest rendering in the main vue only, not to screen... may increase stability if you have that issue.