Walkthrough rendering issues

[Anonymous]

Hello

I am trying to render a walkthrough of a project I am currently working on but have a problem..

When I render a single image of the scene it comes out fine, with no problems at all. However, when I publish the entire movie the floor has a grainy texture and the rest of the project looks slightly pixelated.

I am publishing the movie as a series of jpeg's, and use the exact same settings that I used to publish the initial test image.

If anyone has any suggestions that would be great.

Thank you

[MarionLandry]

Dear tbstlimited,
When publishing an image, JPG works great! But when you play a series of jpg images in a movie.. it's often a disaster.. the reason for that is that movies will need softer edges, greater antialiasing and different settings in order to play smoothly. When you look at 30 images per second, things are moving fast and a and the sharp edges create flickering effect.
You need to keep few things in mind:

-Is your camera animation moving too fast for the distance you are covering? At 30 frames per second, you need to cover a small distance in order to have a smooth transition between each image.. let's say.. you are in the lobby of an apartment and 2 second later you are in the living room which is at the back of the apartment.. you might not have enough frames/images to cover the distance you are traveling... is that makes sense? Kind of hard to explain...

-Frame per second: Do you have enough frames per second? You can try to increase it to 30/fps to have a smoother render which is what we use for most CG movies.. Well.. that's what I use anyways.. Have a look at this web page, it will show you the difference between 15-30 and 60 fps... It's kind of self explanatory.. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html

-Now about rendering, it is really important to add anti-aliasing when rendering an animation as it will smooth out the edges of your objects in the render and give you smoother result in your animation. I would also suggest that you used a movie output file, unless you are planning to do post processing with the jpg sequence? Which I doubt since JPG are really low quality images... I normally output all my animation into quick time (.mov) or MPEG-4. I find these are the two one that give me best result and easy to use for presentation, PP or YouTube. Make sure to add anti-aliasing like I show in the attached image.

Let me know if that gives you better result. You can also post the flickering movie and I can perhaps look at it and give you further suggestions..
Thanks
Marion

[Anonymous]

Hi Marion

Thank you for your suggestions. We have rendered a short test walkthrough with the settings you have recommended and it is much better!

We are now trying to render a larger walkthrough, around 40 seconds. Our machines have the recommended hardware for running Showcase but the rendering seems to be very slow. Can you estimate the sort of time it would normally take to render such a walkthrough? The settings are currently at: Render level 10, full anti-aliasing, 30fps.. but as soon as we press the render button the computer seems to freeze and the progress bar doesn't update at all. Is this normal?

[MarionLandry]

Hi,
wow.. that is 1200 images you are trying to render.. How long was the render for one image? Let's say it was 3 min.. That means you have 3600 minute of rendering to wait for .. 60 minute per hour.. that means you will wait for 60 hours before you see any result.. you better be patient.. it might work.. it might not. What I would suggest is the following:

But before, why is your animation 40 second long??? is it a full walkthrough of your complete space? You need to look at animation a little bit differently here. Focus on the point of interest (living room, entrance, kitchen) rather then walking through the complete space with a lot of not interesting areas (narrow corridors- stairs) these are good for real time presentation but really not attractive once render. So, while keeping that in mind, if you create a series of short 3-10 second animations for each important room, these will be easier to manage in terms of rendering time.. then you can put them back together in one big video, perhaps include still images in between, plan, photos of the site and create a really compeling presentation..

here are my suggestions:

-keep your animation short and create multiple camera animations. This will be faster/easier to render and you won't need to wait 60 hours before you find out if it worked or not 🙂

-Run some test at low resolution to see if you like your camera animation first.. it's possible that it's moving to fast or not showing what you want.

-Includ a combination of stills and animations in your presentation for a more dynamique presentation. The still images allow the viewer to focus on specific areas while the animations help him get the flow of things and understand space.

Hope this is helpful. Have a look at this presentation as a guideline: http://youtu.be/fqKz3VbeeoU

[Anonymous]

Thanks again Marion

Yes our walkthroughs are always going to be quite long. In this particular project our client wants a walkthrough from the entrance of the project right through to the main space.

We have only just started using Showcase and chose to use it over 3ds max as it seemed easier to use/navigate while still producing good results, and we needed a quick turnaround. Would you recommend using 3ds max for longer walkthroughs/animations?

Thank you

[MarionLandry]

HI,
well.. rendering a long animation will take as long in Showcase that it can take in 3ds Max Design. I would recommend instead to educate your customers... But that's just me.. I am sending you a link to the CGArchitect, architecture animation nominees for inspiration. Have a look at what the best people in our industry are doing..
http://3dawards.cgarchitect.com/nominees/show/7


Now if you still have a long walk through to render, I would still cut it in multiple shorter animation.. Just so if you don't render for 60 hours and find out there is a problem with it. Instead of having one camera that makes one long move, place multiple cameras to create your one walk through and render each camera. Then attach all the small render into one big render. This approach is more manageable in terms of rendering and will allow you to render on multiple computers as well..

This approach is valid for 3ds Max Design and Showcase..
Good luck and share the result with us if you can...

Marion