Looking for a good software for rendered animations
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Like Kwistenbiebel pointed out, although there are programs (Podium, Vray, Fryrender, Indigo, etc) that are capable of rendering a series of stills out of a sketchup scene animation, it's the fact that sketchup itself has very minimal animation tools and the scene transitions are too unnatural. Biebel does some wonderful things with animating sketchup scenes, but he uses a lot of video editing to give it character and style that would not otherwise be present.
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@earthmover said:
I tried Shade and didn't like it at all. Can't say why, just didn't really jive with me.
If you guys just want to do camera path animation, I find Vue great for exterior stuff. If it were for interior animation, I would stay away from vue as the settings needed to get good interior lighting are taxing on render times. Modo would be a great option for the money and give you both rendering, modeling and animation tools.
Personally I prefer using my older version of Max for animation stuff. The toolset has been extremely robust since at least Max 5. If you can find an older (cheaper) copy, that would be my first choice. Lightwave is also pretty robust for less than a grand.
Thanks Earthmover. I actually did like Shade from trying the demo version. All the tools I came to know in 3DS and only 200.00. Alas, there seems to be no reliable integration between it and Sketchup. I do have a licensed seat of Max 2.0, but never came to like it and soldiered on with my old DOS farm running 3DSr4 ver. 4.0 (circa 1994). I now run it on my laptop, using Virtual PC DOS window, but it is a kluge. I guess i should not have let Max intimidate me. Now I am in a bit of a bind, as my old system is dying and my time and finances stretched. I'm getting the impression that one just chooses to go with a package and learn it and it will probably be just fine.
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@sjaak said:
Try Artlantis.
Sjaak
I checked out their site. Wow! The prices have really gone up!
I purchased Artlantis 4 years ago (495.00)and liked it, but there were too many glitches when using Sketchup. When i re-introduced a changed model, it would not aquire the materials from the existing atl file and when they could not help me, I got my money back.I still like it the best of what I've tried and assume that integration has become seemless by now. I see they talk of a plug-in version for Sketch-up, but could only find a download for a file converter. Is that what they meant? Is there a plug-in version of Artlantis that is cheaper than the full stand-alone?
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@ecuadorian said:
Why not do it in Podium? Someone made a Plug-in for it so it can make animations.
Unfortunately, it treats scenes as individual frames, rather than keyframes (or am I wrong about that?). It requires you to create a path that gets broken up into the # of scenes you need. In creating a walk-through the camera and it's target follow the path created, resulting in "straight ahead" camera views, resulting in a boring, robotic tour. While you can change target from scene to scene, it is very impractical.
......or did I miss something?
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I think I ended up settling on 3D Max after all. I played a bit with Vue and C4D but in the end I really needed something now and I didn't have enough time to test them to determine whether or not they'd be sufficient for everything I'll need to do in the future. 3D Max was my safe choice because I know it does everything.
-Brodie
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Good choice if you need animated cars and people.
Be sure to check Archvision's collection of plants, cars and people, they will save you a bunch of time.
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Cool, thanks for the resource. Looks like it should be very helpful. We've gotten some trees and cars from Dosch but actually the trees are all messed up.
Right now we've been doing SU animations so we've gotten by w/o real animation but since we're upgrading to rendered flythroughs it seemed like a good idea to have more options than less. Anything to add some extra cool factor.
-Brodie
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I used MAX for years, and I developed a deep love/hate relationship with its radiosity engine. And yes, stuff for MAX is almost always messed up and you have to correct scale/re-link textures, etc. Also, when you re-import your scene to MAX after making changes, you have to re-apply all materials again, or at least that was the way things worked with the last version I used. I made the link with my modeller via .3ds files. And don´t even get me started about how .max files would get bloated when working with radiosity, how your textures will look washed out when using Logarithmic exposure control (unless you edit the curve for every single texture), and how much of a memory hog radiosity is. That´s why some people ignore MAX´s scanline renderer and buy Vray for MAX, so you have to factor in that additional cost and training time.
So, if you don´t need moving cars and people, I highly recommend you try Kerkythea. Even if you finally decide for MAX, you´ll have some invaluable training on the basics of different rendering methods with Kerky. MAX is really THE standard for animation and you will find tons of MAX-specific help on the net, but it will take a long time to master.
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Max is a great choice. With Mental Ray standard in Max, not many bother with the scanline anymore. Vray is my cup of tea, but like Equadorian said, kerky or even indigo would be good (free) secondary options. I find pretty good translation between sketchup and Max using .3ds extension and I haven't had too much of a problem with texture coordinates not being preserved. Something may require a quick UV mapping modifier, but I think this is a blessing and not a curse. I wish sketchup had this feature.
Max is just one of those programs that is not "obvious" in it's workflow right off the bat. It takes a lot of understanding how to use the tools at hand to make things like selection a lot easier. The material editor is what always confused me at first, but now I understand it and it's pretty easy. Max has always reminded me of a cluttered closet, where new stuff get's shoved in every year, without reorganizing and tidying up the existing mess. But, like most creative types, I have a hard time functioning without a little clutter around me.
If I could recommend......check out this tutorial for animating in Max - http://www.digitaltutors.com/store/product.php?productid=3552
It's the best one of I've seen and the price is not bad. I've watched it twice so far, and probably have to watch it another 3 or 4 times before I grasp all the information contained within it.
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Hi Ecuadorian,
I don't know prices by heart, but buying 3Dsmax AND Vray will cost you an arm and a leg.
Why spend thousands and thousands of dollars....if Google would just put its mind to it and would make the Sketchup animation just a little bit more smooth ....
At the office we ran through a range of animation solutions but all were heaps over budget, especially considering it is just to have a PR animation solution.
People who bought VrayForSketchup or Maxwell for Sketchup just cannot justify an extra purchase like that.
Hello Google ! -
Thanks for all the info. I will check out that link, EarthMover.
So Kerky does animations? How does that work? I played with Kerky awhile back and it seemed to have some promise but that was back when I was looking for a still-image renderer, not an animation tool. Does it just export your SU animation or can you configure your own camera w/in Kerky? And it doesn't do animated cars and such?
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
So Kerky does animations? How does that work?
Ooohhh yeah...
You've been able to make animations with KT since KT2007... You can check out the A quick clay animation... I posted a while back...
@unknownuser said:
Does it just export your SU animation or can you configure your own camera w/in Kerky?
Well... The scenes you set in SU will become your camera points in KT, but you can add camera positions as well in KT...
Please check out the Walkthrough Animation Step-by-Step tutorial available from our repository...
Although it was written for KT2007 the basics remain identical for KT2008 Echo...@unknownuser said:
And it doesn't do animated cars and such?
It is possible, but is not that easy...
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Great, that's good to know. I might have to test that out. I glanced through the walkthrough briefly but I'll really have to go through it again w/ Kerky open to grasp it all. It mentioned setting the number of threads in one of the settings menus. Will Kerky take advantage of a quad-core machine?
Also, you don't have to explain the details, but you mentioned that it uses the SU cameras at keyframes but that you can add more. I guess the question is, how much does that help the issues w/ SU's camera pathing? For instance the jerky starting and stoping of the camera (sort of like flying around a building in one of those teacups at a carnival).
By the way, your animation looked very good. I was very impressed by the sky in the background, super realistic. HDRI?
-Brodie
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@unknownuser said:
Will Kerky take advantage of a quad-core machine?
Yes...
@unknownuser said:
...you mentioned that it uses the SU cameras at keyframes but that you can add more. I guess the question is, how much does that help the issues w/ SU's camera pathing? For instance the jerky starting and stoping of the camera (sort of like flying around a building in one of those teacups at a carnival).
The SU2KT plug-in have it's own animation export function, which will generate a kst-script... This will make the animation in KT identical to SU...
However, if you use the build-in "Walkthrough Animation", then it's different and you won't have the same jerky animation between camera transitions...
Make sure you tick the "Interpolation"...@unknownuser said:
By the way, your animation looked very good. I was very impressed by the sky in the background, super realistic. HDRI?
Thanks...
Yes - it's a HDRI from Dosch Design... -
Not sure if you saw my latest reply, Brodie...
Anyway... Here's the latest - and very impressive - animation rendered with KT by one of the KT Team members, Grzegorz Rakoczy (Grzybu)...
@unknownuser said:
Here is short ~40s animation with this scene: http://grzybu.hostings.pl/3d/natural_history.avi (~5MB, xvid, 800x450)
Render time was about 20h in 1280x720 on single quad.The original model is from an already closed lighting challenge http://www.3drender.com/challenges/
Models were made by Alvaro Luna & Joel Anderson...Here's some renders I made of that model...
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Great movie, Kim!
(Although I'm afraid that TyRex is falling apart...) -
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@frederik said:
Credit goes to Grzybu...
I know...
BTW Rakoczy (or spelled rather like Rákóczi in Hungarian) is among the top historic personalities in Hungarian history (if there are only three streets in a small village,one is definitely named after him):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_II_R%C3%A1k%C3%B3czibut certainly has nothing to do with that TyRex.
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And what about SU Animate 2.0 for Podium?
Has anyone work with?
I'm searching for universal tool, mostly to do walkthrought animation
Tryed Artlantis... Can't say, I was impressed. I render in Podium static, and then must tune Artlantis render properties... It's not easy and quick*( -
@starlex said:
And what about SU Animate 2.0 for Podium?
Has anyone work with?Mmmm... A smooth animation runs at 30 frames per second, which means that for a short, 2-minute presentation of a project, you will be rendering 3600 images. And my videos are usually 5 or more minutes long. According to the product page, SU Animate creates a scene in SketchUp for every single frame of the animation. Having a SketchUp file with thousands of scenes does not seem very practical to me, and according to the Podium forum, it often only renders a part of the scenes, meaning you can't simply leave it rendering overnight and go to sleep.
There's an alternative, though: Podium Animate, a free script created by user SaphuA. However, it still is not a really practical solution for camera-only animation for two reasons:
- Podium will have to re-make the Photon Map for every frame, which means a big overhead.
- You will still have to suffer jerky SketchUp camera movement.
But if you MUST have object animation and don't want to summon the all-powerful 3dsMAX, you could try combining this method (Podium + Podium animate) with the "Proper animation" Plug-in. But I have to tell you, if you really need good-looking object/people/car animation, then you are better off using MAX, with all its shortcomings. You can use independent illumination for static vs animated objects. That way, you can simply use the Radiosity mesh for illuminating everything that does not move, and a few omnis for the moving parts. For camera-only animation (aka Fly-through, Walk-through), use Kerkythea. I haven't used Mental Ray, but it seems to use an implementation of the Photon Mapping method, as Kerky does.
I'll do a test to see exactly how much overhead making a camera-only animation in Podium adds, vs. making it in Kerkythea. I'll use the Warehouse model with identical settings to make a fair comparison. Give me a few hours...
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