Looking for a good software for rendered animations
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Our company has moved from doing our renderings w/ SU and Photoshop to now rendering them with Maxwell. What I'm still lacking, though, is a way to do rendered animations. We only design hospitals so the buildings are quite large, however I'm also hoping to find something that handles trees, sky, and animated cars well in an animation. What would you guys suggest?
Vue is really intriguing right now, going to get a trial of it. It looks like it handles environments like no other, but environments aren't my focus so I'm not sure if it's the right tool for me. Any thoughts on that or anything else out there?
I've also dabbled w/ 3D Max. It does everything and seems to be the industry 'go to' but I'm not totally sold on it either. Big learning curve and we don't do a lot of animations so I won't get to use it every day. We rarely do animations now (and when we do they're straight SketchUp w/ a bit of video work) but when we start rendering them I'm sure we'll do more. Nevertheless, I can'd see doing more than maybe 1 a month tops.
-Brodie
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Would you consider Blender? There will be new version soon (a month or two?) with redesigned user interface. It should be worth trying.
Tomasz
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Silly that the animation feature in Sketchup never improved over the last 3 versions.
If only we could have more smooth and realistic camera behaviour....oh well...We currently have the same issue in our office.
There's no real good solution besides converting to one of the monster modelers. -
I'm up for trying anything. I would like, however, to hear why people prefer a particular software over another and/or any cons of it. I've heard of both Blender and Artlantis and have seen great things from each but part of my problem is that I don't really have time to try every photorealistic software out there to the extent that they'd all have a fair shake. I'm really hoping to widdle it down to a few.
What would also be helpful is if you have any good links to well done architectural animations done in any given program.
-Brodie
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Here are some examples done in artlantis. Because the videos come from youtube the quality is 'YOUTUBE'.
I still hope it gives you an impression what can be done in Artlantis.
http://artlantisobjects.com/html/videos.html
Sjaak
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I also am looking. I do mostly animated walk-through/fly-arounds. Anyone here tried Shade 8.0? It's very affordable (200.00) Just wondering if anyone can recommend it?
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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.
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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.
http://www.artlantis.com/index.php
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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