Whats the most Cost Effective Animation Renderer????

kwistenbiebel

That first 3DS Max animation is really nice.
Moving cars and people really make it alive!

That is what we really miss in SU and its render engines.

Could you share with us which animated people collection you used?
Are they full 3D or animated billboard textures?

Ecuadorian

Thank you, Master Kwisten. The people, cars and palms are RPCs from Arch-vision. The moving people are not 3D meshes, they're actually a matrix of pre-rendered images so depending on relative position a different image is loaded from the animation loop. That's why they project no shadows . The moving cars are 3D, though. The buses are from Turbosquid, but I edited the colors and reduced the poly count with MAX's multi-res modifier. Most of the smaller plants are from my own collection of photos, and they're actually made of three planes placed at 120º intervals.

As you can see, I used a radiosity mesh with very low detail... I think I used a 2mx2m or 1mx1m mesh. That's the reason you don't see any nice light/shadow details. I had to use this setting because for a finer mesh I would have needed some 200GB of memory... That's why I am so excited about Kerkythea: Its photon-mapping method is a lot more memory efficient. Yes, I know MAX's Mental Ray also does Photon Mapping, but at the time I was too lazy and I would have needed to set up all my materials again. That's the beauty of Kerky: It's like having several render programs in one, without having to re-create your materials.

The water turbulence was made with an mpg video texture, as were the TVs. I would be more than happy if a render engine for SU implemented video textures.

Blah11

I heard that hypermove is pretty good also I heard rumors that its extremely easy though I never tried it though im tempted heres some examples http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypermove/examples/index.html
hopefully this helps sadly I dont know how much it costs.

Actually a little searching around I don't think its on the market yet.

Ecuadorian

A video test of "The most Cost Effective Animation Renderer", Kerkythea:
[flash=854,504:kny3l3o3]http://www.youtube.com/v/h3cwW2xkloA&hl=en&fs=1&ap=%2526fmt%3D22[/flash:kny3l3o3]
Youtube Video

I say Kerky is "The most Cost Effective Animation Renderer" because:

It will cost you $0
It features an optimized* render method (Photon Mapping), meaning you can render in less time, and time is money...
It can work in the background, meaning that you can keep working in SketchUp while it renders (thanks for the tip, Fletch).
You can select which frames from the sequence to render, which means you can easily assign portions of the sequence to several machines, which again means time and money saved. And you don't need to spend a dime on additional licenses for those machines.
If you ever decide to try your hand with "unbiased" render methods, Kerky has them too, meaning you won't need to invest time learning to use another program from scratch... and again, time is money.
You won´t need to buy additional material libraries. The friendly Kerkythea community has shared lots of them.

= They say "biased"... I say "optimized".
The "stack of rubik's cubes" model comes from this thread:
http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=79&t=17167

pilou

Seems you have forgotten Blender
0 $ 0 £ 0 €
The more powerful at this date!
I don't say the more easy after using SU