How do you render flythroughs and object animations?
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Hi All,
I continually get frustrated when I try to delve into creating flythroughs and animation with sketchup. I would like to ask what people use for their workflow and what have been the successes and failures. My main focus is on interior animation with artificial lighting. That seems to be the limiting factor, since most any engine can do GI or sunlit exterior fairly easily.
Edit: I just dived into the tutorials for Blender, I'm just gonna suck it up and learn it already. So far not too bad.
My experiences:
- Vray is great for flythroughs - you can precalculate the lighting calculations, and it has fine control over the image quality. It's biased, so it's about as fast as can be. The big limit is that objects can't be animated.
- Twilight is good for exterior, but I've found it plain awful for interior lighting. It can animate objects very nicely.
- I tried Lightup, but it did not have the level of realism I was looking for. I was also not able to render a video with object animation.
- I haven't even attempted to render with an unbiased solution. I can't wait a month for a minute of animation to complete.
Your thoughts?
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So here's an update in my search for animating and rendering happiness
I'm getting more in depth with Blender, and TIG's object exporter works great! Wish I'd started sooner.
All the animation functionality I've been struggling with in SU is just so ready and willing in Blender. I've been using Yafaray, and once I discovered the ray depth setting, everything is copacetic...On the SU side, I am trying Thea, and, well, meh. I'm really not impressed with the (limited) SU integration. Also - is there any way to move geometry back and forth from the studio without having to set things up again and again. I see it saves lighting and materials, more or less, but I've been less than impressed with the lighting functionality. Also, adding Thea lights messed up my keyframe animation. Don't know what that's about. I haven't even tinkered with animation yet, but what happens when you want to edit something in SU that you've rigged in the studio?
On the rendering side of Thea, I'm not hugely impressed with the quality, partly I think it's the limitations of the artficial lighting. I'm working on an interior scene, as that is what I've found to be the limiting factor for a lot of the rendering add-ons.
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@andybot said:
On the rendering side of Thea, I'm not hugely impressed with the quality, partly I think it's the limitations of the artficial lighting. I'm working on an interior scene, as that is what I've found to be the limiting factor for a lot of the rendering add-ons.
which limitation? you can use every material as an emitter or ies and you can easily setup point lights, spot lights and omni lights (in studio and in sketchup). What do you want more?
For the animation I understand you completely, thea is better at stills then animation. But however you can lock irradiance cache ond photon mapping to calculate it only once (like the light pass in vray)
I've heard the cycles renderer for blender is really fast, maybe you should have a look into that one for animations. Personally I never tried it so I can't say.
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@dbalex said:
you can use every material as an emitter or ies
Thanks, I think I missed that part, I was looking for an area light option, but I guess emitters are used for that. I guess I wasn't keen on it because of my attempts at Maxwell, where everything is emitter based. I don't like that system personally.
So what happens if you have to reload the model? Do you have to set up the emitter again or is it a material property that is saved with the SU plugin?
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it's saved with the material so if you set it up in sketchup through the plugin it will be saved in your sketchup file.
If you set it up in the studio (like I do) then you can use the merge feature to update only the geometry changes done in sketchup and not the textures. So all your material/camera setups made in thea will stay the same even when updating the model. It's not a perfect workflow but it gets the job done.
For a better workflow you should look at completely integrated render solutions. But if you do this for sketchup you will be limited by the sketchups limits (no highpoly, only 32 bit (not much ram for rendering,...) so if you find that the workflow sketchup-external renderer is not the one for you, then I would say to do it in blender like you said. This way you will learn how to use blender and you will not find yourself limited so fast as in sketchup. I learned 3dsmax for the couple of months and I must say I really regret not have done it earlier.
I still mainly use sketchup but when I know something is easier in 3dsmax I don't loose my time and do it in there. The renderers are completely integrated (most of them) and it's a real pleasure to work this way.anyway don't be afraid of asking question on the theaforum. The people there will be glad to help you with your lighting questions
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Thanks for taking the time to respond. Good to know more about the Thea workflow. I think I better hold off on coming to any conclusions on Thea until I have a chance to get through some tutorials. I also haven't ventured into the Thea forums. Sort of a chicken or the egg kind of situation. I want to get a sense of a program before I invest too much time into it, but then it's hard to get a sense of it until you do invest some time...
I hear you about the integrated renderers being hamstrung by the SU poly limits. For my still image work, that has not been a problem as I can post-pro things I need to in Photoshop. But for animations, SU plugins really hit a wall. That's why I am looking to jump ship into Blender for movies.
I've dabbled with 3DsMax, but atm I just can't afford the program. Blender's got a great price point!
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@andybot said:
I also haven't ventured into the Thea forums. Sort of a chicken or the egg kind of situation. I want to get a sense of a program before I invest too much time into it, but then it's hard to get a sense of it until you do invest some time...
Perhaps you should start from Thea video tutorials; overview, studio, mini and complex motion case study (revision 627 and afterwards required).
For Thea, best place to get info is naturally Thea forums. Remember to register using same email that was used when Thea was ordered (Naturally most of the forum is available for all users, with or without license, but some areas are only for licensed users). If mail has changed you need to contact to us so proper forum permission can be given, although there is lot of Thea users here too.
For walk troughs I believe watching "Complex Motion Case Study" can help a lot... also some animated dummy object (a small box hidden from rendering that you move around the scene) is helpful as camera targets.
As a render method, perhaps some biased mode is fastest; Final gathering with locked irradiance cache (better disable photon mapping unless all lights are near camera in a closed space) or alternatively the new Adaptive(AMC) with caustics and fairly high Adaptive Bias (%).See you at Thea forums
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Shaderlight will do all the above, i have the licenced version and works great, it did have problems before but the fix beta was released last week and works wonders, it works with su_animate and keyframe animation, what more can you ask for, i would like to see it work with SP but thats something they might consider for future releases ( i hope )
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When I tried I found shaderlight a little too slow. They have a nice integration with sketchup but if it's already slow in stills it must be really time consuming to render an animation. (I must admit I tried it only once and not the latest version so maybe it's faster now)
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Yes it is slow and time consuming but it does render the animations quite well, time again can be hurried by changing the video res output though
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@iichiversii said:
Shaderlight will do all the above... it works with su_animate and keyframe animation, what more can you ask for...
Thanks for the suggestion Damien. Let's see: biased (hopefully speedy) render - check! artficial lighting options - check! simple integration with SU - check! Hopefully I'll have a chance to give it a go soon.
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Any joy with shaderlight??
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Thanks for asking, I haven't had a chance yet. Still making my way through understanding Blender. And my Thea trial...
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@andybot said:
Thanks for asking, I haven't had a chance yet. Still making my way through understanding Blender. And my Thea trial...
Ha iv being trying blender from time to time,, got nowhere, let me know when you get the chance to use shaderlight, im sure you will be impressed, unfortunately in the trial version you cant render animations, but if you would like i could do a test for you also if you look at my blog you will find a short animation i did useing keyframe animation and shaderlight for rendering, its only a quick test, not the best but working on something much better at present
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Thanks for the trial details. Based on this, I will definitely wait on Shaderlight until I can focus on using the trial - after all it's the animation I'm concerned about.
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I just downloaded the trial of LumenRt on Monday and purchaced it on Tuesday. I was very supprized on how fast the program worked. There were several items that I did like about the live cube and several items that I posted on thier forum about and it seems that E-on is working on solving allot of the issues that have been brought up in the past. I am a novice at animation but created this from the live cube. The video is 44 seconds long and out of LumenRT there were 2 -1.4 gig files and another 450 meg file to make 3 sections of the video. It exported the AVI files in under 5 min. and I ran the files thru Handbrake and squashed the crap out of them down to 12 megs. I then used Quicktime to put the files together and again squashed them down to a very nice 6 meg file. This process in total took under an hour, the last video I took out of VUE PLE for 30 seconds took over 8 hours to produce. To say the least I am very happy about my results and the fast animation that LumenRT Produced. I am now in the process of looking into Sketchy Physics and seeing if I can create some moving clouds, people, doors, ect. The face me trees are off of 3d warehouse and am working on gatherig up better examples soon.
My 2 cents
Chris
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Thanks for this info, this is helpful to see the finished result. There are two reasons why this is not what I am looking for as far as rendering. One - this is not really rendered, it's just at game quality. See how sharp the shadows are, how would a semi-enclosed or enclosed area look? Also, the transparency mapping is very poor. Two - I see you are just using SU camera directly - and I am trying to find solutions that have much more control over camera keyframing as well as including object animation. I'd like to know if it supports at least keyframe animation or camera keymaker for example.
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@andybot said:
Thanks for this info, this is helpful to see the finished result. There are two reasons why this is not what I am looking for as far as rendering. One - this is not really rendered, it's just at game quality. See how sharp the shadows are, how would a semi-enclosed or enclosed area look? Also, the transparency mapping is very poor. Two - I see you are just using SU camera directly - and I am trying to find solutions that have much more control over camera keyframing as well as including object animation. I'd like to know if it supports at least keyframe animation or camera keymaker for example.
I dont know if it matters or not, but again this was my first animation with this product, the settings were on the review mode witht he lowest settings (under 1 min processing) I am sure the other 4 modes from 5 to 1 hour will produce better results.
I am sold just on the time process to produce something quick to get into the clients hand for review. If I am really doing post production and real animation I will switch over to 3DS Max design.
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The "Trial" version should give you all the features of the full pro version (which includes animation) but it expires after 14 days, so just register on shaderlight.com and they will send you an activation key which unlocks the pro version.
Once your trial is up Shaderlight will revert to the free version which as iichiversii says does not allow you to use the animation feature.
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