The Return of LightUp (house WIP)
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After years using only Lumion, I decided I wanted to be able to create animations on a laptop. Specifically, a 2013 Macbook Air. This thing doesn't even have a discrete GPU, so this rules out almost all renderers available on the market. Since I had some success with LightUp in the past, I started experimenting with it again.
It has not been easy: The Intel graphics in a Macbook Air is a weak insect compared to the NVIDIA GPU I have in my PC. I've had to reduce polygons, reduce materials, and I also made sure all my textures are square powers of 2, just in case. Still, I get lots of bugsplats, but I'm learning to handle it. This feels like learning some dark art. Who in his right mind would try to render an animation on an Air?
Still, here's the first decent video (ground floor only... working upstairs right now). Comments are welcome. It took 7h30m to render @1080p with motion blur.
I'm thinking on getting a 13-inch Macbook Pro. The Intel Iris Pro in the 2017 MBP has 3x the graphics power of the 2013 MBA, according to the Passmark scores (˜1500 vs ˜500). Call me crazy, but I'm intent on being able to work from a 13-inch Macbook. If anyone knows of another animation renderer that can work on my machine, I'm all ears.
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Very nice and interesting.
A couple of things caught my eye:
- I like the fact that you can see action on the TV screen. Animated textures is a nice attribute.* I found the texture of the metal on the refrigerator pretty interesting as well. A tiny bit too reflective for me but the basic texture was very nice to me.
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Well done!
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Nice, very effective.
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Thank you, guys.
Dave, the reflection in the fridge (and in other places) had a roughness setting that was ignored in the rendered video. I just wrote the developer about this.
Here's a more complete video. I'll add a piano track and also an alternate version of the living room with the projection screen up:
So, does anyone know of another renderer for animations that can work on a Macbook with Intel Graphics? I'm eager to try alternatives!
Strangely, this time it took 12 hours to render 3 minutes of video, so it was faster than my previous 1-minute test, despite not really having changed anything... Except leaving the A/C on all night to keep the Macbook cool. Does anyone have a 2016 or 2017 13-inch Macbook and LightUp? Wanna run a little benchmark?
EDIT: It's weird, but YouTube has trouble with straight-from-LightUp videos, adding more than a minute of a static image with no motion at the end. I hope this goes away after I edit them with iMovie.
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Finally, here's the finished product!
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