CODES WITHIN CODES
I think it's been over a week now since I have been following a schedule inspired by The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown who, as I wrote in a previous post, wakes up really early and gets his writing out of the way by the afternoon. I haven't been getting quite as early as him, but I have to say I've been greatly enjoying getting a full day of production in by 3:00 PM. I get so much more done. This reminded me that there were a few things I forgot to mention recently with all the discussion on content delivery.
I want to talk about a few things in Vue, and the first one is radosity. I tend to try and avoid radiosity not only for reasons of speed, but also because I am making anime. It would be overkill. Trying to get a painterly look out of backgrounds rendered with radiosity would be just that much more work. In some cases, however, the techniques commonly used to get around radiosity may not be as effective as one might think, especially in Vue.
In the above image, I originally set it up using radiosity with the idea that once I had what I wanted, I would switch it over to something simpler and just fake it. After I got the scene setup and then textured my mountains, placed my fog, and had all the elements in place, I was shocked to find that dropping radiosity wasn't helping anything speed wise. The next logical step from radiosity is global illumination. It took just as long. Then there's ambient occlusion, global ambience and finally just a plain old render. Of course each one looked progressively worse. To make the plain render look even close to viewable, I had to add in extra lights to fake the lack of fill from the atmosphere. At best it saved me a minute on a 12 minute render and it looked half as good!
So I was faced with a puzzle that would have Prefessor Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code, stumped. The solution? Use radiosity! That's what I did. That's what you see above. You know how they say, "There's fast, cheap and good. Pick two." Trying to go for the faster render time, in this case, just wasn't worth what ended up on screen. I guess I can be grateful that in the anime world, I only have to render the background once.
Radiosity isn't the only destroyer of images though. In this forest scene, I found out that playing with fog can be like playing with fire on your render times. How you place fog in a scene, in this case meaning metaclouds, can really wreak havoc on your speed. The same cloud rotated one way, or closer or further from the camera can matter quite a bit. Getting inside the cloud is yet another story. The advantage though is no more linear fog in the distance like the old days. You place it where you want it and you have complete control. You can even animate it, not just moving the entire cloud, but animating the procedural texture which makes up the cloud too. Might be a bit much for a 2D influenced show, but it's nice to know that kind of power is there. I've gotten great results rendering a single cloud on black to screen over scenes in post as well. More about those kinds of tricks later.
I want to talk about a few things in Vue, and the first one is radosity. I tend to try and avoid radiosity not only for reasons of speed, but also because I am making anime. It would be overkill. Trying to get a painterly look out of backgrounds rendered with radiosity would be just that much more work. In some cases, however, the techniques commonly used to get around radiosity may not be as effective as one might think, especially in Vue.
In the above image, I originally set it up using radiosity with the idea that once I had what I wanted, I would switch it over to something simpler and just fake it. After I got the scene setup and then textured my mountains, placed my fog, and had all the elements in place, I was shocked to find that dropping radiosity wasn't helping anything speed wise. The next logical step from radiosity is global illumination. It took just as long. Then there's ambient occlusion, global ambience and finally just a plain old render. Of course each one looked progressively worse. To make the plain render look even close to viewable, I had to add in extra lights to fake the lack of fill from the atmosphere. At best it saved me a minute on a 12 minute render and it looked half as good!
So I was faced with a puzzle that would have Prefessor Langdon, the hero of The Da Vinci Code, stumped. The solution? Use radiosity! That's what I did. That's what you see above. You know how they say, "There's fast, cheap and good. Pick two." Trying to go for the faster render time, in this case, just wasn't worth what ended up on screen. I guess I can be grateful that in the anime world, I only have to render the background once.
Radiosity isn't the only destroyer of images though. In this forest scene, I found out that playing with fog can be like playing with fire on your render times. How you place fog in a scene, in this case meaning metaclouds, can really wreak havoc on your speed. The same cloud rotated one way, or closer or further from the camera can matter quite a bit. Getting inside the cloud is yet another story. The advantage though is no more linear fog in the distance like the old days. You place it where you want it and you have complete control. You can even animate it, not just moving the entire cloud, but animating the procedural texture which makes up the cloud too. Might be a bit much for a 2D influenced show, but it's nice to know that kind of power is there. I've gotten great results rendering a single cloud on black to screen over scenes in post as well. More about those kinds of tricks later.
3 Comments:
Is it ok if I post off the topic of the current article? I wanted to go back to a past conversation about endorphin. Since then, I've been checking things out, and have come across the opinion that motionbuilder is best for character animation, whereas Endorphin is more for collision physcics. Well. Both are out of my range. So here is something I'm considering for myself: Truespace 7.5. It looks like it has some features similar to motionbuilder, like the ability to edit and blend motion capture, and it has real time rendering. I'll be checking it out as I learn Poser 7.
Hey TW not sure if you ever been to D7.com. they just go done with there 1st episode. its so sweet man you guy are kick butt. hes letting ppl check it out for free for a whole day so you need to go look at it before sunday 7am .
tyler: not sure you would want to add truespace have you played with it before i mean it a full on app not just a rigging program. i downloaded a demo of Life forms 4.0 it claims to work with lwo files and export same so you can do all your motion from within it... dude that program feels and looks out dated. interface gets me dizzy. well i have 18 more days to test it out. well cya
Hey Cali,
I don't know yet how well truespace might work with lightwave or not. I think right now they are focusing more on rewriting the software rather than compatibility with others, but I understand version 7.51 has more export options. I believe that with the .01 patch they now have .obj and collada export, but I don't think they have .lwo.
I guess I'll be finding out for myself how well they work together, since LW is the only full-featured, top 5 3D software I have.
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