Fredo6's Animator integration ?

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ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:53 pm

Chris, that is great news. As I said before, I am a beta tester for Animator so I would be happy to give it a try. Will it require the Pro version?

I do have one concern and that is the render time. Given the render time for the previous image, I could imagine an animation with several hundred frames could take hours. But the bottom line would be the final results :)

Chris
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by Chris » Wed Jun 22, 2016 2:58 pm

The plan is to make it available as a Pro feature only, yes.

Animations do take time. That is the major draw back. There are different ways to improve that, such as keeping your materials simple, simple lighting but a very well-lit scene, hiding any geometry not visible in the scene, etc. But in the end, it's ultimately up to just letting it run.

ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Wed Jun 22, 2016 3:13 pm

OK - looks like I better get started learning Twilight better and see if I can find the money for the upgrade. I am a retired guy that does about 4 hours of commercial work a month for a company that builds car washes. I only do layouts of the car wash and that does not require rendering. I would love to be able to show them a rendered animation. Most of the stuff I do with SketchUp is for my own enjoyment and education.

I am certainly no expert (and not an engineer) but I do have fun trying to learn. The world of 3D and rendered 3D is moving rapidly. When I look at tools like Twilight, Thea, LumenRT, Lumion, and Twinmotion coupled with tools like Animator I see some WOW stuff in the future.

ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Wed Jun 22, 2016 8:23 pm

Thanks for the tips Chris. I made a few adjustments and think this one is much better (IMHO)........
Medium+
Medium+
Pendulum v9.jpg (258.73 KiB) Viewed 10514 times
Biggest concern here is that it took 17:15 for the render. I know that going down to Low or Low+ would speed it up a lot but are there some settings I can check to maybe speed this up? If I had a 500 frame animation, would it take 17:15 x 500 (8575:00) or almost 142 hours? Hope I am drastically over estimating.

Not complaining - just trying to understand the potential here because I am liking what I see and excited about where this could be going.

Chris
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by Chris » Thu Jun 23, 2016 2:06 am

17 minutes seems really high. How many CPU cores do you have? A lot of it comes down to raw power and how fast your computer is.

One important point is that, when rendering an animation you don't use the same render presets in order to avoid flickering. So try out the Animation presets and see if you get better time (they should actually render faster with somewhat less quality).

ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:02 pm

Here is what my systems looks like:
System.PNG
System.PNG (9.81 KiB) Viewed 10505 times
I also have the NVIDIA Geforce GTX 765m graphics card with 2Gb of memory.

I will have a look at the animation presets and see what happens. I will keep experimenting because I really would like to see this happen. I really appreciate your responses. If you would rather do this via PM just let me know.

Chris
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by Chris » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:30 pm

Your specs look pretty good. 17 minutes for that render though... that's a lot. If you rendered on High, try Low/Low+. A lot of times it's perfectly acceptable results at much, much faster speed.

Also, avoid the brushed metal materials (it looks like your frame is brushed metal?). They tend to create noisy results.

ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Thu Jun 23, 2016 4:49 pm

Chris, I tried 3 different settings:
00 - Preview Object Animation - 00:59
02 - Medium + Object Animation - 19:30
00 - Interior Animation 100 (Unbiased) - 5:39 stopped at (10/100)

BTW: How much difference does the number of Threads make (in either quality or time)? All of my renders are being done with 8 threads. Should I reduce that?

I also need to look at your animation capabilities a little also. Can I do something like the animation I posted before in this thread (where the car moves and some sprays turn on and the equipment is animated)?
Again, just trying to understand.

Your post came in while I was typing mine so here is my response to your post:
Chris wrote:Your specs look pretty good. 17 minutes for that render though... that's a lot. If you rendered on High, try Low/Low+. A lot of times it's perfectly acceptable results at much, much faster speed.

Also, avoid the brushed metal materials (it looks like your frame is brushed metal?). They tend to create noisy results.
The 17:15 time was using Medium+ I have tried Low+ and it was OK but of course the higher setting gives better quality but yes the speed was much faster.
For the metal, I used Aluminum.

Chris
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by Chris » Thu Jun 23, 2016 5:07 pm

The more threads, the faster it will go. I will often do all but one thread if I'm working on something else while rendering. If you are just letting it run, though, all threads will usually be the fastest.

The Animation Editor is available to hobby users. It uses SketchUp's builtin animation control so in order to animate geometry you have to use a plugin that is compatible with that. KeyFrame and Proper Animation both work. I know KeyFrame is no longer free but they do have a trial period. Otherwise, you can animate the viewpoint just like you would with any SketchUp animation (using scenes, etc.).

I would try replacing your metal material with a shiny plastic. Metal can be time consuming to render nicely. Also, remove any geometry that isn't necessary to the scene (for instance, does the car have interior geometry?).

ntxdave
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Re: Fredo6's Animator integration ?

Post by ntxdave » Thu Jun 23, 2016 5:11 pm

OK - I just tried the Low+ for a comparison. The time was 4:31 (much more acceptable).
Medium+ render 17:15
Medium+ render 17:15
Pendulum v9.jpg (258.73 KiB) Viewed 10502 times
Low+ render 4:31
Low+ render 4:31
Pendulum v9Low+.jpg (262.08 KiB) Viewed 10502 times
WOW - viewed together, I actually like the Low+ a little better. Maybe I messed with the Environment on the medium+ and I did nothing for the low+.

Given what I am looking at, I can just imagine what this would look like with Animator.......................... :whoot:

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