I'm glad to see it working Dave! I think a better preset will make a big difference (but it will take more time).
When rendering animations, the render preset becomes very important. A lot of the rendering techniques used, especially for indirect lighting, are based on random numbers. And while this works great for stills, the minor variations in lighting become very noticeable in an animation. This is one of the big differences between the Animation presets and regular: they have certain aspects disabled to reduce the variations.
I'm working on some render presets that I hope have even better response in animations, and are more optimized to improve speed. The render that I posted over at SketchUcation (and below) was done with one of these presets. The uniformity of color is much better and there is pretty much no flicker. It has been optimized to remove all refractions and transparency for speed (but an identical preset with transparency enabled would be included as well, just not as fast).
@Pilou, are you looking in the right place? Are you able to render a 'natural' video (generated from SketchUp frames)? If you click on the 'Animator - Player for Clips' button, then click the 'Generate a video' button, it should open up the "Generation of Video" window. If you have installed Animator 1.0x (or later) and Twilight Render 2.5.5 (from the Beta tester forum on SketchUcation), the window should show Twilight Render as an option for Rendering. If not, double check that you have the necessary versions in place (and that you've restarted SketchUp).
Animator Prep
Re: Animator Prep
Chris, I am trying a different settings (Animation - Preview Object Animation) and it says it will take around 7 hrs. That is much better than the 41+ hours when I tried Low+.
Is there any way you can share the preset you are working with so I could test it?
Is there any way you can share the preset you are working with so I could test it?
Re: Animator Prep
Yeah, I'll get a couple of them together and you can try it.
What size are you rendering at? How many frames?
Definitely get rid of any metal material. I think that is going to cause some long render times and bad quality. Also, is the glass in your car windows set to Architectural Glass? If not, it probably should be.
Would you mind sharing the scene (with the animator data in it)? You can PM (I think) if you want. It's easier to figure out how it can be improved (speed-wise) by actually looking at the scene.
What size are you rendering at? How many frames?
Definitely get rid of any metal material. I think that is going to cause some long render times and bad quality. Also, is the glass in your car windows set to Architectural Glass? If not, it probably should be.
Would you mind sharing the scene (with the animator data in it)? You can PM (I think) if you want. It's easier to figure out how it can be improved (speed-wise) by actually looking at the scene.
Re: Animator Prep
Hi Dave. I had a look at the model you sent and there a couple of things that need to be fixed and a couple of things that can be done to improve your render times.
First off, the biggest issue are your two lights in the scene. A very important (but unwritten) rule is that lights should never intersect geometry. I've made a note to include that in our lighting tutorial because I don't think it's in there. If you have a lot of grainy noise in your scene, it is almost always because of lights intersecting the geometry.
If you need to create a "hemisphere" of light, instead of light in all directions, use a spotlight with falloff and hotspot set to 180 deg. This will prevent unnaturally bright areas on the ceiling around your light but will still shine on your entire scene.
Second, don't use translucent or subsurface materials when render speed is important (this includes lampglass and the new realistic water templates). These materials are very slow. They look great for product renders but are usually too expensive for animations.
Your light fixtures were using a translucent 'shade' to diffuse the light from the two lights to make a fluorescent-type light fixture. For this case, it's much better to apply an Emitter template to those light shade faces, making sure to set them to 'Fake Emitter'. That will give them the glow appearance but they are rocket-fast to render.
Those are the two big must-fix issues. Everything else below is recommendations on how you can improve your scene in both render quality and speed.
1. Don't use metal materials, if it can be avoided. The metals tend to create noise that is acceptable in a static render but tends to result in dancing sparkles in an animation. Better to use the Plastic -> Shiny template and increase the IOR to ~2 and the shininess to ~250. From there you can play with the color to get the right look.
2. The car paint material kind of falls under the same category as metals, though not as much. You can probably get away with a shiny plastic and it will render faster.
3. Use Architectural Glass, instead of standard glass. The car windows are standard glass. Switching them over to Architectural Glass will not only make the render faster, but will actually make it look more realistic (because the windows are single-sided; always use Architectural Glass with single sided geometry).
4. Here's something that even surprised me: You have a large unbroken plane of concreted in the foreground which reasonably had a stone template applied to it, however, if you change that template to Flat::Flat, the speed increase is almost 2x. What I think was happening is that the large reflective area (the stone template like most templates has some amount of reflectivity) was almost like rendering the scene twice (maybe?).
5. Depending on the preset you use, you may find yourself needing more light in the scene. For your scene, I switched your background lighting from Background Color to Sky Color, and set the color to white. Because you have one side open, this provided quite a lot of light. From there, I adjusted the render Exposure to get the right level of lighting. After that, I found that the 2 lights in the scene weren't even needed and disabled them.
By combining those changes, I was able to reduce the render time from 2 minutes per frame to about 15 seconds per frame.
Hopefully that helps put you on a good path. Keep us up to date with your progress.
First off, the biggest issue are your two lights in the scene. A very important (but unwritten) rule is that lights should never intersect geometry. I've made a note to include that in our lighting tutorial because I don't think it's in there. If you have a lot of grainy noise in your scene, it is almost always because of lights intersecting the geometry.
If you need to create a "hemisphere" of light, instead of light in all directions, use a spotlight with falloff and hotspot set to 180 deg. This will prevent unnaturally bright areas on the ceiling around your light but will still shine on your entire scene.
Second, don't use translucent or subsurface materials when render speed is important (this includes lampglass and the new realistic water templates). These materials are very slow. They look great for product renders but are usually too expensive for animations.
Your light fixtures were using a translucent 'shade' to diffuse the light from the two lights to make a fluorescent-type light fixture. For this case, it's much better to apply an Emitter template to those light shade faces, making sure to set them to 'Fake Emitter'. That will give them the glow appearance but they are rocket-fast to render.
Those are the two big must-fix issues. Everything else below is recommendations on how you can improve your scene in both render quality and speed.
1. Don't use metal materials, if it can be avoided. The metals tend to create noise that is acceptable in a static render but tends to result in dancing sparkles in an animation. Better to use the Plastic -> Shiny template and increase the IOR to ~2 and the shininess to ~250. From there you can play with the color to get the right look.
2. The car paint material kind of falls under the same category as metals, though not as much. You can probably get away with a shiny plastic and it will render faster.
3. Use Architectural Glass, instead of standard glass. The car windows are standard glass. Switching them over to Architectural Glass will not only make the render faster, but will actually make it look more realistic (because the windows are single-sided; always use Architectural Glass with single sided geometry).
4. Here's something that even surprised me: You have a large unbroken plane of concreted in the foreground which reasonably had a stone template applied to it, however, if you change that template to Flat::Flat, the speed increase is almost 2x. What I think was happening is that the large reflective area (the stone template like most templates has some amount of reflectivity) was almost like rendering the scene twice (maybe?).
5. Depending on the preset you use, you may find yourself needing more light in the scene. For your scene, I switched your background lighting from Background Color to Sky Color, and set the color to white. Because you have one side open, this provided quite a lot of light. From there, I adjusted the render Exposure to get the right level of lighting. After that, I found that the 2 lights in the scene weren't even needed and disabled them.
By combining those changes, I was able to reduce the render time from 2 minutes per frame to about 15 seconds per frame.
Hopefully that helps put you on a good path. Keep us up to date with your progress.
Re: Animator Prep
Chris, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this for me and giving me, and others, things to look at constructively. I am creating a movie right now to see how it looks. Afterward, I am going to go through the changes you made more thoroughly so I can understand and learn from them.
Before I did this, I did go to another copy of the file and moved the overhead lights just to see the impact. I clearly see what you mean and the mistake I made/was making.
I have a really silly and newbie question. You use the term preset in several cases. Maybe I have not read enough but I would like a little insight into how you are using the term and what it means.
Before I did this, I did go to another copy of the file and moved the overhead lights just to see the impact. I clearly see what you mean and the mistake I made/was making.
I have a really silly and newbie question. You use the term preset in several cases. Maybe I have not read enough but I would like a little insight into how you are using the term and what it means.
Re: Animator Prep
Chris, I generated a movie and I do not think I changed anything (but possibly I did change the render setting). Here is the result:
This is much better than my first render but is still needs some work. In particular:
Chris, you mentioned that you had created a render. Would you mind sharing it with us?
This is much better than my first render but is still needs some work. In particular:
- It has an overall tint that I need to adjust
- It still has a flickering - this might be because I inadvertently selected the wrong render setting. It was done with 4) Animation - 01. Low+ Object Animation (Chris, I hope that is what you had it set at)
- The color of the car is kind of week but I can probably tweak that somewhat
- Using the Architecture Glass setting produces a result that I was definitely trying to avoid. If you watch as the car passes under the spray, it passes through the windshield and makes it look like the water is going inside the car. Definitely not where you would take your car.
- In my previous render, I had used the background color as a suggestion from Fletch. In some ways, it seem to give me better control of the lighting inside the building
- I also need to learn how to make the water look a little better (color and brightness (especially on the spray by the wheels).
Chris, you mentioned that you had created a render. Would you mind sharing it with us?
Re: Animator Prep
Hi Dave, sorry for not getting back right away. PayPal decided yesterday to throw a fit with our webstore so I've been trying to figure that out. 
With that in mind, it turns out that the best way to get smooth lighting is to not use the background for lighting. Direct lighting from actual lights (spotlights in particular) provide the most consistent light. In the edits I made to your scene, I turned off the spotlights and set the background to Sky Color. While this makes great static renders and fast too, it doesn't work well at all for animations because the indirect lighting is so inconsistent.
I recommend turning the lights back on and setting the background back to Background Color. You will probably have to add another one or two lights to the scene to provide fill lighting (to brighten up the scene in general) and probably increase the intensity of all the lights alot. But I think this will render a lot more smoothly.
As I said, I'm working on the best presets for object animation and some of this is new to me.
I'm going to keep working on it, and try to identify the better settings for object animation (especially because we want to see people start using Animator and MSPhysics for some great animations!).
Definitely. So I don't do alot of animations so some of the render settings that affect animation are a bit new to me. The flickering is the major problem with animations. It all comes down to indirect lighting, lighting that bounces off a wall and illuminates around a corner (or whatever). I'm working out the best render settings to give consistent results with indirect illumination.ntxdave wrote: 2. It still has a flickering - this might be because I inadvertently selected the wrong render setting. It was done with 4) Animation - 01. Low+ Object Animation (Chris, I hope that is what you had it set at)
With that in mind, it turns out that the best way to get smooth lighting is to not use the background for lighting. Direct lighting from actual lights (spotlights in particular) provide the most consistent light. In the edits I made to your scene, I turned off the spotlights and set the background to Sky Color. While this makes great static renders and fast too, it doesn't work well at all for animations because the indirect lighting is so inconsistent.
I recommend turning the lights back on and setting the background back to Background Color. You will probably have to add another one or two lights to the scene to provide fill lighting (to brighten up the scene in general) and probably increase the intensity of all the lights alot. But I think this will render a lot more smoothly.
As I said, I'm working on the best presets for object animation and some of this is new to me.
Agreed. In that case, I recommend just making the glass into a very reflective black plastic. Kind of like heavily tinted glass.ntxdave wrote: 4. Using the Architecture Glass setting produces a result that I was definitely trying to avoid. If you watch as the car passes under the spray, it passes through the windshield and makes it look like the water is going inside the car. Definitely not where you would take your car.
Yes, I think that will work better. I think the results will be much cleaner.ntxdave wrote: 5. In my previous render, I had used the background color as a suggestion from Fletch. In some ways, it seem to give me better control of the lighting inside the building
I'm going to keep working on it, and try to identify the better settings for object animation (especially because we want to see people start using Animator and MSPhysics for some great animations!).
Re: Animator Prep
Thanks Chris. Again, I am not trying to be a pain as I would like to help move this forward. Even thought I am pretty new to this and have a ton to learn, I did some messing around this morning around this morning. I kind of went back to my starting point and tried to do some of my own testing. Yes, I found the window can be solved my messing around with setting other than glass. I also did some messing around with car paint and found I can make some adjustments there as well. Another thing I did just to see the impact was change the concrete block wall to just a plain color. I also went back to the background color and made it white. Each of these had some impact but none of them produced the results I think any of us are looking for. I still need to play with the lights more to lean how to set them up correctly. At this point in time, I think the quality of the render is the primary target and the render time, while important, needs to take a back seat.
I got fairly close on a couple of occasions. One of them was looking pretty but I wound up with a pretty grainy image. The flickering was pretty much gone but the graininess was not acceptable either. Believe me, I can certainly understand no getting any kind of quick response (although I have to admit I kept hoping for one ). I am certainly willing to keep trying and experimenting as long as you and the rest of the Twilight Render team are willing to put up with me. From what I have seen others doing with Animator and MSPhysics, I think finding a way to have good NPR renders of animations could be a big hit for your product and would like to help.
I have a couple of abbreviated examples of stuff I did earlier today that I could share via PM/email but would prefer not to put them on youtube of post them here because I stopped them and they are only partial but might give some indications of the things I have messed with.
Again, I am very appreciative of the attention you are giving this and the patience you are exhibiting in dealing with me.
I got fairly close on a couple of occasions. One of them was looking pretty but I wound up with a pretty grainy image. The flickering was pretty much gone but the graininess was not acceptable either. Believe me, I can certainly understand no getting any kind of quick response (although I have to admit I kept hoping for one
). I am certainly willing to keep trying and experimenting as long as you and the rest of the Twilight Render team are willing to put up with me. From what I have seen others doing with Animator and MSPhysics, I think finding a way to have good NPR renders of animations could be a big hit for your product and would like to help. I have a couple of abbreviated examples of stuff I did earlier today that I could share via PM/email but would prefer not to put them on youtube of post them here because I stopped them and they are only partial but might give some indications of the things I have messed with.
Again, I am very appreciative of the attention you are giving this and the patience you are exhibiting in dealing with me.
Re: Animator Prep
Well, I think I have some progress to share here. I stopped the generation of the video a little over 2 hours into it and it had about another hour to go. However, notice that I do not have any flickering in it.
So the questions are what did and do and what were my settings:
Again, for me the significance is seeing a step forward. Perhaps the Twilight team can find additional improvements for me and maybe find a way to speed up the render speed for animations. But lets first concentrate on quality because that is the first priority (IMO). Speed can be addressed once a path to good quality is established.
As always, feel free to share your opinions.
Twilight Staff/Moderator - feel free to relocate this thread if you feel there would be a better place. Maybe a whole not category for animation issues since you are working with both Animator and MSPhysics. I bet the results issues are going to be pretty similar.
So the questions are what did and do and what were my settings:
- I removed the concrete block wall texture and replaced it with a solid color
- I set the TR material to Paint:Custom
- I set the ceiling and floor to color textures in SU and then used the Paint:Flat Enamel for both of them
- I added to Sport lights with the settings of: Size:25.00 Power: 900W Efficacy: 13.00 Fall Off: 180 Hot Spot: 180 and I turned off Shadow
- For the Environment I used Background Color: White and for Post Processor-Simple, I have Eposure: 2.40 and Gamma 1.40
- The render setting was: 4)Animation 01. Low+ Object Animation
Again, for me the significance is seeing a step forward. Perhaps the Twilight team can find additional improvements for me and maybe find a way to speed up the render speed for animations. But lets first concentrate on quality because that is the first priority (IMO). Speed can be addressed once a path to good quality is established.
As always, feel free to share your opinions.
Twilight Staff/Moderator - feel free to relocate this thread if you feel there would be a better place. Maybe a whole not category for animation issues since you are working with both Animator and MSPhysics. I bet the results issues are going to be pretty similar.
Re: Animator Prep
I think you are on the right track. Direct lighting is the key, I think, to a clear animation (and really, a well lit seen will always render better).
Here is an animation I've made. It uses the two upper spot lights as in the original scene, but I've added a fill light behind and left of the camera. I disabled shadows on the fill light (just as you did) but left shadows on the two upper lights. But in addition, in the Light Editor, I turned of Global Photons and Caustic Photons for the fill light, and turned off Caustics Photons for the upper lights. I don't know if it does much for the flickering but it should help with render speed.
This also uses a special optimized preset (don't worry, I will post them! they just aren't complete yet). This specific preview has refraction/transparency disabled (for speed) so the water uses a solid plastic template. On three threads, this rendered each frame in 18 seconds, so the whole thing took just over 2 hours (and my laptop isn't very powerful). So I think this is pretty doable.
Here is an animation I've made. It uses the two upper spot lights as in the original scene, but I've added a fill light behind and left of the camera. I disabled shadows on the fill light (just as you did) but left shadows on the two upper lights. But in addition, in the Light Editor, I turned of Global Photons and Caustic Photons for the fill light, and turned off Caustics Photons for the upper lights. I don't know if it does much for the flickering but it should help with render speed.
This also uses a special optimized preset (don't worry, I will post them! they just aren't complete yet). This specific preview has refraction/transparency disabled (for speed) so the water uses a solid plastic template. On three threads, this rendered each frame in 18 seconds, so the whole thing took just over 2 hours (and my laptop isn't very powerful). So I think this is pretty doable.
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