Long Animation Render Times

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 23, 2011 at 7:30pm

Render window command line mentions nothing about passes to it appears as if it is changing between scenes where layers are turning on.

The animation atempts to 'grow' buildings from the ground plane using active section planes. Similarly following the buildings, lightpoles, then trees, people and finally cars 'grow' from the ground. Following this, the scenes are all the same (same active layers) as the views change to create the ground level fly through.

The active sections and combination layers on and off took me hours to work out! Seems now that the process is causing the animation grief :(

Im definately not running out of RAM...hovering at around 50% only.

This animation is not even the whole thing..just the start as a test to see how the active planes look animated...ill send the model via you send it to support@renderplus.com

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 23, 2011 at 7:37pm

Funnily enough too, yesterday i ran ccleaner while the animation was stalled and once it was completed (deleted temp files etc.) the animation kicked started immediately and completed the animation within an hour or so! Unfortunately ALL of the materials were lost and the render looked like snow!! Obviously all of the materials/texture maps etc. are stored in a temp file somewhere and they are causing the animation to stick...

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 23, 2011 at 10:21pm

We store all rendering information in a sub-folder of your temporary folder, so your cleaner removed them all.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 25, 2011 at 1:28pm

It turns out that the trees in your model are too complex for us to handle. But I have a fix I can suggest.

 

This model has a bunch of leaves which are components and each component contains a SketchUp Image with a picture of a leaf on it.

 

Our current logic has to make a new rendering material for every image even if the same image is repeated multiple times in components. (For faces which share the same material, we only have to make one rendering material and can then reuse if for each face.)

 

So, if you explode the images into faces, then we will process them much, much faster. An Image is very much like a Face with a material. (If you explode an image it turns into a face with a material). After you explode them, we can process them much more efficiently.

 

If you enter (for edit) each component which contains an image (e.g. "leaf1"), and explode it's image, then it will be exploded for all components with the same name. This should make things go much faster. (It may be faster to do this by placing an instance of each leaf component into the model, editing it and exploding the image - will will explode the image in all instances of the same leaf - and then just delete the dummy leaf.)

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 25, 2011 at 5:23pm

Thanks for your help with this Al. these trees are great and i have used them in a few larger models and had problems so im really looking forward to the results being positive.

 

I know slighlty off topic but can you shed any light on section planes in sketchup...why is it that my section planes will not save their finishing location...i have them activate at ground level and then move up to just above the model height...they keep moving to WAY above the model which seems to be affecting how quickly the model 'grows'...do the section planes have a default location that cant be altered? I worked out that i needed to make them visible and then shift them in the scenes and then update the scenes but the 'upper' ones seem to want to stay up up up in the air!

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 25, 2011 at 8:16pm

Hi Al,

i have simplified the faces on the trees and BANG! Animation took maybe 5mins to process and the rendering started immediately...THANKYOU.

Early times yet but im going to produce a 33 sec promo to upload and show. 10 frames/sec and 5 passes only at this stage to give me an idea of what it will look like but so far so good.

The trees are great and worth the trouble and i appreciate your analysis of them to help sort this issue. I have been working on this for over 12 months and not been able to come to a solution.

PS i had another go at saving the section planes and they appear to be locked now...took special interest in moving, updating scenes and saving the model step by step. closing out and then re-opening to make sure they stay!!!

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 25, 2011 at 10:55pm

Rich is working on a change to the rendering engine which will process the "Image" leaves better.

 

We don't animate section planes yet (e.g. between scenes). Have you been able to get them to work properly at scene changes yet? If you need them we may have to work on this more.

 

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 25, 2011 at 11:24pm

Hi Al,

The animation test is still running but should complete in the next hour or two. The answer to the animated section planes is hard to answer becuase i havnt been able to see an animation yet but looking at the animation being created it looks as if the layers 'flick' or 'appear' as opposed to 'grow' via a section plane at ground level moving to a section plane in the sky. They work and look good in sketchup but not from what i can see in irender nxt animation.

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 26, 2011 at 1:42am

Hi Al,

The animation has completed and looks ok (took 5 hours or so)...scenes do not animate as you thought...this would be a very good addition to the functionality...is this difficult to add? My animation does not have the impact i hoped it would without the moving section planes.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 26, 2011 at 8:28am

We are doing some other work on animations, and we will see if we can implement this,

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Permalink Reply by Michael Silvy on May 29, 2011 at 10:39pm

Hi Al,

My large animation continues...should be finished for review in 24 hours or so but i just noticed a strange occurance with the people within the model.

For some reason the animation has reversed/flipped the orientation of the people (they are 'face me' people) and rendered them with coloured clothing as per original colours i guess...i have made all the people translucent black glass and thats how they appear in the sketchup model. Any ideas why this might have occurred??? When i have rendered the scenes individually i have not had this problem!

Great to hear animated section planes can be added as a feature...this will really make animations special.

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Permalink Reply by Render Plus on May 30, 2011 at 9:21am

Face me people are only going to face the camera on the first frame, and at any frames which reload the geometry - e.g. when there is a layer change at a SketchUp scene. (The rendering engine does not have a "Face Me" concept, so we send them a rotation for the item based on the view whenever we load the geometry - but not just for a view change.)

 

As a result, there are probably scenes in which you are seeing the back side of the person. You could turn off "face me" in SketchUp, temporarily, to see what the person looks like from the other side. You may need to place the same material changes on the back. However, there will still be some views in which you find yourself looking at a person from the side.

 

We will have a similar problem with RPC people - since we only process the geometry from the proper direction when we load the geometry.

 

Here is a short animation showing how people rotate, rather than always facing the camera during an animation:

 

 

One thing we sometimes do with trees to help with this is to place them in a criss-cross fashion, rather than always face camera. This probably works better for 2D trees then people.

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