Photorealistic Car Rendering Animation Test..

[morph106]

Hello to all!

I enjoyed watching how the suped-up elipse was rendered in MR but I tried a batch render and it came out with the shadows flickering. I was doing a turntable of the car just to see what it looked like in an animation and I'm assuming its because GI is used. This does not bode well for me as I had hoped to do a car animation through a city.

Can any DT gurus suggest ways of fixing this because I kinda don't know where to go from after watching the dvd.

Thank you guys
JR

nb. and out of curiosity, if I set FG to NOT rebuild, would that help at all..? Thanks nonetheless

[DjVoyager]

I wouldn't suggest using a turntable camera with a complex body of this Eclipse since it works on the basis of the mesh, and using GI might cause glitches in computing the shadows.
One way of achieving your goal is to actually animate the car around a basic frame structure of the city you're gonna be using. Render the city separately though and compose it later with the animating car sequence.
Another way, and a much easier way, would be to animate only the wheels of the car and have the camera keyframe animate around it in such a way that it causes the illusion the car is moving. You can even use multiple cameras. That's how I animated my Eclipse and nobody could tell the difference. It's also a lesser load on GI rendering.
Hope that helps.

[McGergs]

If you are just doing the turntable animation do like DJ said, turn the camera around the car.

-The best way I like to do this is create the camera,

-then group it CTRL+g with camera selected

-Then then keyframe the y roation of the group. Frame 1 at "0 degrees" and frame 301 at "360 degrees".

-This makes it a 10 second NTSC 30 FPS fly around.

-DO a couple renders at different angles with a final gather map with rebuild set to off. Then batch render and it should be fine.

[morph106]

thanks for the advice guys! was hopin' but not expectin' speedy replies.
@ DJ
Im gna take on board what you sed about steering clear of the camera turntable and I marginally understood your approach to animating the wheels and camera to fake the body of my car actually moving. You mentioned that you did an animation test..may I view it sumwea so I can see how it all turned out?
I lyk your suggestion because of that magic word, "easy", lol. Does that mean to say that animating your entire city block (and camera's) to move "around" your car was an easier feat to pull off than it sounds lyk? I'd love to see how yours turned out too if thats okay.
@ McGregs
I'll try what you suggested and hopefully I'll be able to give much praise in about 10 hours, lol :-)

guys, once again, thanks for the helping hand.

[DjVoyager]

Mine's on a DVD and I didn't FG render it , didn't had the patience :p, but here's a quick example. It's GI/FG render with an HDRI image lighting. The camera became a bit jerky but you'll get the idea.

[morph106]

hey DJVoyager

just wanted to say thankyou for helping me out with that lil problem, I've been workin on improving my render settings to get a more realistic look with my car so I'd like to refine that before I proceed to test out the animation. Pretty daunting to think of how I'm gna key the camera and scene to move around the car instead but ill give it a wirl.

I appreciate your help man and if I'm allowed, I'll post my results..!

[DjVoyager]

No prob, and definitely post your results.

When you animate the camera, make sure that you F focus on the car so that it doesn't stray off too much.
Here's an idea: get a video of a car running, pulling in or out. In your mind, erase the road and the background so you would only picture the car's movement. You'll feel the car is not moving at all except for its tires rotating.
I'm not sure how complex your city is gonna be, but if there are lots of turns then don't use the above method. You could but it would be a lot easier to just animate the car instead. The camera technique would be best used for a racing track or an open space.
Good luck!

[colicoid]

If you use final gather it's mostly about bumping up the number of rays. 1500 is usually a good number. It might take you days to render though. Filter size and max radius come into play also.
Be sure to have some direct illumination in your scene to take some pressure of the fg engine.