SAVING Animations (quality)

# 1 28-05-2004 , 11:09 PM

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I have an image I designed in Photoshop, look nice, crisp and clean. Then I went and created a 2D Fluid Animation in MAYA(without an emmiter). The animation does what I want it to do, now I'm ready for saving. So I went through all my settings, Fluid container resolution is at 250 x 250, the photoshop image that I imported into the Fluid container is 72 dpi. I went into the output settings and set it to output GIF's at PRODUCTION QUALITY, and also set the output animation size to be 320 x 240.

Now, when I do the batch render, (firstly it takes 5 hours to render this damn thing) I've rendered it 3 times so far and only come out with 65 Gif's (because the animation is 65 frames) but they all look like shit. I mean the animation when I run it in MAYA looks nice, clean. But when it's finally rendered and I put all the gifs together to animate it, i look at each gif and it looks like broken up molecules, it doesn't even look like the smoke effect that I created in MAYA. (it moves like the smoke, just doesnt look like white smoke) So I want the output to be just as nice as the preview I get in MAYA. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong??

Last edited by cluster; 28-05-2004 at 11:12 PM.

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# 2 28-05-2004 , 11:41 PM

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So, here's the animation that I rendered with Playblast (then saved).
As you can see it looks just the way I want it. However, when I render it at high quality (as stated in the above post) it isn't white or hold the texture at all of the smoke effect like you will see in the AVI below recorded through playblast.

CLICK HERE FOR MY AVI

Any help guys would be great. Imagine this, I have left my pc alone for 5 hours at a time, 3 times now, only to see the rendering job looks like a pacman processor put it together.

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# 3 29-05-2004 , 01:40 PM

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Hi Cluster,

first a couple of questions... user added image

what version of Maya are you using?

are you using MR or the standard render?

what are your rendering settings?

could you e.g. show a couple of rendered image to see how the thingie looks like you are talking about?

the playblast look cool... user added image

are you rendering it out frame by frame, as single images or as an avi?

regards

Strarup

------------------------------------------------
Alex V. U. Strarup

One mistake can ruin it all...

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# 4 29-05-2004 , 01:51 PM

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you're rendering as gifs what did you expect?! user added image

render as tiffs and I'm sure you will notice a sizeable difference in quality. Gifs can only display 256 colours and are a web format not a proper image format.

It will take a long time to render fluids, it might be worth checking out the docs for any possible speed ups you can achieve.

Alan

Technical Director - Framestore

Currently working on: Your Highness

IMDB

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# 5 29-05-2004 , 01:57 PM

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Have you tried rendering out in another format such as .tga or .tif? GIFs are paletted and only 256 colors max. Try one of the other formats and set the quality to production quality in Render Globals. Your quality could also depend on the original file brought into Maya so try to save it as an 8 or 16-bit file (aka tif or tga), assuming the file was created from scratch.

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# 6 29-05-2004 , 01:58 PM

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heh...Pure_Morning beat me to the punch. user added image

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# 7 29-05-2004 , 06:59 PM

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Hi Cluster,

first a couple of questions... Shoot

what version of Maya are you using? 5 Unlimited

are you using MR or the standard render? I'm not sure which one is which. I just play with Render Globals settings, then click BATCH RENDER. Does that answer your question?

what are your rendering settings? It was set to Production Quality as well as the Fluid box itself was set to 250 x 250 Resolution: Then the render size was set to output 320 x 240.

could you e.g. show a couple of rendered image to see how the thingie looks like you are talking about? Here you go, this is a single frame rendered in the middle of the animation.

Frame 16 looks like this as a Production Quality GIF:

the playblast look cool... Thanks

are you rendering it out frame by frame, as single images or as an avi? Frame by frame with file extention name.#.gif, then I assemble it all together in a program like VideoMach.

regards

Strarup

Pure Morning, I can see where you are going with that, I've tried rendering one frame as a Production Quality TIFF (16 bit) vs the Production Quality GIF. And here is the difference:

P.s. That sucker took around 30 minutes to render! I rendered it as a TIFF, then opened it up in Photoshop and saved it as a GIF to lower the size of the file was 247 kb (tiff), now is 10.7 kb (gif) and looks just as clean.

------------

Now, what do you mean by "worth checking out the docs for any possible speed ups you can achieve" ?
Because I can tell you now, I was doing a batch render with gif's and it took over 5 hours each render, it will likely take 20 hours to render Production Quality TIFF's at (16 bit). This would be much help to me. Please let me know what I should do for speed ups. Thanks.

NitroLiq, The file was created from scratch by me in Photoshop. It was saved as a JPG high quality image. I'm looking at the image on my screen right now and it looks nice and crisp.

If I save this is a TIFF (all 65 frames) it will be a huge file for such a small animation. I want this animation to load up on the web in seconds regardless of Internet Connection Speed. So I'll be taking each and every one of the 65 outputted TIFF Images and and re-saving them as GIF's. Is there any programs out there that will take all the outputted files and all in one pop save them as GIFs? I just don't really wanna do all 65 manually, if so, oh well

So, there's a lesson to be learned here, never output as a gif!! Only covert to a GIF after the image has been outputted with Maya as a TIFF.

Cheers. And Thanks.

Originally Posted by

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# 8 29-05-2004 , 07:36 PM

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You should just do render tests at specific frames for testing quality, then once you're satisfied, render the whole thing out as tiffs. Your scnshots look almost totally black on my monitor. DO you have any lights in the scene? If you want, post your scene file and I'll take a look.

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# 9 29-05-2004 , 08:46 PM

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check your pm Nitro

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# 10 31-05-2004 , 06:32 PM

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I actually went ahead and started the rendering of the animation two days ago. And it's only 1/2 way through right now, outputted frame 30 of 65 user added image

Man is this ever taking long.

I didn't manipulate the lighting on it at all, I left it as default.
However, what should I have done to make the smoke effect more prominent?

And one more thing, while rendering, can i cancel the render and continue the render another time without screwing up the output? I ask this because when I roll my mouse overtop of one of the existing 30 outputted files completed so far, I see a change in file size every time I scroll over it. So I'm not sure how Maya distributes the file information, if it distributes additional information to the past 30 rendered images (I'm guessing that's why each time i scroll over it changes its size/KB). Does my question make sense?

Cheers.

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# 11 31-05-2004 , 07:20 PM

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Sounds ridiculously long. Why not just render out one frame to see that it's looking the way you want, first? If you want to render a certain bit at a time, just change it in your render globals to say render frames 1-10....then on another day, render 11-20, etc.

As far as making the smoke effect more prominent, I'm not sure as I don't really use fluids. Have you gone through the manual?

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# 12 31-05-2004 , 07:44 PM

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Indeed ridiculously long..... I'm rendering at PRODUCTION QUALITY, Custom size of 800 x 600, 16bit TIFFS.

My pc is a slow as well, P4 1.7 w/pc133 ram (512 of it) This is what's slowing me down i'm sure.
I'll be upgrading to the AMD 64 bit within the next 2 months. DDR400 Ram (1 gig min), 128 Meg ATI Radeon vid Card (already have this).

As for rendering one image to see if I like it first, I did that.
I like it's look, a bit whiter of smoke would have been nice, but I think it will work nicely once I incorporate other things to it as planned.

Cheers.

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