Rendering environments quickly

# 1 22-08-2012 , 04:30 PM

Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2008

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Posts: 229

I've got a project coming down the pipeline that will probably have only one week from finalized animation to rendering... the project will consist of:

Greenscreened image planes inside transparent 3D spheres (a la Super Monkey Ball)
Three environments: Jungle, desert, and Space Station. All envs to be built in Maya, blah blah blah.
8 minutes long

issue: as I mentioned I have a week to render this. Minimum 720 and it MUST be 30P because the camera grabbing greenscreen doesn't do 24 :< So that's an extra 6 frames each second.

My ideal workflow would be building the environments and camera motions and rendering on GPU, but I don't have any GPU renderers. I want things like palm fronds to be moving, so I can't exactly bake GI, AO, or Shadows can I? Plus there's this moving ball. I'm just looking for a way to render quickly-ish. And I'm realizing that in raytracing polycount is far less of an issue than in a game engine, so the answer isn't "Keep your polycount really low" cause high poly just means more RAM and render startup time. It's shaders and lighting. So, what hints do people have on those fronts?

--
Peter Srinivasan
Producer

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# 2 23-08-2012 , 09:19 AM

The Nurb Herd
Join Date: Oct 2007

Location: London

Posts: 2,381

are you going to camera track the shots?
are you building the assets now?

not sure what you are asking, do you need help with the lighting and rendering?

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# 3 24-08-2012 , 06:20 AM

Registered User
Join Date: Jun 2008

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Posts: 229

The camera moves will be built in maya. I'm currently building assets. I wasn't specific enough in my previous post...

My Problem: From the beginning through to the end of the project, I need to plan for fast render speeds and decent visual quality (we're talking 10-20 s/frame on an i7 920)

Possible Solutions:
Low poly geo w/ high res maps
High poly geo w/ medium res maps
baking AO and lighting (what? how?)
Determining the fastest shaders and using those.

The thing is, I can't tell if any of these things have a major effect on render time, except for baking AO, Shadows, and GI. I'm sure that has a huge effect, but my assuption is you can't bake that when you have any moving objects. So I guess the best thing would be for me to figure out how to bake ALL lighting effects except for the lights majorly affected by animated objects. Does this make sense? Is it possible?

--
Peter Srinivasan
Producer

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# 4 24-08-2012 , 09:36 AM

The thin red line
Join Date: Aug 2009

Location: England

Posts: 4,472

Yes you can bake out light maps and occlusion maps this will save a lot of time rendering on those objects, how you render the moving parts will be another thing as they will need full lighting so it makes sence to me to do these in another scene and comp out or Dom might now a better way, as for rez of poly or maps that will depend on how close the camera is and what speed you are passing them............dave

https://download.autodesk.com/global/...ber=d30e545604

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Rendering environments quickly

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