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Author Topic: Animation - Random from Geometry  (Read 5435 times)

Richard Birket

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Animation - Random from Geometry
« on: September 24, 2010, 10:54:29 AM »
I wonder if you could help me understand this parameter?

I have a single TreeStorm tree with wind animation enabled. I have about 12 of these trees within an FP object. Upon rendering, all the trees move exactly the same way, and it looks very unnatural. I assume the 'Random from Geometry' option will help me here, but I am not sure how it will work (it takes a very long time to render so I'd rather know first)?

Does this option eneable me to randomly offset the animation, for example, one of the frames starts animating from frame 0, the adjacent tree starts its animation loop from frame 12, the next loops from 7 etc etc?

(Ideally, I don't want to create additional TreeStorm trees with unique wind animation seeds as I fear additional trees will use a lot more ram to render, and it will be even slower...but I might be wrong about this)
Kind Regards,
Rich

www.blinkimage.com

iToo

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Re: Animation - Random from Geometry
« Reply #1 on: September 24, 2010, 11:33:33 AM »

Yes, the random animation feature works as you pointed. The "Samples" parameter, defines the number of mesh samples, and "Time Offset", the difference in time between them.

For example, using Samples=4, Time=10 and rendering the frame 0, Forest gets 4 samples at time 0, 10, 20, 30. Rendering the frame 5, it will use samples at 5, 15, 25, 35.

The sample mesh generated at each time depends of the object used as source. TreeStorm creates a continuous animation, so all frames are different. Instead, a proxy has a limited number of samples used in a defined sequence (loop, ping-pong...). Forest determines the adequate frame sequence automatically based on the type of object.

In your case, the animation takes a long time to render (more exactly, in the pre-processing phase) because TreeStorm is very slow generating the mesh samples.

You can speed up it creating animated proxies from TreeStorm, and using them in Forest. The performance improvement is huge, because Forest doesn't need to request the animation samples to TreeStorm, since they are already stored in disk.

Are you using Mental Ray or VRay ?. If you need help creating the animated proxies, please tell me.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

Richard Birket

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Re: Animation - Random from Geometry
« Reply #2 on: September 24, 2010, 12:55:38 PM »
Thanks for your reply. We are using vray.

I had considered creating an animated vray proxy for the tree, but it took a long time to create, and a 150 frame proxy ended up being 3.5GB!!! I guess I can reduce the length of the looping animation somewhat, but even down to a 2 second (50 frame) loop, the proxy is likely to be over 1GB in size!

What do you suggest? Our render machines only have 4GB ram in them, so I need to be careful...
Kind Regards,
Rich

www.blinkimage.com

iToo

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Re: Animation - Random from Geometry
« Reply #3 on: September 24, 2010, 02:43:10 PM »
The size of the proxy is not important, because the file contains one mesh for each animation frame, but Forest and VRay only load the meshes required to render the current frame. You can make some tests using different number of samples, and check the total of memory used.

As you can see creating the proxies, TreeStorm takes some seconds to generate a sample. Forest must wait the same time at each frame, but multiplied by the number of samples. So, i suggest to use the animated proxies, saving them in a shared network folder.

The key here is the slow performance of TreeStorm. Probably, with a faster tree generator would be better to render the trees on the fly.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software

Richard Birket

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Re: Animation - Random from Geometry
« Reply #4 on: September 24, 2010, 04:26:15 PM »
I will try to find time to give it a go.

I don't suppose you are working on a tree generator are you???? lol. Its one thing that is still lacking with archviz. Onyx is good, but has major problems as well.
Kind Regards,
Rich

www.blinkimage.com

iToo

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Re: Animation - Random from Geometry
« Reply #5 on: September 24, 2010, 04:53:54 PM »

No, we have not plans to create a tree generator. These type of tools require a long development time, and currently we have our resources focused to other projects (as RailClone).

As complement to Forest, we resell other third-party plants libraries, as HQ Plants.

Have you tried GrowFX ? HQ Plants were created using this software: http://exlevel.com/features/

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software