I decided to start another animation project. I am basing this off a bunch of minor projects I have done in the past.

I will be adding my piano model to some of them and adding some sweet camera angles and shots...

Here are a few test frames:
Click to view attachment
Click to view attachment

Render time is going to be murder! Most scenes have AO (the desert scene etc) and I managed to optimize those to keep them under 20 minutes a frame.

The pool scene I took AO out so I could render faster (about 2 hours a frame with AO!!) Most shots are down under 20 minutes a frame now.


I have plans to hopefully finish this comletly including rendering in the next 2 weeks to enter in a contest at my school.

Off to do some more work!!


Photoman

I like the desert scene alot.
Great composition.

I wish there was a way to bake AO shading onto objects.

@Robcat
That would save me probably 50 hours of render time.

Though the 18min test frame on v14.0c OXS renders at 6min on v13 XP!
(Same computer)
Interesting


Photoman

Have you read Jeremy Birn's book? I bet with careful conventional lighting you could cut that way down.

I am using conventional lighting! Just a sun light and global ambience, (Though i use AO with global ambience in the desert which renders fast enough).

Another note. The 10 minute frame on OSX v14 renders at about 9 minutes on a 1.8ghz pent4 XP v13 PC.

Photoman

If you can figure out the UV wrapping/Unwrapping, then xNormal will generate AO maps for your model. I believe you would apply them in AM as Diffuse maps.
xNormal imports .X models.
http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

Has someone done this? Or is this yet-to-be-achieved?




GA is a bit unconventional.

10 minutes... that's not bad. That's not going to kill you.

10 minutes is fine, im just making an observation. Also I have 2 more pc's to add to my render farm, to total it up to 4! Though I can only use them at night.

On another note, I may try to add a skylight rig in and see if thats better than AO for the ambience/indirect light.


Photoman

Hot off the CPU:
Click to view attachment
Took 6 hours on the dot!


Photoman

As far as I know, it is yet to be achieved. I didn't try very hard. But with all the UV tests you have done lately, you could probably get it working.

My tests were all aimed at making it a simple as possible in A:M.

Exporting something to polygons and figuring out how an external app maps it, and then figuring out how to get that remapped back onto A:M... my enthusiam flags a bit.

nowhere near as good as photmans great piano but here is mine I made from scratch lastnight.
Click to view attachment

I like the piano and pool shot alot.

Nice looking piano Spleen, just need to add some claw and ball feet and 50,000 patch scroll work for some trim to spaz it up some

Been a while since Ive updated this... The project is on the backburner right now. Ive become quite busy with school and swimming so I get to this whenever I am not tired and have time (which isnt as often as I like). So to keep y'all in the loop here is a quick studio clip:

Click to view attachment

Photoman

That looked very good!

Man thats good ,not just the piano and stall but the lighting is great ,very nice

Looks great! That may be a good place to try volumetric lighting out. Makes me want to play piano...

Beautiful shot!

Thanks for the good comments! If anyone is wondering about the lighting setup, it is really simple, and... there is no AO!


First thing I wanted was the dark room spotlight look so I placed the first kleig light up top aimed right down at the piano.

Then I realized that that looked quite plain and didn't have any "pop" to it, so I placed 3 more kleigs at strategic points around the piano and set each of them to be just specular.

Then I wanted the reflection of the "guts" of the piano brighter so I placed a low powered bulb light inside it.

After I had all this done I went through each light and tweaked it, I changed the Top kleig to have 25% softness and 100% shadow darkness. Next I set the bulb to have 100% shadows with 3 rays distributed in passes to give more detail inside.

Click to view attachment

SO... that was my setup and for information I had each frame averaging about 1min 20sec over 240 frames @ 1024x435

Also that shiny look is from an environment map material of a studio HDR image, which needs to be upscaled...

Photoman

Beauty, eh?!