Ive been playing with this for a few weeks now and not sure which is the best method
each one takes about 5 hours to render a 30 second scene (not sure why that is but could only get it to render about 3 secs clips in a reasonable time)
tell me which one you guys think look best

They both look interesting.

You can get faster rendering by not using ray traced shadow lights. Use z-buffered Kleig lights.

If those are materials on your landscape you can probably bake them to textures for faster rendering. (remember to take your material off after you bake)

I think the second one looks more realistic but both look good.

I love the second clip.

The second one is my pick.

When I light outdoor scenes or terrains I usually thing about how it works in the physical world. The sun casts its light from an angle depicted by the time of day. Based on that angle only certain wavelengths of light are visible (ie noon is very white harsh light as sunset is only the longer and thus redder wavelenghts). Also shadows depend on the time of day, for midday-noon harsh shadows are ok, but at dawn or late sunset/sunrise the shadows are very soft because of bounce/atmospheric light.

But as Robcat mention raytracing can be a render killer. With that said, I dont know if you would want to set up a z-buffered kleig array though

Ive been wanting to record a tut on out door lighting with a sun type light for a while now. Maybe I will this weekend, oh well.

I think both look great, just look like they belong in two different environments. The first one looks like you're flying in ideal sunny weather, no turbulence and enjoying your inflight movie.

The second reminds me of a lunar landscape, somethine for Tralfaz's 2001 moonbus to fly around in, or the simulation of the Genesis Device from Star Trek II (and III!).

Either way, nicely done!

hey guys thx for the tips
i tried the Z buffered keig lighting
i wasnt able to bake the mat because i dont have enough memory to do it
so just went with a color for now
render times are still around 7 mins a frame
it probly has something to do with the amount of patches i have, info says 625,000 patches

did you try the lowest res setting? you won't need much.



That's unnecessarily large for what you are doing. I'm impressed it renders at all.

yeah, I don't even know if one of Al's super detailed models has that many patches!

i redid the entire model its rendering now its alot faster at 3700 patches, about 6 secs per frame
ill post an update tonight

yeah, there ya go! That's one of the beautiful things of AM, you can make carves and whatnot, and have a really low patch count, whereas with poly modeling, you need to increase your poly count to make smoother edges and stuff.

ok the rerender finished but for some reason it was going to take 17 hours to finish. so i had to stop it to strip it down to a decal and 1 light
and this was the result. not sure why the renders are taking so long maybe you guys have any idea
plus i think i need a better way to upload these videos, original file sizes are around 150MB for 160x120 video size!

...I don't even know how that's possible. I can render several second clips in HD720p and they only equal less than 10MB. What are you rendering to and what are your rendering settings?

saving it in quicktime format
compression type: animation
30 fps
keyframe 10
depth: best depth
Quality medium

render to targas not Quicktime

Load the sequence into your Images folder, RMB>Save Animation As

The "compression" button lets you choose a codec.

For more on Quicktime Compression see my Chapter 8 notes here

well i tried the targa thing and it made the program crashed and it erased all the videos in the folder so i dont think i will try that again... luckily there was no project files in that folder so all i lost was the videos i did for this test, i guess im just not cut out for this animation thing... maybe ill just stick to pictures

Saving a file to a drive does not erase other files. Something else is wrong. Rendering to targas is the way 90% of rendering is done.

well i cant find the videos anywhere on the system so they are gone but beyond that i got some of the frames rendered (still estimates 17 hours to render fully) but all i have is frames now not sure what im suppose to do with them to make em a movie

Ok, to make the movie bit, once all is exported, Right Click on the Images folder in AM, choose Import>Animation/Image Sequence. Choose the first frame and click OK. Then if you right click on the newly imported animation and choose Save Animation As, set it as a MOV or AVI or whatever your preference is, and save it. Now you have the animation file.
Could you also screenshot all your render settings. So the Render to File screen, the options for rendering and perhaps even your compression settings. There's something in that that shouldn't be. Perhaps you could also ZIP all the files together and upload it to the forum so some of us can have a look at the project.