Baboon for piero

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Draise
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by Draise »

Hi Pugman! Glad you are asking!

Concerning feet bones, typically the rig would have the following structure:

Root > Transform Control > Hip > Legs > Feet > Foot Placeholder (constrained to the Root, with option to turn on/off)

Then you move the transform (the whole object translation), turn on the placeholder constraint and it would move your whole object, leaving the feet Placeholder where they are relative to the root (useful for walk cycles), or turn it off and move with the transfer with moving everything (including placeholders) - all done with a constraint switch turned on or off.



Concerning rendering, it's an art, techincal mastery and trickery. I spend months sometime optimizing my render systems for my large project, composite systems, render pipeline, etc. Typically I can get a hour per frame on my i7 machines without optimization - with with clever compositing tricks and layers and other optimization setups, I can drop it down to 10 to 15 minutes per frame. I then run the renders 24/7 between 4 machines during production, a total of 22 cores - each machine doing a frame with a "skip rendered" feature. I render frames due to the "farm" nature to get it done. I use image sequences, which per 10 minutes of animation and all my passes, rendering to OpenEXR can take up to 300-500 gigs of harddisk space. But some passes can be JPG or PNG, which will lighten things up significantly.

If I had GPU, and a rendering system on that, I'd also run that if I could just for sheer speed, but I don't have good video cards at the moment.

For animation, I do actually use a typical traditional 2D aspect of rendering animation: have a static background rendered once and then render only the animated parts in frame sequences. Then in Compositing, I put it back together again.

My typical 15 minutes frame will only take between 7 an 8 minutes on my i7 using that technique. All of this in 1080p HDTV.

So.. what is optimization? Well it's starting at your best quality, and lowering it till you get a good even balance - quality vs. time.

Typically in Blender you have Cycles samples. I recommend you use samples, and if you can, use CUDA cards to up your speed by nearly 4x. Also, use blender 2.71, which is nearly 40% faster than previous versions.

So now then, within blender you can actually go by sample rates per ray. So you can up the diffuse ray samples, down the refraction, up the SSS, down the secondbounce ray, etc. Watch out for fireflies, and if all needs be, use ray clamps.

This is VERY useful. If you have no glass in your scene, you can practically turn the refraction off and not worry about using up your machine calculating those rays for nothing.

I do this often with my layers too. I use really low samples in general with my background objects (as it may be in DOF anyway) and then use high samples on characters. I may turn off bounced light all together to save time and use some area lights to get what I need to roughly illuminate what I want.


So here is my rule of thumb for optimization:

1. Evaluate what is important in your scene (characters, props, ray types, etc) and evaluate order of importance.
2. Evaluate how you can turn this level of importance into layers (passes)
3. Setup lights and be all arty, start with low quality to edit the artistic side of things - leave at a high quality for best solution (longest render time typically).
4. Implement evaluation: seperate objects and lights into layers, setup render settings with different ray types, create your passes for compositing and start putting them all together again upon render.
5. Test, render, optimize, repeat, and make your compositing tree optimal for each pass/ray type and layer - till you are happy with quality vs. time.
6. Composite final image sequence upon final render

Typically I can render up to 300 to 400 frames per 12 hours on my 4 machine farm this way, then composite them in maybe an hour or two of rendering (from the node compositer in Blender actually). I use Arnold in Softimage.

Which is good for me, as I can only animate about that much with good quality per days work anyway in full production anyway.

But if you can get into GPU, I am sure you can drop your times to fractions of a minute if needs be, using the same "pass" layers system and ray priority optimization.

But for anything animation intensive, render farm is the key word, and render passes.

Also, assign lights and bake lights as often as you can. For example, bake your GI to your scenery and then use assigned lights to your character mesh. This can also optimize your system A LOT. Also, use game engine techniques of rendering - no GI, no Final Gathering, just light tricks and baked results.

So yeah.. it's all just breaking the final image up into parts, easier chunks for your machine to process (less samples), and then put it all together to combine the different quality levels for a GREAT final image for your animation.


Good luck! Can't wait to see you animating!
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by Draise »

Oh and I've never animated anything in Blender before, but I'd love to try! Help you out or something. =) Test out your rigs?
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by pugman 1 »

Iv got his rig now working ,weight painting finished still a prob with the
mesh when i arch his back the feet stay on the floor this has somthing to do with the root
bone , All i have to do is move the bones from the feet up to the defrmation bones of the feet-
Now i must texture the eyes and sort out the fur a bit better Then hes done .
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by pugman 1 »

Here a quick play with them both,,i must add teeth and a tonge to the ape
so it looks ok when he opens his mouth-
What do you think so far .
Attachments
test render.png
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Re Final: Baboon for piero

Post by pugman 1 »

Here is a final image cycles 300 samples 1.5 hours .i wont animate these carecters
i have no idea how to batch render or copositing ,
maybe i make noes ark
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by Finis »

Looks good. Just for learning purposes, learning Blender animation, you don't need a full quality render. Turn off the global illumination (light bouncing) and render old style like TS model side. Just ray tracing. Make the frame size small like 800 x 600. It will be much faster.

If cycles doesn't have an option to turn GI off then set the light bounces to 1 or 0. Which ever means it doesn't bounce or is as low as it allows.

Use regular lights (point, parallel, spot) instead of IBL, HDRI, etc. Faster.
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by Draise »

Looks great! I'd say the grass looks a bit uniform, but nice lighting. I'd also say the roughness in the feathers is lacking. But awesome stuff! it's awesome to see work like this in the forums, great stuff.

Oh! you have a PM ;)

Here is a tip for making Cycles render faster: here
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by pugman 1 »

Thanks guy maybe i try - i have a ati firepro 7800 ,i also have in my other pc a
gtx 760 maybe i try that in my 3d pc to see how much faster it is
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by pugman 1 »

The file is on mediafile now -
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Re: Baboon for piero

Post by Draise »

Great! I'll be downloading it this evening. Right now I'm crunching at work, but I'll try play with it shortly! :D
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