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zsero
11-13-2005, 06:43 PM
One of my friends just asked me to do him a special architectural viz animation where the scene is very simple but the visualization needs to be very spectacular. All the animation would be camera moving around a building (helicopter view) and the scene would be in the middle of urban area. The maps of the buildings around are not known, so I think the environment will be a textured background.

So my task is to make a very simple building's visualization spectacular, and this is why I came here to composition, because although I haven’t tried any of these software I really think I have to go this way. I think I will use either AE or Combustion. (Nuke is unknown where I live :-( )

What do you suggest me, what makes a scene very spectacular but is not very hard to do with these software? I am thinking about a windy, snowy scene turning into a clear sunny afternoon with a sun shining through clouds OR the same with rain instead of snow and maybe a rainbow at the middle. Maybe the sun could go down for a sunset.

I thought about the following techniques (correct me, I haven’t used any compositing before):
- rendering in max with vray using HDRI for lightning.
Question: how to do the transition as the weather changes? AFAIK the vray HDRI map doesn't support HDRI FLIs, so I cannot animate HDRI like a normal map. Do 3 different renderings (for different lightings) and do the transition in the composing package? How to do the "sun coming out behind the clouds" thing? I can use a HDRI map for lighting but I have to use a direct light for the part when the sun shines. Animating the light multiplier makes the irradiance map caching unusable, doesn't it (I need to recalculate ir.map for every frame)?
- composition of some spectacular sky: what is better, to use max to render the background, or leave it to the comp. app using 3D compositing?
- rain or snow could be a PFlow and rendered in scanline and mixed in comp.
- shining sun is clearly a post-processing, AFAIK.

What app. do you suggest for this particular application? Do I need to look for something like AfterBurn or DreamScape or max + HDRshop + combustion or AE is enough for the job?

boboroshi
11-13-2005, 07:02 PM
Hey zsero -

I've done a fair amount of architectural rendering (and have my degree in architecture) so here's my suggestions:

It makes no sense to render this completely out of your 3d application. It's a waste of time. Most of what you're talking about can be faked in 2d, and if not, you should have various camera moves matched forelements and render them separately.

Simulating natural phenomena is difficult at best. I don't know if there is a 3ds max equivalent, but if I were attempting rain and snow, I'd basically use paintfx in maya and then composite those in with a lot of zdepth fog.

My question to you is this:
What does adding the weather patterns do to communicate the project better? If the building is bland, it's going to look bland in any weather. I feel that entourage would be a better approach (cars, people, vegitation, etc.). Here's an old example hacking a locked off shot with paintfx back in 2000 (wow... Old Skool):

http://www.meticulous.com/media/portfolio_img/film/aquarius/12_establish_dv_sm.mov

The model was actually from 3ds max at the time. the environment was from maya, and the comp and birds were done with Shake (like version 2.5 maybe? can't recall).

Regardless, You can quickly color grade the shot etc in a compositor and affect individual elements much easier than re-rendering a shot or sequence. HDRI lighting will help tremendously on a reality sell, but at the end of the day, you have to somewhat lie/fudge in 2d to really push it to the final level.

JoshKirk
11-13-2005, 09:33 PM
http://209.5.190.177/downloads/courseware2/movs/eyeon_Keying_2.mov

That movie has a pretty cool method in regards to snow. This tutorial was done with DF 5 but can be applied to most compositors. Im thinking animate the threshold of the luma key to get the season change look.

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