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altruizine
04-11-2006, 08:21 PM
Hey all...

We've got a job coming up here that will involve rendering out a couple minutes of very high geometry scenes. There will be animation w/ in them, dynamic lighting, skin shaders... bunch o' stuff.

Anyway, we're starting to look at options for doing this effectively and I thought I'd throw it out here to see if anyone has tackled this kind of stuff before and if they have any tips they could toss outregarding what you've used or appoaches to this kind of thing.

We can build out our farm for this, so we can go pretty much any way. Our main app is maya of course. Mental ray is an option - but how much can you feed it before it begins to choke? Also we know of someone using Vue 5 as their render engine for large scenes (not just landscape - anything). Have you tried this? What are your results like?

I read from time to time about how big studios have custom apps to feed the rendering engine only what it needs at the time of each frame - how does this stuff exactly work?

thanks!!

-JF
gottesgerl
04-12-2006, 11:22 AM
Hi altruizine,

we started a similar project two weeks ago: A heavy geometry loaded cityscape of NearFuture-Berlin.
So my task for now is not too different than yours I guess: Find out how to deal with such scenes.
Perhaps we can share some knowledge and flashes of genius. ;)
:lightbulb I tried some displacement possibilities, to have HighDetail-Geometry where I need it, and LowDetail in the Background.
:lightbulb I think one way to please mental ray is by using MAP-texture-files.
:lightbulb Another one, I guess, is to break up your scene in as many passes you can handle (e.g. Background, Middle-Ground, Foreground, Animation, FX...).
:lightbulb We had a real-time project where we got good result by baking ambient passes to textures.Thats why Iīm trying to bake as many things into textures as possible (normals, ambient, displacement, lights, ...) using the Surface Sampler, but Iīm also not too euphoric with that right now. Letīs see if itīs about that tool or my own stupidity. :wip:
Overall I try using some real-time-techniques to save render loadīnītime.
:lightbulb Today Iīll have a look on LOD-(Level On Detail)-Options inside Maya.
Thats it for now,
stay fine,
Hannes.
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