A forum which hosts Octane Render Artwork Competitions
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rman1974 wrote:Here is:
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/13100212[/vimeo]
Average rendertime is 10-20 min per frame (1920x1080) on GTX285, exept the last one with close up glass (this one took 1h 30 min per frame). There isn't any color correction, just a little glow and flares on post.
Unfortunately, I'm not a character animator so animation is very simple
All animation is a unique sequence. The result is a the sequence generated in blender only with the images generated with octane. The only process is to remove noise (thanks Konstantins Visnevskis). Edited with cinelerra to add titles and sound.
All models are not mine, I used two scenes of the last two lightning challenge and six objects taken from blendswap.com, although apart of modeling the rest, I modified almost all of the geometry, either to increase the detail to reduce or to bring it closer to my idea. In total, about 2.5Mill. of triangles.
For the textures I used gimp and MapZone2.
For soundtrack, have used samples from freesound.org or generated by me. All using audacity to edit or create the sounds and cinelerra for positioning in the video and mix tracks.
Rendered at 2880x1440 and downscaled to 1440x720.
One challenge has been that in the same scene, there are two very different scales, which has given me problems, both in blender (faults in tools, numerical problems, etc. ..) and octane that either gave me problems in small as in big, so I had to find a middle size and vary the parameter rayepsilon in between.
Another challenge has been the lighting. My original idea needs several things not yet supported by octane, as is the ability to change the lighting in animation and have light emitters. For the first the changes have to be done by hand in each frame, so I had to greatly reduce the original idea. I really hope that in future versions there some method to modify all parameters of illumination in an animation, because the main reason for using a motor unbiased in an animation is precisely the treatment that makes of light. As for the light-emitting I have done what I could with what we have, and with the arrival of the beta 2.3 will be much easier and the quality will improve greatly.
The process has been too hard, mainly because I used an alpha version (blender 2.5 is still alpha), which has led me to meet with multiple problems, having to redo multiple times either to find a method with fewer problems, or simply because had degraded the animation. It's not a version full of bugs, but when you have limited time, to meet a failure can be very frustrating. In contrast, the changes compared to 2.4x are many who do not see myself going backwards.
As to render with octane, I also had different problems, although some of the most important could be solved, I am confident that the rest will disappear in future versions:
-One of the major problems was the time to export, since for a scene of more than 2 million triangles per frame involved much time, which would be built about 70 hours (there would be outside the deadline), but luckily I was able to quickly solve the problem with my own plugin for blender, and disappeared completely this time.
-Another problem I had (out of ignorance rather than failure of the program) is that at some point, to accelerate the process, exported only part of the scene in order to adjust materials more comfortably within octane, but did not know that when you save the scene , all materials that were not being used (not to have exported the objects they were used) would be lost, so I had to create all new material and the animation have 189.
-Another annoyance is that I have to work while rendering, since my machine has spent 16 days doing render uninterrupted, and octane (at least in linux) steals the focus every time it shows a dialog and can be desperate.
-Another problem, and I think this is a bug, is that from time to time, octane fails to start the render (load everything and voxelize). It is standing right where it should start the kernel. The worse is that has happened to me several times while sleeping, so I lost many hours and finish the rendering has been rushed. Some frames also needed to rerender, because octane is closed in the middle of the render (usually with "ERROR: Program Executed terminating illegal instruction ..") without saving. Now with more time will try to give more information.
-I also had problems with UV mapping. I have not had time to check if the problem is with the exporter, or octane, but on rare occasions (I have not yet determined why) some faces that should be continuous texture, appear with a jump in very large scale, taking one triangle at normal scale and the adjoining a very large scale.
As for the high render time, although the average per frame is not too high (just over 10min), but there are many frames for a single gtx260. With a last generation card, the total time would been much lower. The main problem is that during those 16 days, while octane be rendering continuously, could not render tests without stopping the process and thus delay the end, what has been a major handicap, especially the different problems that were undermining estimated time. Without the extended week, I would have had to reduce the quality.
My conclusions are that octane can be used successfully to make animations, but in my current situation of limited hardware I found it very hard. My recommendation would be to have at least one more powerful gpu (it is important to have enough ram, not only on the gpu, if not in the system because it uses a lot of memory especially in the voxelizating process, and I have my 4Gb machine swapping all these days). Possibly a second machine that could serve to keep working with octane as the first one is doing the rendering and rendering support when not needed (using two instances of octane on the same machine has problems in the current state). Given the cost of the license of octane (using the same programs that I used) and the necessary hardware, for very little money actually can work very comfortably. Right now I can't afford it but when I can afford it I can certainly create better animations.
I trust that was worth so much effort and you like the result. Soon will try to solve some problems to improve quality and add the missing part that I have already in mind.
Good luck to everyone.
Radiance or Enricocerica, I need to put something more?, Video in some other format, some other screenshot? Thank you.
Sorry for my English, is not my native language and I am very tired.
Cheers
Last edited by livuxman on Wed Jul 07, 2010 5:47 pm, edited 5 times in total.
LiVux 64bit | Geforce GTX260 Core 216 and GTX470 | i7 860 | 8Gb | Drivers 275.09.07 | Cuda 4.0.17
Well it looks like I will miss the deadline. Cloth simulation is about 3-4 hours from finishing and rendering will take at least another 8. Good luck everyone. There have been a lot of great entries for this competition. I'll post the render results in the WIP section once the render is finished. Time has just gotten away from me these last couple of weeks.
System 1: EVGA gtx470 1280Mb and MSI gtx470 1280 in Cubix Xpander for Octane, AMD 945, 4Gb Ram
All systems are at stock speeds and settings.
Here's my entry, a 30 second fight clip from my Killer Bean Forever movie re-rendered in Octane Render. You can open it up for full 720p playback.
Here is the flv download, but the quality is not that great. I couldn't up the quality that high in Riva. Anyone know of a better, higher quality flv encoder?
The animation was done by me. The background environment is a Daz3d model made by Stonemason.
I used the oversampling method, rendered at 2560x1440 at 256 samples. Then I de-noised it with Noise Ninja 2 and brought it into Photoshop to shrink down to 1280x720 and adjust the hue slightly to make it a little warmer.
Each frame took about 5-6 minutes to render on my gtx480. This clip has 23 shots edited together with Sony Vegas. Sound design was done by me with sound effects I licensed. The music is also licensed.
andrian wrote:livuxman , thats a very good idea, you did surprise me with that end congrats , good job on that and good luck.
Thank you very much. I have done everything possible to show that idea in time, although it has been at the expense of some quality and the animation is too fast.
Cheers
LiVux 64bit | Geforce GTX260 Core 216 and GTX470 | i7 860 | 8Gb | Drivers 275.09.07 | Cuda 4.0.17
