My First Animation

[gdelgy]

Hey everybody,

This is my first animation (other than making a ball bounce) and I am looking for some feedback. It is a combined fly-by & walk-thru and was done for the renovation of Morris Library at Southern Illinois University.

Everything, including the "coffee commons", was modeled in AutoCAD 2005 and rendered in VIZ 2005. The only parts I didn't create are the furniture.

http://www.lib.siu.edu/renovation/renoflyby

The total running time is slightly less than three minutes.

I hope you enjoy and thanks,

Gerald

[TheAllusionist]

First off nice work, it was a big undertaking. I am going to give some C&C, don't take it wrong, just trying to help.

Paths are pretty good, at some spots I think it could be sped up, I feel like I am wading through water, meeting resistance of some sort. Overall good work, I think the texturing is killing you in some spots. I realize to get decent render times, you need to keep texturing down here is where I could see improvements, but still keep it pretty simple for render times. Your grass could be a darker green and not a lime color. Entourage could be low poly mapped characters, we can see the billboarding and the lighting on them isn't quite right. The green carpet, both of them are tiling really bad, I would rather see a constant color than something that looks like an 80's video game. walls are a little dingy, brighter white would help and the pink wall just jumps out, if nothing else changing that would help, you don't need any neon colors. I think the ceiling lights could be shiny white or shiny black rather than the cartoonish blue. The glas is fully transparent, which allows you to see inside, but the trees outside show up once you are inside as a cartoonish lime green. Try to get a good pallette for a still image, keeping fancy texturing to a minimum, yet color scheme realistic and the rendering/animation would look even better. In the end you could center the text in the shot a little more, not dead on, but it is crowding the top a bit.

May seem like I am picking on a lot of items, but they are just things that could imporove the animation tremedously. You have the paths and key frames pretty good, if you just tweaked the colors and the carpet textures, you could leave it over the weekend to render and I think you would have an even better animation. Nice work and thanks for sharing it, animations are a lot of work, hence a lot of people just do stills, you should be commended for taking the leap! Like I said, you have a lot working well, so don't take my comments as negatives, just possible improvements.

[gdelgy]

Russell,

Thanks for the C&C, it was exactly the type of information that I was looking for. I've watched and re-watched the animation and see the areas you're talking about. The interior colors are the one area that's received the most comments. Not to sound like a cop-out but, but those are the colors that were selected by a different architect/interior design firm and I have heard that the colors will be changing to a more subdued pallete (no neons). The carpets are also being changed so that'll give me the opportunity to address the tiling issue.

About the windows, would a noise or a reflective map on the interior side of the glass help with the way the trees look, would that help reduce their lime green appearance by reducing the windows transparency or is there some other way you would suggest? I just used the "stock" trees that come with VIZ and never even thought about adjusting their colors. The issues of the speed in some areas and the centering of the text are also being corrected.

Again thanks for all the help that you have given, it's been greatly appreciated and I look forward to submitting more work for yours and everybody elses opinions.

Take care,

Gerald

[TheAllusionist]

For the trees, etc., if you adjust the color to something more realistic (they could have been set up for a scene with less light) would fix a lot without increasing rendering time and hence they would look better once inside. If you had reflection etc. to the windows I feel you rendering time will increase considerably, most my advice was aimed at fixes that don't increase rendering time and just focus on more realistic colors with the lighting setup you have. I would focus on good colors and keep your rendering time down unless your goal is to do a very realistic rendering and are willing to let your computer render the scene for a week. Good luck with it, we look forward to seeing you next go at it!

[gdelgy]

Hey Russell,

I have another question for you. This one concerns your workstation. I'm trying to convince my boss that we need to upgrade to real workstations and not just off-the-shelf p.c.'s. The animation that I created was two and half minutes, 4500 frames, with an output size of 800 x 600. In your opinion, how long would something like that take to render on your workstation (a ball park figure would be perfectly fine). When I did it, I started rendering on Friday at 3 p.m. and it finished the FOLLOWING Friday at 10:53 p.m. - seven days and eight hours total.

Thanks again,

Gerald

[TheAllusionist]

I haven't rendered any animations on my new workstation so I can't answer that. On an older machinge with an AMD Athlon 3200+ I did an exterior fly around a lot shorter than yours but with a lot of detail and full texture and it took almost a week. That CPU isn't that much slower than the ones you can get now, but my current system is a dual cpu Xeon system so I would hope I could cut the time by half due to faster CPU's and two of them. I have never been that impressed with the speed gains from a new CPU if the new one is close to what I had to begin with. Ram seems to make a big difference, but with the cheap prices of computers today, you can get a dual cpu or dual core and a nice video card (good for realtime navigation of scene, not better render times) for a decent price and your productivity will go up.

I guess I would mention that while you are working on a faster machine you don't have to wait while navigating, etc., how much does 2 seconds here and there add up through the day, week or a year.