Rendering Walkthrough issues

[dna]

Don't know if anybody is interested in this one, but i have been working away on a sizable animation and have encountered a few problems whcih i can share

1- (the biggest one) speckled materials (like sand) will sparkle (or shimmer as accurender calls it) which creates a horrible effect, cuurently there are no workarounds, this is a known issue with accurender and McNeel associates are fully aware of it but have yet to resolve it they suggest not using speckled material which is easy for them to say

2- even though you set the resolution and everything with image size export avi does not follow that setting, you have to calculate the output dpi by yourself, easily resolved though you set your resolution in the export avi dialog (like 800x600) and set your view size (like 2"x2") and voila your resolution will come out at 400 dpi

3- there is a limit to the avi resolution you can export currently 1000x1000 dpi (which is normally enough) the trick is not to get your view size too big (like 2"x2" is good) othersize you'll end up with grains

4- there is a limit to the size of the avi maximum is 1 Gbyte, this is not set by accurender or revit it is the avi format itself, there are ways to increase the size but not with accurender

5- i suggest setting you raytrace quality to best, this will slow down the process a lot butyou will like the final output better and you won't have to do it twice, there is trmendous difference animating with different qualities

6- have a lot of patience, depending on your revit file size, it will take a while for the animation to be processed

7- be aware that revit drains the ram pretty quickly, on this project (about 300,000 SqFt) just having the file open takes about 256Mb once I start the animation it easily jumps to 1.5 Gb

8- sadly video card does not have any effect whatsoever in the process, processor and ram are key, so son't spend 1000$ on video card (like I did) any basic video card (32Mb) will do just fine

have fun

[hand471037]

DNA, thanks for the great tips! Hey, did you use Radosity at all with animations? I've only tried it once, and was having strange issues where the light wasn't remaining consistant with the view, i.e. almost like a very cheap video camera, in that the levels of brightness were changing as you moved through the space depending on how much the light sources were or weren't in the view. Have you ever seen this? Am I just doing something stupid?

[Scott D Davis]

Would you please post your AVI, or a piece of it, so we could check it out?

Thanks!

[dna]

if you're asking me to post the avi then it's not going to happen, the smallest piece i have is 34 Mb, but when it gets finished i am sending a copy to revit HQ and they can make it available on their servers

i did try the radiosity in an interior run and it worked fine even though it didn't give me much enhancements and made the animation too bright

[Scott D Davis]

Thanks anyways....I figured it would be too large!

[Allen Lacy]

How long did it take to animate? I tried one several months ago (5.0), and ran it all weekend (6pm Fri to 9am Mon) and it only did about a quarter of the path (Intel P4 1.6 Ggz, half gig of RAM).

And speaking of walkthroughs, I just discovered the dynamic view walkthrough. Pretty cool! :D

[PeterJ]

I'm intrigued by the 1Gb limit you note on avi files, dna. I spent some time last week piecing together some bits of dv recorded material that I captured onto the PC. I'm in the UK so our full screen TV format is 526 x 725, or thereabouts and 20-25 minutes of that size of output with 44 ?hz stereo sound came out around 5.5-6.5 Gig as one file. 'm afraid I dumped it straight back to DV and deleted the file so I can't tell you anything else about it, but it was certainly that order of size and other people I have spoken with recommended that I anticipate an edited output as an avi file of around 2 Gig for every ten minutes.

I was working with Adobe Premiere 6.0 and it seemed quite happy with these file sizes so maybe you need to run shorter segments of Revit walkthroughs and piece them together.

On a different note I have a couple of very substantial files that I need to share and I am looking at making a secure standalone disk on my network available for ftp - some technical hitches yet - so if it is just the storage issue that's a problem rather than the upload time I could probably make some space available to you so other people could take a peek.

Pete

[dna]

the animation times are extremely long with accurender, and there is no helping it either, i did the animation in ranges usually 100 frames every night, takes about 12 hours and then put them back together using windows movie maker

sad part is i'm not done yet, it will take a total of 36 days to finish, although i did a shaded with edges version which has kept the client happy up to now

i am using a P4 HT 3.06 Ghz with 2.5 Gb Ram on XP Pro, i use a geforce4 128Mb but neither revit nor accurender utilize it (i tested several different cards with the same exact result)

[ajayholland]

36 days! - Thanks for the tips, it sounds like you've been at this for a while.

I took a look at the HBA wbesite - a nice mix of project types! Could you describe the project you are animating, and perhaps post some single frame images?

A. Jay Holland

[dna]

here's one [/img]

basically it's a senior housing complex, our office specializes in senior housing, even though we get a lot of other work as well

this one is about 300-400 thousand square feet, i've only done the shell in revit the project itself was started in acad long time ago so we left it there and revit would have probably struggled with a project this size (not counting worksets)

the challenge here was all the extra detailing in the elevations (curves, trims etc) and i had a stroke of genius halfway through modelling it which made it much easier to do

[ajayholland]

Yikes! I'm impressed! Are the vehicles Acad or RPC?

Image of the Week?

-AJH

[beegee]

dna,

must get pretty cold therabouts ? .... those are MASSIVE chimneys :) :)

All joking aside, very nice render ! If the client is totally impressed with that ... well what can I say.

beegee

[PeterJ]

You published that image before in alt.cad.revit. It looks good as did the other bits that you posted at the same time.

How long did the shaded with edges animation take and what was the output file size? Its information like that that can help work out whether or not to go forward with trying to offer people renderings, or whether we need to buy more machines if we want to sell that service.

The other things that intrigues me is that if you can do 100 frames in a night but require36 days to finish that is 3600 frames which at a frame rate of 25 fps gives 144 seconds of animation. I understand the technical limitations but, and this should not appear rude, my clients would not typically wait a month or more for 2 minutes of presentation. How are you using it and how are you fleshing it out?

P

[gregcashen]

...i had a stroke of genius halfway through modelling it which made it much easier to do

Mind sharing it?

[dna]

sorry for the delay, been quite busy running the rendered animation and finishing it, didn't quite get there though, i had 4 computers freeze on me during the 4th of july weekend :cry:

1 - All vehicles are 3D models, can't really say acad they are made for 3dstudio, but they convert to dwg etcetera
2 - yeah it does get pretty cold, 50-60 in the winter, but you know it's california, it's like when your in vegas and see sloped roofs
3 - the client was floored (YESSSS) we got 2 more jobs out of it and got 4 more seats of revit in the office (OH YESSSSS) :D
4 - actualy the image is a little different, check the colors, but of course i have been working on the animation and the still shots are from way back
5 - shaded animation took a total of 10 hours or something, currently stands at 134 Mb resolution is 1200 by something format wmv runs 3:07 minutes total
6 - have to mention that the rate mentiond before (rendering 12 minutes per frame) is on a P4 3Ghz with 2.5 Gb ram, i have tried same on different machine P4 2.4 ghz 1 Gb ram runs about 25 minutes per frame (both have great video cards, not that it matters much)
7 - i have been running animations for about 12 years now and if you have a client that need the animation they'll understand that it's a lenghty process and the money isn't bad either
8 - stroke was using thin (1") extruded roofs for the curves in the elevation and attaching walls to them

[Scott D Davis]

By my calcs, 3:07 minutes of animation is 5610 frames at 30 FPS. 5610 frames at 12 minutes each frame is 1122 hours, or 46.75 days of straight rendering time!

So what tricks did you use to cut it down to only 10 hours of rendering time?

[dna]

the question was the difference between the shaded with edges animation versus rendered, shaded takes much less time (obviously)

[Kroke]

I have found to use Bink as my visual tool.

I render to single frames and sometimes play with the fps setting until I get one I like.

Even at 12-15 frames per second, it makes for a pretty nice animation. I turned a 1.1 gb animation down to a 65mb file w/ bink.

[sbrown]

when I've done animations(shaded with edges) the playback is extremely fast, is there a way to slow it down?

[Henry D]

When you export the walkthrough as an AVI, the dialogue box shows the default as 30 frames per second. It's been a while but I seem to remember I slowed it down to as little as 2 frames per second, but maybe try 5 fps first.

[christopher.zoog51272]

when I've done animations(shaded with edges) the playback is extremely fast, is there a way to slow it down?

Use the motion picture standard of 24 (or 25 I forget) frames per second. This should give you real-time motion.

[Henry D]

Chris,

How many frames do you typically use for a walkthrough?

The default is 300 (can be changed by clicking on the 300 when editing the walktrhough). I know that movies are 24 fps and video is 30 fps so to get even a minute of movie quality walkthrough that would be 1,440 frames which is a huge file. If one does a walkthrough of a floor and sticks with the default 300 frames then 24 fps would only give about 12 seconds which would make it feel like a whirlwind. I have been doing my walkthroughs using 300 frames at around 5 fps which gives a minute of action and is still a pretty large file. It's not smooth like a movie but you get a chance to see what's going on.

[db]

when exporting to avi, do you find that a particular compression is best, or do you use uncompressed?

[dna]

i've tried different ones with not much difference, currently i use microsoft video 1 75% compression, still keeps quality and reduces the file size noticably