Need Animation advice

[stormshadow2005]

So, I recently bought one of MasterMind's animation sets (which ROCKS) and have been trying to figure out Poser's animation settings. So far, I've been saving out as uncompressed image files (which seems safe to preserve image quality), but these are HUGE files at around 750-950meg for a 10 second clip. I'm curious what video codec's people have used and compression settings (for upload and for personal use).
My other question involves render times for the animation. My first attempt at the default size of 540 x 500 and default Firefly render settings took 11 hours and looked like shit. So, I increased the size to 1024 x 768 and used manual settings and 10 hours later I had all of 63 frames (out of 300). So, again, I'm just curious what settings you guys and gals use (and what rendering engine if other than Poser) to get an animation that doesn't take weeks of CPU time and leave ugly artifacts in the clip. I already checked the Poser manual and (it figures) no help at all... Any help would be much appreciated.

[markr]

xvid codec is very popular , or use wmv format.

animation is a long rendering process. Its 24 rendered images for every second of animation , or 30 if you are doing television standard in the US.

720 x 480 or 540 @ 30 fps is US broadcast tv .

You can cut it down by using a background image instead of a scene with props , or reduce render quality, eliminate raytrace etc .

I assemble in a video editing program.

[Hellboy]

I sacrifice render quality. In the worst cases, I set it to the minimum. Shadows take time too, but animation without them doesn’t worth crap.
In short, I try to do only already dark animations with shadows. That can hide the quality loss and look creepy and dramatic! (though if that’s not the idea...)
Yet, you can imagine why I don’t post my animations! :P They, er, doesn’t worth crap.

[stormshadow2005]

*Smacks self in forehead* Render over an image for the static scene elements... that's a great idea! Wish I'd thought of that :salut:. I'm still trying to find a good balance between quality and quantity. I loves me my advanced skin shaders, but these probably don't help speed the whole thing up. I suppose I'll have to break down and begin the odious task of cutting my texture maps down to a more reasonable size :BangHead:
Hellboy, I'm doing a reasonably dark scene already, although not nearly enough to hide defects... And I agree, NO WAY am I going to postwork 300 frames. BTW, love your avatar... mesmerizing in a wierd sort of way...

[Hellboy]

*Smacks self in forehead* Render over an image for the static scene elements... that's a great idea! Wish I'd thought of that :salut:. I'm still trying to find a good balance between quality and quantity. I loves me my advanced skin shaders, but these probably don't help speed the whole thing up. I suppose I'll have to break down and begin the odious task of cutting my texture maps down to a more reasonable size :BangHead:
Hellboy, I'm doing a reasonably dark scene already, although not nearly enough to hide defects... And I agree, NO WAY am I going to postwork 300 frames. BTW, love your avatar... mesmerizing in a wierd sort of way...
Thanks! Ha, ha! Gini says is hypnotizing! It's my little brainwashing machine, It makes ppl think the toilet paper in my gallery are images!

mark is right! if you use an image instead of a whole scene for the background, you will save a LOT of time.
If you were doing a detailed scene, I guess that will solve most of your problems. You will only render all that only once instead of 300! :)

Still you can reduce the quality a little too, once in movement it doesn't show up, and in the long run, will save you a lot of time.

[markr]

Do a test , your skin shaders may look great but do you really see it in an animation. Use it if you are doing extreme closeups but consider something simpler for general use.

Trimming animation time may need you to do a few tests, render maybe 10 frames with different shaders and see how much time you save. It may not be worth changing. I do know that some hair can be a killer.

When saving images out , thats a great idea , and its temporary until you create the animation, you can also postworkin some short effects , like gunshots , but do NOT use jpg images, use png or some other losless compression format.

[stormshadow2005]

Yeah, I just tried a test with a static image and it worked like a champ! Thanks Markr. And, I think that just might be the trick to use with a still image I'm working on... The skin shaders (sweaty skin) DOES show in the render though, so I'll just have to suck it up and finish trendering the other 240-odd frames... BTW any suggestions on a video editing program that won't break the bank?
Hellboy, your images are decidedly NOT toilet paper! Love your work... And if any avatar was going to make me jump the fence, it would be yours :grin: !

[DTHUREGRIF]

Even with a sweaty skin texture, unless you are getting in very close you probably don't need 4000x4000. And watch things like the eye maps and inner mouth maps. You can probably reduce those way down.

I must admit I include huge textures with my characters because it seems to have become the norm and people expect it, but they do choke up computers and increase render times.

[stormshadow2005]

True enough... Thanks Diane. I suspect most merchants make them that big to give artists options for close up portraits. I'm guessing it's far easier to scale an image map down than it is to make it bigger... That's an excellent tip about eye and mouth maps, I'll probably cut those to a far smaller size or delete the mouth maps altogether.

[markr]

There are some free ones but I like Sony Vegas movie studio . Its under $100

[Hellboy]

BTW any suggestions on a video editing program that won't break the bank?
Hellboy, your images are decidedly NOT toilet paper! Love your work... And if any avatar was going to make me jump the fence, it would be yours :grin: !
lol! Thanks! It's the brainwashing machine! It works I tell ya!

I dont know about video editing, but I think Ulead had some, they are the ones who makes my 2d application Photoimpact, and since that one is only $49, I gues their video ones are really cheap too. They have good things. Probably ya should search under Corel now if yer interested for the trial versions! :)

[markr]

www.videohelp.com is a great site for finding what to do with anything video related, tutorials and lists of software including free

[stormshadow2005]

Thanks everyone for the great advice :salut: . 50-100$ is just about in my price range right now, since I still need to upgrade my copy of Vue and CS3...

[StrongFang]

One additional trick is to not have the hair cast shadows. Shadows in general really improve the image but leaving out hair shadows cuts render time quite a bit and isn't really noticible (IMHO). Using image based lighting will cut render time, but no shadows really detract from the finished product. Hellboy's idea of dark animations with shadows works even better in terms of decreasing render time if you use a single light source (like a spotlight) instead of multi-light schemes. I also agree with Hellboy that it takes a LOT of practice to get even halfway acceptable at generating animated sequences suitable for posting anywhere. Patience is a real virtue when you're animating. Doing a couple of single-frame renders along the sequence will help a lot in making sure you're not shadowing a vital part of your animation accidentally. Also (probably obvious) using the preview render engine in Poser and cutting down the size to "quarter size" will give you a quickly-generated preview of your animated sequence. Finally, I suggest using either a 320x240 or 640x480 size frame. These will render large enough to see the details and relatively quickly (e.g. 640x480 frame size with Poser's firefly renderer takes overnight for around 300 frames). The windows moviemaker, which comes free with the windows operating system, is adequate for doing simple video edits, adding simple video effects and transitions, and encoding the .avi files the Poser render produces into (naturally) .wmv files. You need to be careful to maintain the 4:3 width to height ratio or the MovieMaker render will distort your animation to fit this aspect ratio. There's one other setting trick, but my computer is currently rendering a sequence and I can't get back into Poser to check the settings I use. Will post that one when the animation finishes.

[stormshadow2005]

Thanks, StrongFang... Great advice. I agree, no shadows just doesn't look right. I'm using a fairly simple hair prop anyway (tho still high-poly), but I've noticed from my still renders that AO Shader hair + shadows = painful render times. BTW that bit about preview quality was NOT obvious to me :5paperbag: . The first time I eagerly rendered out the animation, I used my normal Firefly render settings. Inexplicably, I thought this wouldn't take hours (or days). I think I already have Microsoft's Video editor, so I'll check that out... And 640 x 480 seems to be about minimum size I'm satisfied with, so I'll give that a go. Thanks a lot... :grin:

[markr]

You can start with FREE if all you need to do is string some clips together. Windows Movie Maker which is part of windows XP will even do to begin.

[MasterMindmm30]

Ok, sorry for not replying earlier but thanks for the purchase, I'm glad you liked it. Everything that everyone has said here is correct, but I'll add a little about other render engines you can use since no one else touched on it.

Daz Studio and Cinema 4D with Interposer Pro can render Poser scenes. However, I haven't used either of these personally -with much success- so I won't comment further other than to say you may want to research these on your own.

I've used Vue to render poser animations, and its engine is very nice, but I've found Vue to be glitchy with Poser, and it crashes when loading a scene with too many figures on my machine.

Carrara can import Poser scenes natively, which is a big plus, and its render engine is much faster than Poser's with more higher-end options. However, there is a decent amount of work involved getting a poser animation into Carrara while preserving the motion, but it is very possible. Also, Carrara may not be able to read some of your firefly shader nodes (especially if you use the fancier nodes).

Unfortunately there's not really a 'one-click' solution to getting around Poser's ridiculously inefficient render engine. Nothing I've found is perfect at importing poser scenes, but Carrara is my favorite so far.

[stormshadow2005]

Thanks Markr, will give the Microsoft Movie Maker a try...
MasterMind, yeah, it's a great set! I love the expressions. And, I'm not necessarily looking for a "one click solution", although I probably would give it a good hard look. I have both Vue and Cararra. I'm not all that familiar with Cararra (yet) and it seems to not recognize Poser Pro atm, so I'll probably stick with Poser for the forseeable future. Thanks alot. :)

[Ryushenron]

All people above advices are good for skin texture but don't sacrifice the hair texture or you'll get up wit blurry stuff in the wind..
Lower all your skins to 1200..3000 is too much for animations...
Don't use HDRI or IBL..or even raytrayced shadows,use mapped with 256 or 512 as settings...Use P4 renderer better than Firefly...

All that to say that I never do what I just adviced you as I never sacrifice a good render, even for anims, to time

Check the litlle anim in my gallery, it's 1 second rendering mounted in a 10 second loop with sound.HDRI lights and Firefly..
1 second=30 frames=17 hours...(the bad compression is due to mpg compression)

when it takes too long to render, just render the 10 first frames then the next 10...ect..Then mount them in a Video editor like Vegas Video....

[StrongFang]

The other setting was "disable backfacing polygons."

[doctorjo]

All of the above advice is sound but. . . Pro level animation is time consuming and expensive even for professional animation studios. My studio uses a render farm of eight quad core 3GHz Intels each with 8 GB of ram and even on that a thirty second HD animation takes about eight to ten hours.

Look at it like this - If it takes your computer two minutes to render an image then each second of animation for PAL standard will take around 50 minutes. (actually more like 70 minutes due to housekeeping tasks by the processors)

Frankly animation in Poser, even the latest Poser Pro I use, is not something I would recommend. It's like making love standing up in a hammock, it's fucking clever but there's easier ways to do it.

[CStrauss]

Im not sure if this has been talked about maybe I missed it but did'nt see it. But you inset on using firefly and all the bells and whistles you can have the movie settings set to render each frame as a single image.

Then I had a program somewhere dont have it installed on my new computer yet, nor can I think of the name, but hopefully someone knows what I'm talking about. But this program allows you to take all the images and put them in sequence thens save it out as a video file. I will keep looking for the name of the program Ihave soemwhere, and post back when I find it.

But rendering each frame as an image speeds up render time pretty good.

Also i read on this thread talking about the diffrent map sizes for example 4000X4000 I never seen a setting in my poser 7 options to change this, where can I do that?



Just found the name of that program I was talking about its called Virtual Dub

[doctorjo]

CStrauss wrote

Also i read on this thread talking about the diffrent map sizes for example 4000X4000 I never seen a setting in my poser 7 options to change this, where can I do that?

In Photoshop - open the texture map JPG and change its image size from 4000 to 1200 pixels wide, change the name on the orginal to (whateverfilename)hr.jpg then resave the new smaller file with the same name as the original name then the MAT files will find the texture.

[CStrauss]

aaaaahhh gotcha I swear in the older versions of poser you could do it in the render settings but i could been mistaken.

Thanks for the clarifications

[DTHUREGRIF]

BTW, I have found (at least for stills) that if you uncheck 'visible in raytracing' on hair it speeds up rendering time and makes no discernible difference in the finished look. Be sure you don't turn it off if you are expecting it to reflect in something, though. It won't. :-)

[markr]

Its worth generating a few resolutions of textures so you dont have to do it while working on a pic. I use _low , _med _ high for textures around 1000, 2000 and 3000. Some of the images are 4000 and except for some extreme closeups thats just a waste.

http://www.faststone.org/ Photo resizer will do in batch. Good also for generating thumbnails

www.videohelp.com has a lot of useful info if you are generating anims and has a list of tools for editing, converting and burnibg dvd and vcd.

[pinkbits]

If you have a multi-core Windows computer, check Task Manager
while rendering with Poser. From what I've seen Poser 7 uses only
one of the cores in the computer. If that is true for you then you can
D/L Daz Studio 3 and render with that. I know for a fact that DS3
uses all the cores and should render much faster.

Caveats: You must be using DAZ figures (not Poser figures) to
render in DS3. Also remember that the two programs handle
textures slightly differently, notably transparency and specularity,
so you may want to do a test render of a single frame in DS3 and
then tweek your textures before rendering the entire animation.

EDIT: You know, I shouldn't say not to use Poser figures in DS3. I'm
not sure whether you can or not. It's a safe bet to stick with DAZ
figures though.

[noelr]

If you have a multi-core Windows computer, check Task Manager
while rendering with Poser. From what I've seen Poser 7 uses only
one of the cores in the computer.One thread is just the P7 default setting, you can use up to four threads by adjusting the relevant option in the "General Preferences" dialog.

[pinkbits]

One thread is just the P7 default setting, you can use up to four threads by adjusting the relevant option in the "General Preferences" dialog.

Done that on a quad core Win XP box. It still only showed 25% CPU usage. DS3 always shows 100% usage.