Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

I'm the director of our team this year and We just discovered the amazement of radiosity (I think thats how you spell it) We were wondering If any other teams out there are using it? my video must look 50 times better with it on but takes 10 times much longer to render. I've already got radiosity computed for my scene. any suggestions?

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

I'm no longer animating for FIRST (they don't let college kids compete) but I've found that using advanced lighting can make rendering the animation take way too long. In the past, I've resorted to placing several omni lights with very low intensity values and shadows off. That seemed like a pretty good alternative to advanced lighting. Good luck on using radiosity. I'll agree that advanced lighting makes the render look that much more photorealistic. I hope it works out for you.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

I also have extolled the values of multiple-omni lighting. I avoid radiosity because i prefer to rendr in mental ray.

We are, however, using caustics in our animation, which is not exactly a basic lighting technique.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

For a lot of situations, you can fake radiosity by using the "spinning light trick". The results are very similar to a genuine radiosity render, but the rendering times are a fraction of a full radiosity render. The particular link above shows how to do it in Lightwave (and it is also a really good general tutorial on area lighting), but I understand that it also works the same way in Max.

-dave

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

That's our problem, too, using advanced textures and lighting effects just takes waaay too long, we're thinking about just taking the files home and rendering them on our (faster) computers, anyone else have any advice for rendering shortcuts?

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

optimize the background objects, use spots instead of omnis, umm...
i dunno. you can also lower the quality of the renderer, but that gets ugly.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

My team had the same problem last year - we were getting render times around 20 minutes for both the safety animation and normal animation. We ended up just having to dial down the settings (mental ray samples per pixel etc...) in order to get decent times. This year, we built our animation with frame times in mind, and made pretty extensive use of wireframe in the finished anim. We used previews of everything first, too, so that we could tweak animations and edits without having to rerender anything. Minimizing the number of lights is always good, turning off shadows for any place where you do not explicitly need them is good, using as few foliage models (or anything super complex) is always good, using mental ray if you have reflections is good, the list goes on...

Anyways, this year the average frame time is less than 30 seconds for our animation, so I guess the work paid off. Especially with that early 2/13 deadline ready and waiting.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

Is there a good way to preview how a scene will look without rendering many frames?

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

sry, should have clarified, we get Max at home with the 30 day free trials.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

You can test render a scene by going to Animation->Make Preview. The results give you an idea of what your animation looks like (the actual motion). When you are satisfied with the motion, render a few full frames, from various parts of your anim, until you are satisfied with the textures etc... Then set up your comp for the long haul.

Re: Any team using avanced lighting this year.
 

what our team did last year is render it at 2-5 second intervals, then eventually edit everything out, that way if we caught something we didn't notice in the preview
we could just do it again and only loose 5 hours of work instead of 48 =)