2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

GUYS! I had this really freaky dream that the AVA was due February 5th! Freaked me out.



In other news, here's a little scene I cooked up of the rare Wild Utah Teapot in its natural habitat. As you can see, it's a bright sunny mental ray day, which brings me to my actual topic.

I highly recommend considering selecting the mental ray renderer as your production renderer. It used to be that you had to shell out additional $$$ for finalRender or Vray to have an alternative to the obsoleting 3ds Max scanline renderer, but not since 3ds Max 6. Not only will mental ray probably render your existing scenes faster, but also offers many, many more advanced features and tweaks.

Check out the above picture. Mental ray features include one-pass depth of field, fast SSS-like shader, and and fast GI calculations. The render time was about 4 minutes, with about 200k triangles.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Rendered 700 frames in 3d Studio Max to BMP frames. Edited said frames in Photoshop. Deleting any evidence that the field is for last year's game. Added Paint Daub filter to frames and applied diodes to dancing student and then cropped pictures so he wouldn't be obviously seen dancing at the side of the field where he would be disqualified in real life.
Now to do the other half of the animation.....

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Almost +faved that. BMP is a good way to waste disk space.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

It's stored (twice) on a server.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Yes but the sheer size of them chokes disk I/O. If they were stored locally, consider an average disk throughput of 20 MB/s. If each image is about 2 MB (2,000 kB), then you can read about 10 images a second, or less than half of a normal framerate. If they were stored on a server, as you say, consider a server throughput of 100 Mbps LAN - network overhead, so maybe 8 or 9 MB/s, and wonder why Premiere takes so long to load the files.

Also, consider this thread derailed.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Someone else will come get it back on track.
We're trying to make it worse by uploading Inventor files into the animation.
Now that will kill the program's ability to run well (did it before back in 2004 with very unhappy results. The model kept pulling itself apart and it was the last night before it was due so we didn't have much time to play with it so we had to live with it's flaws).

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Nice! Would like to see the other half when done :)

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

You guys are getting this rendering thing completely wrong. Don't render out in .bmp files. Render out in .tga or .png files. That way they have an alpha channel and you can composite layer rendering. As soon as your shot is done rendering, take the image sequence folder and make after effects or premier turn them into .mov files with the animation codec. Still no quality loss and they all still have alpha channels.

Either way, if you don't want quality loss your going to end up with a ton of data. Appliance Night Out took up 100 GB on my computer before I could crunch it down.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

At the risk of turning this into a general help thread, how exactly are you importing Inventor models?

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

I use the method 3D Studio Max recommends.
File menu > Import > Select File To Import dialog > Files Of Type > Autodesk Inventor (*.IPT, *.IAM)

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

I always avoid importing inventor files. the poly cont is always through the roof.

Re: 2009 AVA: Are you working hard?
 

Yes but the quality of the meshes generated by that method of import is unmatched.