Animation Dissapointment

[Cad64]

I have had only moderate success. You can definitely tell when the walkthru changes from 1 machine to the next. Lighting shadows etc all change a bit ( based on video cards I think )

 

Yeah, it's usually best if all the machine's on the render farm have similar specs.

[Bill Tillman]

Okay in case anyone wants an update. It's now been running since Monday evening and it's on frame 337 of 600 which puts it a little over halfway. I've not done anything else with this machine and there's only a few idle processes running on it. So the bulk of the cores are dedicated to this animation. It tells me that it still has 36 hours left to go. This goes to show how important it is to get the path of the camera set just right because I can only imagine when this is done and I find that it didn't really travel where I wanted it to and then have to wait another 4-5 days on the animation to complete. This is even worse than watching paint dry on the wall, but when it's finished I should have a very cool 20 second video.

 

I found an interesting video that someone did with AutoCAD 2008 on youtube. They seemed to have used a trick for the background. When I use the Sun&Sky it takes forever. And when i used blue sky with clouds as my backgrouns it sped up but the results were less than desirable for the background. In this youtube video it seems they had the same problem and resolved it by making a giant sky dome over the 3D Roman Villa and set the interior texture with a picture of a blue sky with clouds. So this does seem to be a universal problem and at least one person found a solution to it.

 

36 more hours means my animation will not be done until sometime on Friday or later. The whiskers on my chin grow faster than this.

[David Bethel]

I have 1 that took 600 cpu hours for 3,500 frames. Did it maybe 8 years ago. I use a lot better hardware now and actually older software. Much faster. Today I'm at 2 minutes per frame @ 1,042x784. R13 with Accurender 2.0. Good luck. -David

[Cad64]

600 hours? That's about 3-1/2 weeks! Holy cow.

[David Bethel]

I split it up after the first week onto 3 machines. Accurender 3.0 was taking 20 minutes per frame to render. And it crashed Acad 2000 every 600 frames. So it still took almost 3 weeks. -David

[Bill Tillman]

So Accurender is another piece of software which will work with your AutoCAD files or it is an Add-On to AutoCAD? Two minutes per frame that would be sweet. It looks like this video will not be done until sometime tomorrow night.

[Cad64]

So Accurender is another piece of software which will work with your AutoCAD files or it is an Add-On to AutoCAD?

 

I played around with the trial version about 5 or 6 years ago, but then I started using 3DS Max, so I didn't do much with it and I don't really remember how it works. But this is from the Accurender site: "AccuRender nXt allows you to easily create stunning, life-like images from your 3D models inside AutoCAD."

 

You can read all about it here: http://www.accurender.com/page/product-1

[Bill Tillman]

If finally finished almost 90 hours after starting the process. And it's nice to see but of course there are some changes I would like to have made to the path before it started. I viewed it in Windows Media Player and the colors for the wood framing were as expected with a nice brownish tint. But when I ran it using another player (VLC) the wood took on a blueish tone. I'm not sure why one player did this an not the other. I was hoping to use VLC to compress the file as it's now 154 MB in size.

 

If anyone can tell me more about the video I saw on youtube that was a fly-through of a Roman Villa using AutoCAD 2008. In this video the author appears to have made a huge dome over the villa to simulate the sky texture which he placed on the inside surface of the skydome. I am assuming he did this because like me he found that rendering with the AutoCAD sun and sky settings adds exponentially to the time needed for rendering or animations. I was able to download samples of the file this guy used and I will be studying them carefully for ideas. His video was more detailed than mine and was almost 1 minute long. He claimed his animation only took 12 hours and I would think that came from the sky dome method he used in lieu of AutoCAD's sun and sky settings.

[Raudel Solis]

this man that goes by pentural is a great 3ds max artist he created this animation

and his render time was 110 days @ 720*405 around the year 2009.

 

You stated your render looked so real so im asking do you got all the settings maxed out like refractions final gather precision, image precision "antialiasing"

Im sure the customer wont mind if you reduced the realism a little. Since you stated that autocad only use around 3 gb out of your 12 total gigs of ram you could set the paging file space windows uses to 0 :/