unbiased luxrender animation anyone ?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Hi all,

I’ve been thinking for couple of days to try and break the ice in producing an
animation using unbiased light transport.

I’ve seen various attempts in the past, usually a couple of seconds long and
very noisy, mere tests by people at home rendered in one night.

I believe it’s possible to render an animation of a couple of minutes with
acceptable quality at ~PAL resolution using a hacked version of LuxRender
i’m working on. (i’m a luxrender developer), and some help from some
of our members, as an initial test to evaluate maybe a second attempt at
a short film. (5-10 minutes, hopefully with some renderfarm help)

I’m pretty good with blender, but i don’t have any animation skills.
So if any of these attempt happen i’ll probably be asking some animators for help.

I would like to ask if anyone can ‘donate’ a fairly acceptable animation in
.blend file which i can rematerialize, relight and render, for the initial test.

Something between 30seconds, up to 2 minutes in length (@25FPS)

i’ll credit the author in the final rendered animation.

Thanks,
Radiance

#2

Try to re-render a scene from elephants dream ;-p

#3

hey,

i’ve though of that, but i’d like to do my initial test with something a little less large :wink:
i’m just trying to get a pipeline going with the engine and doing speed / noise tests for an animation.
i don’t have much time now to rematerialize those large & complex scenes…

i was hoping for a smaller project, a short small hobby-class character animation for example.

greetz,
radiance

#4

There should be loads of shorts with mancandy around the forums, you could try one of those.

#5

you could use Oppose Those Thumbs - amo it’s two files - one for each shot - and on the first shot you have to turn layers on a bit at a time otherwise both the scientist and the crab appear before they should. There is a python script to do this, though, which I should be able to get working… what do you think?

#6

Why is it actually unbiased? biasing should reduce noise and render times by very low losing of quality, or do I understand it wrong?

#7

try infinitum , a cool aanimation done by some guy and with a cc license.

#8

i think you first should try architectural walkthrough animation, archi people kill for unbiased animation :slight_smile:

#9

hey thanks guys,

i think infinitum would be good. it’s perfect for my tests, small, compact, easily distributable for rendering over the web, etc…

the oppose those thumb animation, nice too, but it’s a bit larger than the purpose.
at this time i’m just gonna be experimenting with the necessary settings for rendering
an animation and the geometry would be overkill for my purposes right now.

i’ll start experimenting with this over the next days, hopefully i’ll be able to show something soon. :wink:

Radiance

#10

i’m gonna try and modify the project a little as to ‘use’ the tech of unbiased renderers more.
i was thinking animation control over camera DOF would be cool.

since the dof is a variable in the exporter UI right now, i’ll need to ‘hook’ this up to an animation channel/curve.

i’m not very familiar with all then animation tools in blender, as i’ve only done stills for architecture & design as of yet.

i’ve got experience with keys and basic IPO and such though…

anyone got any idea as what would be the simplest way to add a animation/channel control to a scene and being able to retrieve the value on a per frame basis from a python object ?

i could animate an empty and use it’s z axis or something,
but can i animate the blender camera focal length ? (i could hook this up to our DOF export)

thnx!,
radiance

#11

This looks like a great renderer! Thanks for all your hard coding Radiance. :slight_smile:
Now comes a thought for consideration.
When thinking about Indigo not too long ago, I came up with an idea that
I thought would be interesting to bring up for LuxRender.
Seeing as it is physically correct and would just keep on going, that is not very
convenient for animation as you can not have a set level of quality.
But, I was wondering, what if you could tell LuxRender how long you wanted
each frame to render, entering in a number of minutes and when it was done with that frame, it would move onto the next frame. Or something like that. Then again, that would apply only to the physically correct side of the renderer and I just noticed the unbiased render part.
Thanks again!

#12

Sounds great Radiance I can’t wait to hear/see more about it!

And I think that “infinitum” is a great choice!

To the matter of animating the dof I am nowhere near the expert you want though the Empty idea sounds like it would work!

~Marslyr

#13

hey,

thanks,

well, luxrender supports either progressive (infinite) rendering, or linear/traditional (finite) rendering with a configurable nr of samples per pixel.

for an animation i’d use linear sampling.
so the renderer would knit the render (like knitting a woolen sweater) from top to bottom, and all frames would have the same amount of samples p/px.

we’ve also got a command line UI which can be scripted to batch render the frames.

besides all that i can make changes where i want to further optimize the animation rendering process.

greetz,
radiance

#14

Ah, I see. I’ll look forward to testing it later today.
Thanks Radiance! :wink: