SUPER SHERMAN!

edited December 1969 in Carrara Discussion

FINALLY! After 2 months of rendering and STILL NOT how I like it! MY HANDMADE Israeli 6-day war M-51 SUPER-SHERMAN TANK IS ANIMATED!

TO SEE THE ANIMATION PLEASE GO TO!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqN3Dbizs2k

Modeled in Hexagon 2.5, textured rendered and ANIMATED in Carrara 8 pro.

After endless weeks of ERROR MESSAGES like AN ERROR OCCURRED while rendering, after numerous days of rendering over and over again on 2 MACS. Through 3 power outages and endless gallons of Seagrams Seven Whiskey I am done with this part..

It was just maddening to get this done. I also had to re-render many sections as for whatever reason some of the sections DID NOT MATCH UP after I compiled them.

The whole thing is 32 seconds. I had to render no more than 2 second renderings at a time then compile them. if I dared try to render anything longer than 2 seconds on either machine I would get an error after days of rendering. THEN when I would copy and paste the sections of every 2 second render there seemed to be a slight alignment issue in a bout 25% of them LIKE the camera was at a slightly different angle or some frames were missing or numerous frames were the same as if frames 13-17 were exactly the same thing or frame 10-12 were just missing in a 2 second /60 frame render.

AS a mater of fact I wanted to have one continuos camera SHOT following the tank BUT because I decided to EDIT in renders from different camera angles to COVER up the screwed up sections. The part of the view from inside the building, the static camera on the ground shots were for nothing but to cover up the obvious hickups.

I wanted to add a few more but I am just out of time and patients. I may just set it to continuously render the entire 32 seconds at a future date IF I have a new MAC that won't take 3 months to do it.

GESS!

Comments

  • edited December 1969

    For anyone wanting to know what my settings were in render!

    I had 3 spot lights and on distant! All were set for raytraced SOFT shadows at 20 inches set to good.

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  • edited December 1969

    Also the palm trees leaves is not geometry they fine leaves are a alpha map trans that slowed things down as well did the broken GLASS in the window! I dont know why I even left any galls in then you cant see them! I did take it out of the window where you see the tank through the window

  • Design AcrobatDesign Acrobat Posts: 459
    edited June 2012

    Excellent work my friend!

    Quite a time you had modeling, texturing and rendering this out to the point of finish.

    BTW, why are you wasting perfectly good money on that Canadian stump water? You'd be much better off with a 21 year old Glenfiddich Scotch Single Malt. :)

    Post edited by Design Acrobat on
  • edited December 1969

    LOL! I knew someone would point out my lack of taste and cheap disposition germane in Bourbon.

    Well I am an artist which mean I am mostly broke.

    A man way smarter than me I had met at a book store in Austin texas while looking over the Graphic design books for for inspiration ask me. Son do you know what the most important part of being and artist/designer is?

    rattled off about half a dozen answers like, Give the client what they were asking for and, be creative and Bring in on time and on budget and blah blah blah..

    He said NOPE! Not even close He said the most important thing you need to worry about with being a artsist is GET PAID!

    Boy he was right ON!

    He also said avoid net 30s like clamitia!

    Yea If I had a dime for every time a net 30 turned into a net 90 if not more

  • bighbigh Posts: 8,147
    edited December 1969

    get some old grandad

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,040
    edited December 1969

    For anyone wanting to know what my settings were in render!

    I had 3 spot lights and on distant! All were set for raytraced SOFT shadows at 20 inches set to good.

    Hey Richard, nice video. I think you could save some system overhead and maybe time on your next renders by un-checking a couple things in your render settings. I believe compatibility shadows mode is for scenes created in older versions of Carrara where the shadow functions were maybe calculated differently. No need to have it checked. The same could go for the refraction option. I didn't see anything that jumped out as refracting. This will be explained badly, but from what I understand, even if you don't have any refracting items in the scene, the rendering engine still runs it's algorithm. Same with DOF, etc. The other thing you may be able to get away with turning off would be the Raytraced option. I would try rendering a still-frame with it on and one with it off to see if you actually can see a difference.


    I'm guessing the distant light is used for sunlight, but what are the spots for? Reflected light? If so, they may be low enough intensity to turn off soft shadows. The other possibility is that since it is most likely the transmaps in the trees killing your render time because of the soft shadows calculations, you could literally go to the first frame, duplicate the lights (if they're animated the keyframes should also be duplicated), leave everything the same, except that the original light will exclude the palm leaves and retain soft shadows, and the duplicated light will include only the leaves and have no soft shadows. Again, try a test render on a frame using the original method, and the method that I suggested to see if the quality is still there and if it makes a significant enough difference in render times to be worth it.


    Here's an example of what I'm talking about where I was offering suggestions on portrait lighting and getting faster renders with hair. The principle should still apply.

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  • chris poolechris poole Posts: 124
    edited December 1969

    Very very cool, but you've got to switch to a Windows based machine with all that crap your putting up with from the Mac Carrara, I don't know how you finish anything without throwing your machine out the window.

    The sound was very well done, the breaking needed a bit of inertia transference but obviously that would require a cheat or working suspension (maybe a Sparrowhawke plugin) would have helped, but awesome work

  • evilproducerevilproducer Posts: 9,040
    edited December 1969

    Very very cool, but you've got to switch to a Windows based machine with all that crap your putting up with from the Mac Carrara, I don't know how you finish anything without throwing your machine out the window.

    The sound was very well done, the breaking needed a bit of inertia transference but obviously that would require a cheat or working suspension (maybe a Sparrowhawke plugin) would have helped, but awesome work


    Not to sound harsh, but do you really want to go there?!? He uses an old Power Mac PPC, which I realize isn't apparent from the original post. At the minimum, he's using a processor pushing five, six, maybe seven years old, not the newer Intel chips. I use an older one than Richard does, and I've not had the issues he has had. My machine is nine years old by the way and was a 64 bit machine way back in 2003. When did Windows and Intel finally put out a 64 bit machine and OS available to the general public? So how about we avoid the platform wars, because I could go on all day with anecdotes about people I know and the horrible problems with Windows that they've had, of which I've had none.


    Aside from probably having his render settings too high or problems with his scene that cause Carrara to wig out, it is an old processor that is probably over matched by having to calculate raytraced soft shadows through a multitude of transmapped leaves.

  • chris poolechris poole Posts: 124
    edited December 1969

    Very very cool, but you've got to switch to a Windows based machine with all that crap your putting up with from the Mac Carrara, I don't know how you finish anything without throwing your machine out the window.

    The sound was very well done, the breaking needed a bit of inertia transference but obviously that would require a cheat or working suspension (maybe a Sparrowhawke plugin) would have helped, but awesome work


    Not to sound harsh, but do you really want to go there?!? He uses an old Power Mac PPC, which I realize isn't apparent from the original post. At the minimum, he's using a processor pushing five, six, maybe seven years old, not the newer Intel chips. I use an older one than Richard does, and I've not had the issues he has had. My machine is nine years old by the way and was a 64 bit machine way back in 2003. When did Windows and Intel finally put out a 64 bit machine and OS available to the general public? So how about we avoid the platform wars, because I could go on all day with anecdotes about people I know and the horrible problems with Windows that they've had, of which I've had none.


    Aside from probably having his render settings too high or problems with his scene that cause Carrara to wig out, it is an old processor that is probably over matched by having to calculate raytraced soft shadows through a multitude of transmapped leaves.

    Hi evilproducer,

    I'm not against Macs, being in the printing industry we used to use them all the time and I personally rate Macs above Intel machines, and I might be mistaken, but the Carrara for Macs seem to be unstable compared to its PC counterpart of any age.

    But you would be in a better place to judge as I've only used Carrara on a PC and haven't had half the problems other people get, including the PC brethren.

    Chris

  • 3dcal3dcal Posts: 178
    edited December 1969

    Hey Richard,

    Very impressive modeling, texturing, rendering & animating. ;-)

    Want to see your Phantom in action, too.

    How long have you been using Hex? Did you do any of the tutorials
    at GeekAtPlay.com?

    Do you ever use other modelers?

    I don't use it often, but like it a lot.......easy to create the shapes I want
    and export to Carrara for shading & animating.

    Just never have liked using Carrara for modeling.

  • GarstorGarstor Posts: 1,411
    edited December 1969

    megacal said:
    How long have you been using Hex? Did you do any of the tutorials
    at GeekAtPlay.com?

    THANKS! I just checked this out and I think I'll be making a purchase of these Hex tutorials. I'd love to learn how to make better use of the tools that I have here.

  • 3dcal3dcal Posts: 178
    edited December 1969

    GeekAtPlay.com......yeah, lots of great tutorials.....nice people, too. ;-)

    I think Hex is a gem and very under rated......I'm amazed what Richard has
    done with it.

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