Chaos Corona Forum
General Category => General CG Discussion => Topic started by: JGallagher on 2018-03-29, 17:09:29
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I've been playing around with animating my architectural visualizations recently, but I'm having trouble getting them smooth. Is there a rule of thumb for how fast my camera should be moving in 3ds Max?
I rendered out an image sequence overnight. I panned across the front of my building from frame 0 to frame 60, and rendered all 61 images. When I brought it into Premiere Pro it was either way too fast, or way too choppy. I got it looking okay eventually, but nowhere near as smooth as a typical animation.
Does anyone have any tips or tricks for setting up animations? Is there an ideal velocity my camera should be moving at? I have a big animation to do at work in May so I'm trying to get a solid grasp of it beforehand. Thanks for the help everyone.
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The first question is what frame rate your final video will be. 60fps is awesome, but requires twice as many frames as the more regular 30 fps. Either way, this will tell you how many frames are required for 1 second of animation (60 frames for 1 second at 60 fps, 30 for 30 fps).
Then you can think in terms of how fast a movement would be unpleasant in the real world - a camera pan across a whole building in just 2 seconds (if we assume your final video will be 30 fps, your 60 frames are just 2 seconds)) is likely going to be rather fast and unpleasant, especially for an arch-viz use where things tend to be slow, leisurely, relaxing, etc. (in an action movie, who knows!)
The other thing to think about is how much of a difference there will be between one frame and the next, to avoid the animation looking jumpy. To make large movements in a short amount of time you may have to render more frames and then use the time stretching / shrinking in your video editor to reduce how much time that occupies, and get the video editor to do blending between the frames. However, usually you want to avoid large movements in short amounts of time anyway, especially in arch-viz, so likely not an issue - make the movement take more time is the better solution!
You could try and save render time by stretching things out in the video editor to slow it down, but there's not a lot of wiggle room there before it begins to look jumpy, and if quality is an issue, usually better to have the right number of frames matching the frame rate of the final video.
Should be enough to watch the preview in a realtime viewport in Max to know if the movement feels leisurely enough, so doesn't need a test render to get a good sense of just how fast a movement is going to take.
Last, you can consider adding camera motion blur - less of an issue with slow movements, but may still be helpful, and gets more helpful the faster the movement is going to be.
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I rendered out an image sequence overnight.
Set the "Pass Limit" to 1, Set your resolution somewhat low as well, and render out your sequences. It won't look pretty but it will let you see your Camera speeds/angles and if anything is out of place. This should really speed up the process of you testing out things.
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I would say that motion blur is a must in animation, even if motion will be pretty slow. There were couple interesting discussions on that topic in i need help (https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?board=29.0) board, if you would manage to find it, you could gather some valuable advices there.
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make sure (if you haven't already) to optimize your scene so when you hit the play button in max, the camera is smooth and close to your desired speed. I usually hide splines and densely tessellated objects
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Wow, thanks for all the great tips everyone. I appreciate it.
Tom G, thanks for the great explanation. Really helped shifting the way I was trying to go about it. Would you recommend motion blur in Corona? Or would that be better in a video editor?
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There are those links i mentioned in my previous post, might be worth to take a look:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=17569.msg110385#msg110385
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=19153.0