Jay Versluis
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3D Shenanigans at Secret Lake - Carrara Animation
🕑 Added 2021-06-03 16:27:58 +0000 UTCI've always wanted to do a camera animation through HowieFarkes Secret Lake for Carrara. Trouble is that one frame takes extremely long to render that an animation through the environment is cumbersome. I've recently bought a new Z840 workstation and upgraded it with two Xeon E5-2670 v3 CPUs and thought this would be a nice project to stress test it. This is the result.
I've rendered a total of 1500 frames, at around 6-8 minutes render time per frame. Using all 4 nodes I have available to help, this took around 4 days of render time. The Z840 was rendering 24/7 live on Twitch, except for a couple of Carrara crashes along the way. I rendered the images at 1280x720 with default render settings provided by Howie's product. I'm pleased with the results.
Things I'd like to do better for next time are the keyframe interpolations, which appear to be linear on the camera. I haven't worked with Carrara for a while and thought logarithmic interpolations would happen by default, but it appears that's not the case. Hence the slightly abrupt camera movements. This has an effect on speedup/slowdown too, something that I had to futz with in post production: the beginning pan through the grass was a bit too fast for my liking, same as the end on the logo.
Something else I'd like to change is the render resolution and anti aliasing setting. This sequence appears to have a lot of noise, although this is only apparent when viewed as animation. On a still image this is forgivable, but might look better animated at higher setting. Sadly both settings increase render time by 5 and 2 respectively, which means it would take a month to re-do this. Let me... think about it π
This animation will make for a nice addition to my 3D Shenanigans holding loop, the one I use for 3D streams on Twitch.
Comments
Jay Versluis
Forgot to mention: I'm actually VERY pleased with the water rippled we see! I wasn't expecting that to be animated, and was super chuffed when I saw that it was π
Jay Versluis
That's a nice idea! I'd also like a frog jumping across the pond and ribbit as we close in on the logo. If the previews would be quicker to render, and if the viewport would respond at more than 1 frame a second, this would all be doable. I can see why Carrara has falled out of favour. It's great for the odd still and nature background, but it hasn't aged all that well (poor thing).
