Anim8or Community

I've made a couple of posts lately referring to an ongoing film project, and I'm finally ready to show off the results!  it's an experimental collaboration with my composer friend, where we developed the visuals and the music in parallel as a multi-disciplinary creative dialogue.  It took about sixteen/seventeen months total, and involves 5074 frames in a single shot, which stretched our favourite CG animation app to its limits at times.  But I'm very happy with the results, and I hope you'll enjoy them too...

i was recently under the impression that Steve had added the ability to animate an element's parentage.  but i can't find any controls to do so (as of build 1402), and i now suspect i was getting mixed up with the new feature where a figure bone can be set as an element's parent.

so: just to confirm, parentage can't be animated at present right?

another question for Steve...

the project mentioned in my previous thread includes some light bulbs in the scene, and i can see that the pixels occupied by the glass material take several times longer to render in ART compared to those occupied by simpler materials - which is to be expected.

as a side effect, this means that my 12-thread processor can blast through most of the render in a matter of seconds, but then a small number of threads (typically 2 to 6) get stuck working on the glass pixels for a few minutes while the rest of the CPU goes idle.  not much of an issue when rendering a single frame, but i need to output more than 5,000 of the darn things, so that'll be a lot of wasted core time

so here's what i was wondering: ART currently seems to divide up the image into blocks of 100x100 pixels (or thereabouts), and i was wondering if we could achieve more efficient CPU utilisation for bulk renders if that figure was changed to, say, 10x10 pixels per block?  or maybe make it user-configurable?

ah, ok.  pretty sure there are 10 in the scene now, so that explains that.

they'll all show up in the render though, right?

i've stumbled across an issue with scanline renders in build 1393, where items at a z-distance of more than a few hundred are getting left out.  they show up fine in the workspace and in ART renders, but go missing if i use scanline, per the attached images.  the scene's z-far setting is still the default 10k units.

...coz i've only got one 'main' ongoing project, on the backburner for now...

...wait, was that a sidelong reference to Deeper?

been a while since anyone mentioned that film.  i fondly remember the days when the WIP was one of the biggest things happening on this forum, and it'd be great to see it finished someday.  but of course i do realise that life sometimes gets in the way of art!

Quote from: captaindrewi on August 10, 2020, 06:54:24 am

So what size shall we agree on? Jonah has suggested 640 X 360?
16 x 9  4 x 3. ?

How about 1920x1080 16:9 or 16:10?

i'd stick with a 16:9 ratio; that's more or less a universal standard these days.

specific resolution is more of an open question; 640x360, 1280x720 or 1920x1080 would all be good options, but not everyone would necessarily have the ability to render at the higher resolutions depending on their computer's capabilities.  so i'd suggest the two best options are: either we standardise on 640x360 as johnar suggested, or maybe we get someone with a high-powered rig to take care of high-res rendering on behalf of anyone whose machines can't handle it.

my rig is pretty capable, so i might be able to help out with a bit of render-farming.

are we talking Object mode or Scene mode here?

i don't know if this is what's caused the issue in your case, but i remember seeing this behaviour in Object mode after using the Join Solids command.  iirc that command converts all of the point coordinates in the new combined solid to be based on the world origin.