Medusa interior animation tutorial – Part 2

Hi!

This is me, Matus, again. I’m back after some time with the second part of the Medusa Interior tutorial :)

Let’s have a look at V-Ray materials settings, V-Ray options, scene optimizing and camera movement in this part. Important note is that I am not doing everything here in superior quality, in final detailing. This scene was made especially for this tutorial to show you how to create an animation in Rhinoceros in optimized time.

V-Ray materials

Let’s start with this leather armchair. You can download some leather visopt materials from HERE or you can quickly set up the material like this:

Create a new V-Ray material
Load texture like this as a bump map. I usually use value of 1, but it depends on desired effect you want to achieve.

This time, use this bump map as a diffuse map as well, so after applying this material, we can see the mapping on the model clearly.
Add a new Reflection Layer and set both glossiness values (reflection and highlight) to 0.6, subdivs to 16.

Apply this leather material to all leather surfaces on your armchair. And this is where we are starting with mapping part. If you followed my older tutorials, you might seen this Bibendum chair tutorial – mapping part.  Leather map will be very unnaturally stretched all over the surfaces, but don’t worry, it’s just default mapping.

Go to mapping menu, switch from default mapping mode to Custom, select surface projection and play around a little bit with UVW Repeat values. This will tile your bump map all over the surface – play with it until the size of the texture is correct when compare to real-world.

You have to repeat this process for every surface of the armchair.

When I was newbie to Rhino and I had no idea how to map complicated organic surfaces, I’ve always used Box mapping. But that’s evil! Never use Box, or any other geometrical primitive (sphere, planar, cylinder) mapping for organic surfaces, because you will get very ugly parts where the texture projection will be deformed.

So this Surface mapping method is the best you can use in Rhino currently. I am sure a lot of things will be different in upcoming Rhinoceros 5, which already uses Texture Unwrap tool for NURBS, but until then… just use Surface mapping :)

If the whole armchair is correctly mapped, change the Diffuse layer of the leather material. Switch from the Bitmap mode to None and pick a desired color of this leather material.

And that’s it! :)

Have a look at other materials settings: There’s no needed any description, I hope. If you have any question, ask me in the comment area at the end of the article :)

Aluminium Blurry (Default material provided by ASGVIS.com)

CD stand material:

Clear glass material: (please be careful about the Fog color and multiplier!)

Wooden floor material:

Window frame material (white lacquered wood):

Venner wood – Armchair’s legs material.

Medusa relief

You might have some FPS problems during working on this part, so if you are just trying this scene and your goal is not to make a great animation, I recommend you to use lower values than I did.
Now you can search for any texture on the Internet I (or your personal photo?) to use as a relief source image. Adjust this photo in Photoshop, try to blurry it a little bit, to get smoother and nicer surfaces. And use Black and White effect, too.

If you want, get this Medusa texture here, you’ll need that in next few steps, if you don’t want to use any personal photo:

Type Heightfield into Rhinoceros command line and choose the desired texture to make relief from.

Now this part really depends on your computer performance, because this step will generate the relief surface. The bigger numbers in point counts you use, the nicer and more detailed surface you will get. In my case I used 1000×1000 points. 1 000 000 points on NURBS surface. Yes, that’s a lot :)

Hide isocurves of this surface, because having them visible might slow down your computer a lot. Now we’ll crop the relief into round shape to get some nice frame around it. I recommend you to mesh all NURBS surfaces before starting rendering the scene, you’ll save a lot of memory and some time as well.

Animation setting

All you need to do is to create 2 curves (or eventually the curve and the point). Let’s start with this button:

Select camera path curve or point. Press Enter to select last camera path:
Choose the path of the camera now. In my picture, it’s the longer curve.
Select target path curve or point. Press Enter to select last target path:
Select target path now, it’s the shorter curve in my scene.

Preview the animation by hitting this button:

This is how the preview should look like:

Let’s make some details. Do not be too active in this part, we’ll need the animation to be rendered quickly! :)

First of all make some 3D details in the corners on the floor. Draw section curve, railing polyline and use Sweep1 command again.

Mirror this new object to the top corner.

In the same way you can make windows frames.

V-Ray scene settings

These are my scene settings. These settings are not the alpha and omega for each scene and animation, many values depend on your scene, materials, lightning and so on… So have a look at these images and in the end I will highlight important values.
Global switches, System, Camera settings:

Output (1280x720pix = HD resolution, 1920x1080pix= Full HD resolution. In this case I used HD only, what’s enough for this tutorial.), environment (HDRi image in GI and Background used), Image sampler, DMC sampler (use adaptive DMC and turn antialiasing ON ), Color mapping (check Sub-pixel).

VFB channels (Color, Alpha, Raw GI, Raw Reflection, Raw light), Displacement (we don’t actually use it in this scene), Indirect illumination, Deterministic Monte Carlo, Caustics.

Irradiance map

Irradiance map is one of the most important issues in animation rendering. Let’s have a look at the definition of the irradiance map from Vray.us

“Irradiance is a function defined for any point in the 3D space and represents the light arriving at this point from all possible directions. In general, irradiance is different in every point and in every direction. However, there are two useful restrictions that can be made. The first is the surface irradiance – which is the irradiance arriving at points which lie on the surface of objects in the scene. This is a natural restriction since we are usually interested in the illumination of objects in the scene, and objects are usually defined through their surface. The second restriction is that of diffuse surface irradiance – which is the total amount of light arriving at a given surface point, disregarding the direction from which it comes.

In more simple terms, one can think of the diffuse surface irradiance as being the visible color of a surface, if we assume that its material is purely white and diffuse.”

Okay, This is the animation we set up previously (details added):

Preview your animation several times, because when your machine will start rendering, there’s no way back ;) Just kidding, you can stop it anytime :)
Okay, I assume your animation is set up correctly and you are ready to hit the render button. But wait! Rendering the animation as the normal render is possible, but you’ll be able to use your computer again next year, most probably. The trick how to make the animation render faster, is to compute the irradiance map before rendering yuor final animation. Sounds cool, huh? :) So here’s how to do it:

- Go to Global Switches in V-Ray settings dialog.
- Check the “don’t render final image” box.
- Go to Irradiance map settings
- Set Min Rate and Max Rate to -3
- Change Mode from Single Frame to Incremental Add to current map
- Now you have to set the animation again.

Here’s where you have to decide how many seconds your animation will have. The rule is simple: at least 24 frames per second. So if you want your animation to have 20 seconds, you will need at least 480 frames to be rendered. That’s a lot.
For this tutorial I used 240 frames for 10 seconds of animation.
Now we are going to compute the Irradiance map and save it. Set the animation again, but this time use only 1/10 of final frames count. So if your desired animation has 240 frames, for Irradiance map use only 24 frames to be computed.
Render the animation now:

When the process is finished, close the frame buffer. Don’t save any images at this point.
- Go to Irradiance map settings
- Save Current map to your Desktop
- Change Mode from Incremental Add to current map to From File
- Locate previously saved Irradiance map file
- Go to Global switches, uncheck the “Don’t render the final image” box
- Set up the animation again, but this time with full number of frames, in my case with 240.

- Hit the Render button again

And that’s it! Now choose the destination folder where your frames will be saved and have some rest, you deserve it :) If you don’t have renderfarm at home, your animation should take about a day or two.
I’d recommend you to save frames as .tga files, because these are in good quality and preserve background image. HDR and PNG format don’t preserve background.

This is the RAW animation without any postproduction as a result of this part of the tutorial:

And this is the final animation, already finished:

I’m writing the next article now :)

PS1: If you liked this article, let me know in the comment area below. And share it with your friends on Facebook, Thumblr, Twitter, Google+, or anwehere else :) Thanks!

PS2: If you make any animation by yourself, let me know :) Upload it to Youtube or Vimeo and share the link to comments under this article :)