[Neil Evans]

I have just been running a test animation for a large project I am doing and thought I would share it. This rendered at 5mins per frame on dual opteron 285 machines.

Please note that this is only test so the dodgy hdr and the ground etc will be tweaked. Infact there are fifteen houses in the development so this is really just the tip of the iceberg.

I used Renderpal to manage the rendernodes, it worked perfectly.

Anyway here is the link, it is a 5mb mpeg file.

http://www.e3di.co.uk/test/test.m1v

Cheers

Neil

[w i l l]

Oh well... I can't open this file. Would like to see it though as I'd like to have a go at an animation.

[3dtrialpractice]

it opened for me on Windows player..

Looking good. dont you just love that maxwell light..and the glass in the building looks good with the blured reflections.

the model is looking good .. the grass looks good .. is that just a image mapped plane?(although may look good w/some scattered geo poly grass)...although you got some weirdness happening right at the edges of the grass at tthe bottom of the screen..(looks like you ground plane aint quite long enough?) and there is the seem in the background environment.. maybe fix that up..

I would definatly wanna see some vegitation.... bushes a small tree or two (like a dogwood?) and plants/flower garden...

this will be a nice product.. great to see its progress..
OHH just thought of something..
Wehn the camera circles around the house so that the Sunlight is in view. .I would animate the camera fstop or shutter so that the building gets a tad darker as the light shines into the camera.. It looks odd now cuz the lighting is all uniform all the way around the house.. this will add a nice realistice touch.

keep em posting

-Luke

[w i l l]

Oh yeah, very good... like the background haze.

[Neil Evans]

Cheers,

yes there is still alot of work to do. In reality this was just a quick test to see if really could get animations out of Maxwell. The final animation will have all fifteen houses in it...plus two appartment blocks. The grass goes wierd because the camera drops off the edge of the plane, didn't notice in the preview! The background is a HDR file, which needs sorting a bit.

I will be adding planting into the final animations, although I must confess the planting worries me as it really wacks up the file sizes of the mxs exports. I have just done a still render for another job and it was 2.5Gb. Good job I have just bought a terrabit harddrive!

[w i l l]

I have no understanding of animation... I assumed that I would need to use Maxwell as the plugin with other software like Maya... but did you just render frame by frame from Studio (using Renderpal to manage from there).

[Neil Evans]

I used the maxwell plugin in Maya and then do a mxs export with the animation check box checked. You then load up the mxs files into renderpal and hit render. When the updated plugin comes out this shouldn't be necessary as it will run like any other maya render plugin...I hope.