Interior Animation

Hello,

I have a request of my client to make a interior animation of a large and complex project.

My experience with rendering interior stills is, that this is more time consuming than exterior rendering.

Therefore I doubt that I can live upto the expectation of my client to deliver on time.

Can Microstation make use of a 'Lightmap' solution or is there another way to decrease rendering times
for interior animations?
Thanks,
Wim
Parents Reply
  • I think there are a few of us waiting for the ability to bake the lighting into a model, but I remember reading in an earlier post that luxology needs to create some magic in the background before this can be implemented in mstn.

    In the mean time, as already suggested, reference your model without lights into a blank file and create some low poly geometry. Apply an invisible glow material to fake lighting.

Children
  • Using glow will definitely speed up your render time if you had a large store model with hundreds of lights it would be slow to render using a ceiling material in the below example and an amount map I was able to render this in less than a minute. I also added glow to the food in the back cases so they would appear to be lit.

     

    JF

  • Hello Jerry,

    This looks promising!

    One question: what can I understand by 'amount map'?

    Thanks,

    Wim

  • Jerry,

    isn´t it so that Luxology (since SS1 Beta3) can build the whole animation based on the irradiance cache of the first rendering?

    I attached a screenshot of the .pdf-file Microstation published about that feature.

    While I didn´t made an animation for the last 2 years I never tried it out.

    Jacques

  • Wim, Jerry is refering to the map to the right of the glow lux value. It acts like a mask/multiplier to the glow lux value ie. 0 = completley off, 1 = full lux value. The map to the left of the glow lux value affects the glow colour.

    Here is a snippet from movie I recently made (the greyscale look is an intentional). The only lighting in this is the sun, the enviroment, and the two types of glow material (one visible to eye to fake ceiling lights, the other invisible to light the interior generally) the 300 frames rendered in just over an hour.

    A tip is to first turn off the sun and environment, then set up your glow material lighting so it looks good, then turn the environment and sun back on and dial them down to get the balance right. If you do it the other way round you quickly run out of lux on your glow material... then you go insane trying to balance it all. I also had to tweak the number of bounces and rays for indirects lighting to smooth shadows out, but thats another thread.

  • Thanks Robert,

    I'm going to give it a try!