ZFact

Ive almost secured a fairly big animation job... iv done a few
fly around type ones before which were very basic... this
one is going to require movement within the scene also.

I have never used any video editing equipment and dont
really have the time to start learning for this project, so
whatever runs of the end of the renderer will be the final
piece.

Is this madness or can it be done... i need general advice
and any tips on creating good animations without editing
and also how to apply animated water to the scene and
any advice on keeping the render times down as much
as possible.

I'll be using FR2 to render out the frames.

Thanks in advance

Ernest Burden

Perhaps you should break all that down to more specific questions.

fr2 rendertimes are much better than AR, but the program is far from stable. You will need to do a lot of babysitting of your computers, especially if you use distributed rendering. The process runs as two passes, the first does the GI work, the second the raytracing. fr2's physical sky isn't fully functional, you may be better off with distant lights.

Moving water can be done with an animated texture, not hard in C4D since you would probably want to use noise, and it can be animated both in the way the pattern behaves but also in a direction.

You can use the STAGE object to program camera cuts into an animation. I've done that. You set up two or three cameras and cut from one to the other at a given frame, but it can be hard to work with and you will need to be familiar with the F-curves pallette and probably rely upon linear interpolation to avoid cameras flying all over the place.

You are better off rendering to a TIFF sequence than trying to output an animation file, but suit yourself on that one. In fact, TIFF would be the only sane choice since you will probably not be able to get fr2 to render the whole sequence without crashing. I think QuickTime will allow a crash and still have usable footage, but then you would be back to using a video editor to put them together, AND you wouldn't know which frame to pick up on. With TIFF you will by looking at the frames output folder.

Find a way to tell a story and do not allow your cameras to zip about at supersonic speed.

__________________
Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

ZFact

cheers ernest;
anyone know of any good tutorials for beginners

Sindala

I totally agree with Ernest, but i guess he's one of those people who's always right, fr is too unstable for animations.

Also the tif sequence is the way to go, after you're done you can also change small bit's in your sequence by rendering only those frames and just replace the tif-files.
I use after effects to put together the seperate frames of the animation, if you can use photoshop than you will probably get along with ae after a day of playing with it while you wait for your renders.

Also if the project is big, try not to rely on gi, rendertimes get longer and longer after about 100 frames, just fake it, that's the easiest way to go. another thing i found handy was first rendering the whole thing without the AO, goes a lot faster, and you already have a product, and then render the ao in a seperate pass and put if over your animation as a screen-layer in AE.
I hope this makes any sense.

ZFact

Ok... the plot thickens

The client may want some real video footage taken of the site
then the animation layered over it to show the development in
context.

Im probably biting of more than i can chew but it should be a
good learning curve... Can the 2 be layered over one another in
after effects and if so how difficult is it to do given that i have
never used editing software before.

Surely i will need to record the real cameras point in space using
some sort of Satellite navigation system to camera match it with
the virtual camera in C4D. Is that how its done?

The only thing i have going for me at this stage is the client is
not in any hurry for the final product.

manta

Do you have funds for extra software i.e. camera matching video editing and compositing...

__________________
DESIGN FORWARD
http://www.mantastudios.com

ZFact

Yeah... could probably afford around $1500.00 max
but remember im on a learning curve and need something
i will be able to learn in a week or so.

Ernest Burden

That is quite true in AR, it gets out of hand after a dozen frames sometimes, very useless. fr2 does not suffer this problem and produces much better-looking GI faster. Only it crashes all the damned time. Pick your poison, either way you're in for some grief.

__________________
Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

Ernest Burden

Not if you're smart.

There is a really good camera-matching plugin for C4D, but its meant for stills. What you need to do is get a good fee and sub out the live-plate matching shots to someone who has the experience and tools to do it right. That's what should happen when a small studio lands a big job.

Camera tracking is based on known objects within a scene, not GPS data. You would have to be able to record very fine tollerance data for camera position, plus pitch roll and heading.

__________________
Ernest Burden III
AcmeDigital
architectural rendering

AJLynn

I've done FR2 animation (with the model and camera both animated) by working in passes, saving a GI pass per frame then rendering still image frames to make a video later (I think we used Premiere for that). Kind of a hassle but faster than GI in AR2, and if it crashes (in this case it didn't) you have your work saved. Depends on what you're doing and what kind of lighting you need, e.g. if you just want it to look nice but don't need perfect accuracy, and it's an exterior, a fakeiosity dome rig is hard to beat. With all the extra work of camera matching and compositing you might decide GI animation is too much.