Vray/Mentalray in Animation -

Farina

Hello guys,


i have a question about lighten your animation.
I dont find a good video tutorial, where the artist lighten his scene for animation .
I want to make a dark horror scene, with dark skys.

I will set up a skydome, where i apply the skymap (i think this should be right).
My character is running on a plane and he will stop and move his head to the right and to the left. Then he runs again.

But the question is, how i get a good realistic scene? Which render i should use? Vray or Mental Ray?

I wanna get something like this

http://i1.wp.com/www.cgmeetup.net/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/VRay-Animation-Showreel-2013-8.jpg?zoom=1.5&resize=860%2C483

Should i take vray for animation and set up the "VraySSS Material" for the character?
Everthing is low poly.
Could somebody help me?

Eric Chadwick

Both renderers can do great work.

I have found V-Ray to be faster when I have many lights in a scene, for example an architectural interior. For your example though, either renderer would work fine.

It will take some time for you to get familiar with which settings to use, how to set up your lights, and how to adjust your materials. It is a process of constant iteration.

One trick that has really helped me is to set the renderer to the lowest possible quality, and the render size to extremely small (like 100 pixels), and use this to make test renders. Especially helpful for lighting. Otherwise your renders will take a long time, which will prevent you from iterating.

Depending on your experience with lighting and rendering, it could help you to watch some good tutorials on these subjects, from seasoned pros. Check out the paid tutorial websites, the money generally is quite worth it. http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Tutorials#Pay_Tutorial_Websites

If you don't want to pay, then be prepared to spend a lot of time tweaking settings and rendering. Actually, I would highly recommend this approach, as you end up learning a lot more by discovering things for yourself.

Farina

i try to read the tutorials --) Thank you so much Eric!

The idea, to lower the render quality is nice idead. I will check this out.
You mean, turn everything off? Final Gather, Antialiasing ... and and and

Eric Chadwick

Yes. Turn everything off, just to adjust the basic light values. Final Gather does affect the lighting a lot though, so you will need to turn it on at some point.

But the idea is to gradually increase settings as your scene gets closer to final, because you can adjust things more if your renders are faster.

Nox

For this particular case Arnold would be best option, it's fast in outdoor, has probably best SSS shader and very fast hair (faster that Vray/MR). Also amazing volume light shader for creepy atmosphere.

You don't need to make zillion of test renders, just start IPR/render region and it updates interactively as you tweak settings, materials, lights. It's also dead simple to setup (just couple of sliders) and flicker free.

.Wiki

Nox wrote: »

For this particular case Arnold would be best option, it's fast in outdoor, has probably best SSS shader and very fast hair (faster that Vray/MR). Also amazing volume light shader for creepy atmosphere.

Signed Because of prebaked final gather maps and possible flickering i would avoid mentalray or vray for animation.
And arnold is really easy to set up.