Rendering teaser trailers, cinematics etc

Thor Sowards

Me and a couple of my friends are making a teaser trailer for a class. Our storyboards consisted of a lot of explosions, guns firing, a lot of character animations, some crazy DOF and motion blur throughout the video. We're going for a very realistic look for our teaser and we began thinking about how we should go about rendering our video out.

Vray was an option that was brought up but no one really knows much about it or how to use it properly. We did a couple of LONG LONG LONG test renders of a still frame and it look awesome when it was done. Did the same shot with a default mental ray render which look good but the vray render was a lot better. Did a quick google search about vray animations and I was disappointed with what the search results came up with. Seems to me that it is mainly used for beauty stills

So my question is
- What do game studios use for rendering out their teaser trailers and cinematics?
- Is Vray a viable option for rendering out a minute+ long teaser trailer? If so anyone have any tips and pointers they could help us out with?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

MoP

I'm fairly sure Blur use Mental Ray.

You can fairly easily set up Mental Ray to look pretty awesome. Just use lots of final gather, and bright area lights with lots of shadow rays.

kdm3d

most cinematics are done in-game these days... with some good results. Set it up right and the rendering times are nonexistant.

Vray is great and relatively fast compared to others. Its a really easy setup to get good results quickly. Shouldn't be a problem in using it for animation, but if its a complicated as you say it is, you'll just have to deal with the rendertimes.

1 min long for a teaser?

r_fletch_r

Yup blur use mentalray, I think Tigar Hare use Vray, some use PRman. personally id stick with MR as its built into all the major apps. (all of them are great tho)


If your raytracing DOF and motion blur pretty much act as a multiplier for your render times so if you can, I'd research doing these in post. That said Mental ray has a nice Output shader called 'HDR Image Motion Blur' which does a decent job of linear motion blur and its fast (it wont do radial motion blur tho)

Global illumination is another thing that your going to have to research. when you animate with FG it tends to flicker if you haven't set it up correctly and solved a fine enough solution.


If you settle on mental ray take a look at the following links for some great tutorials and general MR Knowledge

This is the Guy who wrote alot of the mentalray shaders you'd be using
hes got some great tips.
Master Zaps Blog

Jeff writes excellent mentray tuts. great for learning lighting.
Jeff Patons Blog

Another of jeffs sites. he has a blog here and a public material repository.
mrMaterials

Great Mentalray comminity
myMentalray

There is also a fantastic tutorial on skin shading written by masterZap (the shader author) in max 2011s additional help