IRAY for Animation

No doubt, IRAY is a big-league player at the table of Computer Generated Graphics.  As a full time architect, I have been using IRAY for 90% of my weekly rendering for the past 18months.  And I must say, I'm very happy with the results.  Iray does have its shortcomings, but what render client doesn't?  There are times when I really want a material-ID in post production; but even then, IRAY and MentalRay play together so nicely, all I have to do is switch over to Mental Ray and do the ID pass.  I have a lot of still rendering that can been seen on my personal website www.joshpabst.com

Now, we don't do a lot of architectural animation in house, but we do some.  Below are some of the iray 3d animations that I have done 'not for work'.  Unfortunately, some of the best work, I have of course done for actual projects, and cannon share, yet, due to project statuses.

Now, in both of these cases, the animation probably could have turned out quite a bit better had I let the animation do more passes.  And, I should have.  Time is always the enemy in this business.  The renderings you are looking at are all less than 400passes, and especially for the night stuff, it's really just not enough.  That said, when you are dealing with youtube, you can get away with it due to the fact that most people watch at 480p and not 1080p full screen.

IRAY ANIMATION | Architecture Building

These series of animations were done using IRAY.  The total time is over two days to render on a single GTX-460.  Even though this Cuda enabled card is not the greatest, it still does an amazing job speeding these renders along.  Don't even bother trying to use IRAY on CPU only; you will be disappointed.

IRAY and HDR | HDRI Lighting

Using HDRI and EXR files, otherwise known as HDR images, is a great way to effortlessly light your scene. First it is important to know that not all HDR images are created equal. Some of them have much higher contrast or brightness ratios. For instance, even though the clouds look extremely bright, the sun is exponentially brighter.  And if the photographer making the HDR does not apply these ratios correctly when making the image, then the settings WILL be a little screwy in 3ds Max. It doesn't mean you can't use the image.  Just don't expect to be setting your exposure value up around 14 or 15.  It could be as low as EV=0.  Now, that said, inserting the HDR is very easy.  If you are already using the 3ds max daylight system, then the mrSky is probably already inserted into your environment map slot.  Good.  Now, all you have to do is replace that with your HDR image.  Make sure to set it to "ENVIRON' and "SPHERICAL".  See the above image for help.  I find it necessary to make a new slot in the material editor and then make it an instance. Below are three images, where all I did was swap out the bitmaps and click render for two minutes and let the HDR light the scene in that unique way.  You'll notice in my example image at left, that the OFFSET under the U parameter is set to 0.9 | This is how you 'move the sun' in your HDR lighting system.  Moving the mrSun will no longer do anything.  Also remember that rotating your HDR is a value from 0-1.  Not 1-360.  A value of .5 would equate to 180 degrees.  You can see loads more IRAY renderings at my website here.  

IRAY Animation | TIPS | Architectural Walk-Through

The animation below was done over the past weekend.  It took about 48 hours to complete.  It didn't need to take that long, but because of the long weekend, I wanted to let it run, so I upped the number of passes.  The thing to remember when doing and animation in IRAY is to make sure you are not using the 'time' feature.  You need to set the number of passes for your animation so that each frame is 'equal'.  In other words, if you set up each from to take 2 minutes, a simple frame in the animation might achieve 45 passes, while a complicated frame with lots of reflections might only achieve 29 passes.  This makes the frames look quite different and alters the grain pattern which can lead to a sort of flashing in the sequence.
Animation Tip
So, the thing to do is decide how long you want the rendering to take.  Let's say you only have twelve hours to render 400 frames (overnight).  That means you have 720 (12*60) minutes available.  That means each frame can only take 1.8 minutes, or about 100 seconds. Go to the IRAY render settings and punch in a guess on the number of passes/iterations and see how long the scene takes.  You might want to choose a complex frame to be on the safe side of the total render time.

IRAY Renderings | Architectural Examples | Thoughts

I've been using IRAY as my go-to renderer for about two months now.  I'm loving it for the most part.  The ability to change the look so effortlessly using HDR's is probably my favorite part of the software.  Again, I'll state that I'm only using one GTX460.  This card is not expensive nor does it have a great deal of RAM.  I do most of my renderings for daily use at 2400 x 2400 pixels.  Any larger and I hit RAM ceilings pretty quickly.  That said, many of the scenes I have rendered have upwards of 8 million poly's.  I have had to make my HDR images smaller (often times they are enormous, around 40-80mb).  I've had good luck getting them down to about 8mb.  Of course the actual quality of the clouds and sky in the background does suffer, but you can always save as a PNG file and replace the background easily.  The attached images are about 2 million faces all modeled in CAD and then rendered in 3ds max.  These renderings are using about 1600mb of the ram.  Just sitting idle though, uses about 600mb or ram, meaning the scene is eating about 1000.  I modeled these two versions this week and rendered them.  Each rendering took about 8 minutes.  I could have obviously let it got longer, but it really wasn't necessary, as the majority of the grain was cleared.
PHOTOSHOP TIP
A quick trip into photoshop and using the FILTER, NOISE, DUST AND SCRATCHES, heals the rest.  See for yourself.  That is a regular part of my work-flow.  As you can see; the first and the fourth image are really the same rendering.  All I did was change the HDR image and the looks is quite different.  You can see a lot more of my architectural visualizations at my website: JoshPabst.com  |  Again, all of these were rendered originally at 2400 x 2000 pixels in this case and resized for web.  You can of course still see some grain in the shadowy areas of image 2 and 4 primarily. These four renderings, because they are schematic, were saved as jpegs; no change has been made to the HDR sky.  In the large, originals, the sky is a bit pixelated because  I made the HDR smaller. Comments/questions welcome.

joshpabst.com | Architectural Design

My new architecture website is up and running. joshpabst.com  I'm pretty pumped about it and really happy with the way it turned out.  It was important to me to make the site easily editable and expandable.  I have a long way to go in my career, so adding content to my site is a must.  I'm still tweaking the design, but thus far am pleased.  I'd like to get additional architectural photography that I've done up in the near future; but that can wait.  My focus right now is on design and the rendering work I have done on a myriad of projects all over the world.  I supposed at some point the site can really act as my architecture portfolio.  

IRAY for Animation | First Thoughts

These are two animations I did using IRAY.  I built the models (about 400,000) faces in C4D.  I then imported them into 3ds max and rendered using IRAY.  They were rendered in HD at 100 iterations and what you are looking at is about 12 hours of render time.  This is on a quad core with a gtx 470 from NVIDIA.  The 470 is about 300 cores.  I've made several posts now regarding IRAY (here) and its current limitations; RAM.  These scenes didn't seem to have any problem.  I should not that the glass is a thin geometry; which is cheating and doesn't offer as real results.  It should also be noted that IRAY doesn't offer render passes and cannot do any kind of motion blur at the moment.  Taking that into consideration, fast camera moves can look jerky.  If you are going to do a fast move, you might need to add some motion blur in your non-linear editor.  Or, more hopefully, IRAY updates will be coming soon that will update and give more ability to the point-and-shoot render system. 

IRAY Renderings and Thoughts

Here are some renderings I have done in the past couple weeks using IRAY.  The scenes are quite simple to keep them under the RAM limitations of my GPU (GTX 470).  The images were saved as PNG files and then I replaced the sky.  I've never had great luck with the sky's out of MAX using IRAY or mental ray for that matter.  As I mentioned in a previous post.  It doesn't take much for a scene to hit a 1.5gb RAM ceiling.  As soon as you start adding some serious texture maps and get the polygon face count up by adding some trees or people you are likely to run into problems if you aren't using a TESLA or Quadro with some hefty RAM numbers.  Unfortunately, those cards are a little too expensive for me.  I've noticed that ATI has a myriad of reasonably priced cards on market with 2-4 gb of RAM and I think NVIDIA will follow suit in the coming 6 months. That will make IRAY a real front-runner for CG artists seeking photo-realistic renderings.  IRAY does have a lot of limitations at the moment however; the inability to achieve render-passes like AO or simple material ID channels for use in photoshop is very limiting and can make post-production a PITA.  I'm pretty sure that the ability is coming from what I have read.  The next iteration of IRAY will be a significant update.  In terms of animation there is a different set of limitations and things to think about: HERE. 

Render Pabst | Architectural Post Production 03 | IRAY

This is among the first of renderings I have done with IRAY.  I have found IRAY to be simple and intuitive from the get-go.  However, the RAM limitations are tough if you are on a budget.  You really need a minimum of 2gb of onboard GPU ram in order to effectively use IRAY in day-to-day production.  Also, architectural renderings tend to be large format so that they can be projected or printed on large presentation boards.  A large rendering size will quickly exceed the capability of the GPU.  However, the Tesla and Quadro cards are out of reach for most consumers.  Also, the IRAY platform is extremely slow if you are only using the CPU.  I would not recommend this strategy.  If you cannot afford the GPU (s) to do your work, I would certainly stick with Mental Ray, or V-Ray if the plugin is at your disposal.

Render Pabst | Architectural Post Production 02 | IRAY

I haven't had proper time to test IRAY for night renderings.  This was just a dusk kind of deal.  Added 5 or 6 mr Omni and pulled the trigger; with reasonable results.  I hope to get more into the ability of IRAY using the self illumination tools in the near future.