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The Earth vs Render Time. Various mind-blowing questions :)
Hope someone can shed some light on the questions at the end of this long intro. Thanks.
The effect we’re going for is a slow pullout from the Nile Delta to a complete globe. We downloaded a very high rez map from NASA that works perfect for wrapping around a sphere. It was high enough resolution to be a crisp image when zoomed in on the Nile.
We planned to use Zax invigorator for this, but it kept crashing due to memory issues. We found that Boris Sphere handled it a little better. First we made a precomp for the image map layer. Since we’re not rotating the earth much, we cut the map in half and told BCC Spere to do a 1-way wrap to keep the perspective correct.
The plan was to make a sequence of increasingly smaller resolution versions in Photoshop and switch them out as we pulled further and further away from the earth. I thought that this would save some render time. It did, but the renders still came out very long (40 hours), even with Nucleo Pro cooking it. We also tried cropping the images in the image map precomp to only what is visible in the master comp (hope that made sense). Still getting crazy renders.
specs:
Final Comp size: 1331×768
Image Map precomp: 10800 x 10800
High Res map: 10800 x 10800
Med Res map: 8100 x 8100Questions:
1. Does cropping an image in a precomp make renders faster?
2. Does using a lower resolution still file make a render faster, even if it is being precomped into a large subcomp that is being used as an image map?
3. Anyone have any insite on how we might reduce render time?Thanks in advance,
ReinsSystem Setup (for a more detailed list, see my profile)
HARDWARE
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Two 16x SuperDrives
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Photoshop CS3
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Digital Anarchy Anarchist Suite
ParticleIllusion 3.0
Trapcode
Zaxwerks -
3 Replies
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1. Does cropping an image in a precomp make renders faster?
No, I think it still has to render the entire frame of the precomp then it crops after rendering.
2. Does using a lower resolution still file make a render faster, even if it is being precomped into a large subcomp that is being used as an image map?
Definitely, this is huge. 10000+ pixels is a lot of data. If you can bring the size down it will help a lot.
3. Anyone have any insite on how we might reduce render time?
Here are some Ideas:
Pre-render the globe animations and match your camera move in the new comp.Unless it’s key to use motion blur, try and use a directional blur to simulate motion blur.
Use the large map as little as possible. Only for ECU shots and create a map about 2000X2000 for the pull outs. Use a quick dissolve to get from high res to low res with some blur to distract the eye.
Of course the biggest time saver would be to pre-render the globe in a 3d program that can handle big #ss maps like MAYA or C4D.
Hope this helps,
Joel Jackson
http://www.creativebloc.com/port.html -
check out andrew kramer’s tutorial on earth zooming. https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=15
the problem you’re having is utilizing a MASSIVE image. using andrew’s method, you’ll use a bunch of smaller, more manageable layers and still achieve the quality you’re looking for.
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I did a shot similar to this you can see on the reel at https://www.antifreezedesign.com
I bought the photos of a specific lat/longitude point from digital globe at various altitudes, then laid them all on top of each other, with each larger being scaled up until it matched the smaller one above it. They were in 3D space, but only spread out on the depth axis enough to be stacked. Then, I pulled my cam back. I don’t remember the render times being horrific, and that was on a 4 yr old dual 2.7 G5. Maybe because I was flat, with just faked curve (lens distortion, I think), it rendered easier. (I had to do a slight-of-hand transition to a Maya globe.)
-Greg.p.s. This post is rather old. If you’ve got a sample of it up, I’d love to see how it turned out. Ours turned out well, but the transition between the AE and Maya was a real pain to tweak by hand.
Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com
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