Can indigo run for an animation project?

[lemon_weng]

Hi guys,

I am new here. I am working on some animation projects use Maya.

And now I am trying indigo renderer, but in the plug-in, I can not found any export option for export animation.

The animation subject is more like to compare the near frames to simulate the motion blur.

I am not sure if there any thing I misunderstood.

So I came here to ask, Can indigo run for an animation project? Exporting the geometries out and render it frame by frame?

I am also using Octane render in my pipeline. But it can not support Cuda 4.1 and there is a texture amount limitation now.

[CTZn]

Hi lemon_weng, welcome to the Indigo forums !

Regarding the Maya exporter, motion blur will happen for keyframed objects, wether a sequence or a single frame is issued.

An animation sequence will be exported for the current playback range, when the "animation" option is checked in the Maya to Indigo options window, down the Renderer tab. That window is frozen into a wip stage, I'm not happy with it.

I am not sure if there any thing I misunderstood.

You will soon find a documentation beta shipping with MtI.

PS: currently the object you want to produce motion blur trails must be the keyframed one. If only parents are keyframed then the child object will not be detected as animated, I will adress this asap. However if the object itself is keyframed, the parents transformations will contribute to the blur trails of course.

I am aware of some motion blur inconsistencies in certain cases, you can edit the global MB steps from the options window, Animation tab for tweaking. I am to look into this as well.

[Zom-B]

I do quite a lot of Animations using Indigo.
Most are quite short, so the rendertime doesn't kick in that heavy...

For Animations I have a few hints from my workflow that could help you too:

Use a capable Denoiser
This is soooooo incredibly important!!! A Temporal Denoiser (I use NeatVideo) will take multiple frames (NeatVideo up to 5) and calculate the changes. The Noise is different from Frame to Frame, and gets eliminated very effectively.
Denoising will bump your output Quality and shorten rendertime a lot!

Use higher Resolution
Render your Frames with 200% of you target resolution, denoise them with a temporal Denoiser and resize back to 100%! Doing so you'll avoid that the denoiser eats up texture detail. There is no speed loose in rendering in Higher Rez, since you are doing Supersampling here "by hand".

Slow Animations Denoise better
A "slow" moving camera or Objects are easier to denoise then action packed animations since the Scene based change from frame to frame is smaller and the denoiser recognices stuff better to not be noise!

Pain with Motion Blur
Is totally Indigo unrelated, but customers often like to change stuff short before deadline, and to weak or strong Motion Blur can't be changed here anymore. Think about use some vector based Motion Blur as PostProcess to have better control in the end, Post Process Motion Blur ia also a great denoiser too

[CTZn]

Pain with Motion Blur
Is totally Indigo unrelated, but customers often like to change stuff short before deadline, and to weak or strong Motion Blur can't be changed here anymore. Think about use some vector based Motion Blur as PostProcess to have better control in the end, Post Process Motion Blur ia also a great denoiser too

It is possible to get motion vectors from within Maya and use them in post to blur in 2d a sequence rendered with Indigo.

With MtI you can set the motion blur steps to 1 to force blur off.
Default is 3, enough for smooth paths.
Again some steps values may lead to inconsistencies currently, change them back then. I think that even values should be avoided atm, use odd numbers for mb steps.

[lemon_weng]

Hi lemon_weng, welcome to the Indigo forums !

Regarding the Maya exporter, motion blur will happen for keyframed objects, wether a sequence or a single frame is issued.

An animation sequence will be exported for the current playback range, when the "animation" option is checked in the Maya to Indigo options window, down the Renderer tab. That window is frozen into a wip stage, I'm not happy with it.

I am not sure if there any thing I misunderstood.

You will soon find a documentation beta shipping with MtI.

PS: currently the object you want to produce motion blur trails must be the keyframed one. If only parents are keyframed then the child object will not be detected as animated, I will adress this asap. However if the object itself is keyframed, the parents transformations will contribute to the blur trails of course.

I am aware of some motion blur inconsistencies in certain cases, you can edit the global MB steps from the options window, Animation tab for tweaking. I am to look into this as well.

Thanks CTZn. Is there some user manual for MayatoIndigo and Mtl? I think I need to learn it deep.

[CTZn]

Right now feel free to use the Maya forum; the specific informations I provide there are of use for everybody. But by using the forum I mean asking questions mostly.

I am at your service for this purpose. Your requests shall be my framework.

[tar_gniK]

I
Use higher Resolution
Render your Frames with 200% of you target resolution, denoise them with a temporal Denoiser and resize back to 100%! Doing so you'll avoid that the denoiser eats up texture detail. There is no speed loose in rendering in Higher Rez, since you are doing Supersampling here "by hand".

Do you think this technique could be applied to a standard static image, other than for animations?

[Zom-B]

Yes King Rat, thats how you can denoise static images too, here even higher rez could be a good way of improving your image.
Rendering noise stays 1pixel noise also in 300% of target resolution, just denser (regarding the same rendertime then lower rez).

Try for yourself, to get a feeling for the denoiser & results archived!

The temporal component of a denoiser is still the super power that kicks in best, so I would suggest following workflow:

- you want to render your final image in 100min.
- render that image at 200% 5 times for 20min with a different seed (very important for different random noise!)
- Now denoise that sequence with a temporal denoiser like a animation in 32bit and output 5 denoised EXR files.
- Now multiply that 5 images in Photoshop together, that should work like merging IGI files and you end up with a great single noise-free render!

This is something I often thought about but never tried... but it should work!

[subpixel]

- Now multiply that 5 images in Photoshop together, that should work like merging IGI files and you end up with a great single noise-free render!

In fact, you'd need to do weighted addition, which would be add (its linear burn in PS I believe) 5 layers at 20%. Though I haven't tried it either.

[lemon_weng]

Yes King Rat, thats how you can denoise static images too, here even higher rez could be a good way of improving your image.
Rendering noise stays 1pixel noise also in 300% of target resolution, just denser (regarding the same rendertime then lower rez).

Try for yourself, to get a feeling for the denoiser & results archived!

The temporal component of a denoiser is still the super power that kicks in best, so I would suggest following workflow:

- you want to render your final image in 100min.
- render that image at 200% 5 times for 20min with a different seed (very important for different random noise!)
- Now denoise that sequence with a temporal denoiser like a animation in 32bit and output 5 denoised EXR files.
- Now multiply that 5 images in Photoshop together, that should work like merging IGI files and you end up with a great single noise-free render!

This is something I often thought about but never tried... but it should work!

Hi Zom-B,

I do not think it is an efficient way to denoise.

In my case, I am trying to find a efficient renderer for my pipeline.

If as you say, it needs 100mins per frame or 20mins per frame. I will use mental ray that we are using now.

I have evaluated Octane Render(Fully GPU Renderer) and Arion(GPU and CPU).

They all rendered very quickly.

But Octane Render just support CUDA 4.0, there is a texture amount limitation.

And Arion can support CUDA 4.1, but not work smooth with my pipeline.

PS: I test them with WIN7 X64 Intel i7 860 2.8G 12G RAM GTX590

[tar_gniK]

Mental Ray vs Indigo?? That one doesn't even need answering.

[Zom-B]

If as you say, it needs 100mins per frame or 20mins per frame. I will use mental ray that we are using now.

The high minute count was pointing for still images, not for animations!
For my 720p animations I render 10 to 20 minutes per frame (depending on scene complexity!), on my quite unspectacular PC...