Fly through animation

[Micha]

Hi,

I ask the McNeel team for an advanced Fly through animation tool at the link below. I ask me, which data are needed for Vray to precalculate LC and IM? Could be great, if some one of the Chaosgroup team could write at the McNeel forum post, which data are necessary. ( Peter.Chaushev konstantin_chaos )


Best-
Micha

[Peter.Chaushev]

V-Ray should be able to cover any standard animation API which can provide interpolated scene data for every frame in advance.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Micha]

Interpolated scene data ... so would it not be possible for VfR to read Bongo animation data and create an own interpolated path for IM/LC cache and motion blur calculation? On this way maybe the Chaosgroup developer wouldn't need to wait for new codes from the McNeel side.

[Peter.Chaushev]

In the case of Bongo, imagine animation as a sequence of standalone scenes, each one providing data only about its current scene state, in contrast to having a single scene with interpolated data for transformations and other plugin changes for each frame.
V-Ray render each Bongo frame as a unique still scene. This is the reason Bongo animations rendered in V-Ray lack some features, such as motion blur.

Kind regards,
Peter

[Micha]

So, could the single camera positions of each frame not converted to an interpolated curve? I imagine a little tool that starts an Bongo animation frame by frame and record the path for camera source and target. So, a complex Bongo camera animation could be converted to a simple two-path-camera-animation. Finally, the Bongo animation would run on it's own complex data, but Vray is using the interpolated curves for calculating GI and motion blur.

Here a sketch of this idea - the cameras show the positions during an animation at each frame position. The curves are the converted, interpolated curves, no matter, how complex the source animation was (maybe a blend of different curves and constrains). So Vray could know position, direction and speed at each frame.

(Maybe the same could be done for all animated objects too.)

[Peter.Chaushev]

Animating walkthroughs with complex camera paths will be possible in V-Ray Next for Rhino via the new V-Ray Timeline Grasshopper component.
Improvements to the current V-Ray workflow with Bongo are not on our to-do list.

Regards,
Peter

[Micha]

Oh, that's a pity, since Bongo is the official McNeel animation plugin since years. My hope was, that a better data exchange could help to get VfR together with Bongo running. I don't know Grasshopper. Can it replace Bongo, also for object animations? It could be great, if there would be a Grasshoper + VfR next animation tutorial, maybe an example of a fly through.

Thanks,
Micha

[Peter.Chaushev]

We'll look into V-Ray for GH animation showcase (tutorial/webinar) after the official release of V-Ray Next for Rhino.

Kind regards,
Peter