FlyThrough Quality Dilemma

[Dwight]

Have I gone and done it now.
Snookered.
My assignment is a 2 minute flythrough of a condo for DVD presentation. Naturally I want to do 720x486 at 30fps.

But the model is so complex - bamboo and cutlery and other nice things like slumpy mesh cushions and finely modeled faucets that rendering some frames is going to take ten minutes.

This is a gently moving cinematic treatment with trucking and panning

What compromise damages the project the least?

1: reduce to 15 fps
2: reduce pixels by 1/2 and enlarge in Photoshop
3: both
4: other alternative???

[stefan]

Dwight wrote:
But now I'm in a situation where it takes 7 minutes a frame for about 900 frames of an animation. At least I don't have to watch.

7 minutes a frame for a complex rendering is not that bad...

Even with all hardware render-farms, the Hollywood movies still require several hours per frame (they render in several layers to allow for compositing afterwards, so that adds to the rendertime).

[Dwight]

With all due respect, I do not have a chrome man morphing into Robert Patrick dressed as a cop emerging from the flames of an exploded tanker truck. Running.

Or giant spiders clinging to an exploding tanker truck. Flailing.

Or Charlise Theron and whatsisname pushing the exploding tanker truck over a cliff. Or was she in it?
Hey. That wasn't CGI.

This is just a [adjective we don't want our mother to read]
block of flats! No rotating blades, even. Altho with mirrors I got the fire to twinkle a bit.

[stefan]

Dwight wrote:
With all due respect, I do not have a chrome man morphing into Robert Patrick dressed as a cop emerging from the flames of an exploded tanker truck. Running.

Or giant spiders clinging to an exploding tanker truck. Flailing.

Or Charlise Theron and whatsisname pushing the exploding tanker truck over a cliff. Or was she in it?
Hey. That wasn't CGI.

This is just a [adjective we don't want our mother to read]
block of flats! No rotating blades, even. Altho with mirrors I got the fire to twinkle a bit.

Untill recently, most of the movie renderings didn't use any form of raytracing nor radiosity. Renderman simply didn't support it.

Then they combined (sometimes) BMRT and Mental Ray to provide for that and now Renderman does it too.

But still, most of what you see in movies is high-quality and high-polygon-count and using motion blur, displacement and depth-of-field, but no raytracing or radiosity.

HDRI and ambient occlusion are used more and more, though.

----

Even the reflecting helmet from Buzz Lightyear used no raytracing, since Renderman simply did not do it in those days.

[Dwight]

Most CGI movie frames have quite dull surfaces and when something is shiny it really sticks out.