LightWave Rocks

[Dave Jerrard]

http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/Asteroids_0001.jpg

Well, they are!

Yes, the title is a pun, and a well deserved one.

But it does rock! Need proof? Look here. (http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/LightWaveRocks.mov) You've never seen this come directly out of LightWave before.

The animation above (for those who can't wait) contains a quarter million, randomly stretched, independently rotating, self shadowing Hypervoxel asteroids, rendered with spherical distortion. What's odd about this is that the animations contain a quarter million, randomly stretched, independently rotating, self shadowing Hypervoxel asteroids, rendered with spherical distortion!

Memory usage: 1.4GB before rendering (PFX data only), 1.5-1.6GB during rendering. Render times were approximately 8 minutes per frame. The entire sequence took my machine about 30 hours to render. This was rendered using the new Advanced Camera.

But there's more. I figured I'd try out some other things. So, here's the same animation again (http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/Asteroids-360.mov), same camera, but this time with a horizontal field of view of 360 degrees. This will look weird about 1/3 into the animation. This is a spherical render, so the left & right edges are looking directly behind the camera. This one rendered even faster. I added a visible flare to the light source so you can see that the dark area in the upper left is actually full of asteroids as well. The light is actually about 30 degrees behind the camera. To the lower middle-right, you're looking in the same direction the light is shining, so all the asteroids in this area are fully lit. This is the ultimate fish-eye lens. And it can go wider. In fact, in the corners of the frame, you're actually seeing more than 360 degrees. Watch carefully & you'll see asteroids repeated as the flay directly behind the camera. Again, this was with the Advanced Camera - one of four new cameras in LightWave.

I'm not done. Here's another view of the same thing (http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/Asteroids-Cylindrical.mov), but this time cylindrically rendered. The aspect has been changed slightly so it's a perfect 2:1 aspect. This can be mapped as a spherical map onto a ball, or the environment. The left & right edge show what's directly behind the camera. This Advanced Camera mode is good for rendering big panoramas for backdrops. Yes, this was the Advanced Camera again.


So, what? You're wondering what the other cameras are? Well, here's the same scene again, but this time rendered with the Orthographic Camera (http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/Asteroids-Ortho.mov). This one's interesting in that there's absolutely no perspective in what it renders (the exact opposite of the Perspective Camera, which is a speedier ray-tracing version of the old, Classic Camera). This camera works like the orthographic views in Layout or Modeler, but can be rotated (great for rendering game graphics). This sequence starts out with a field of view of 20 centimeters (yes, these are actually pebble-sized asteroids) and expands to just over 6 meters wide, resulting in the apparent camera pullback effect. The camera is not moving though. You'll see a few asteroids appear to vanish, and this isn't an error. They're actually moving toward the camera and are passing through the camera plane. The lack of perspective makes it look pretty weird.

He Who Was Doing This Just Because He Could.

[Earl]

Very impressive! Did you use the 32-bit or 64-bit version of LightWave?

[Dave Jerrard]

Sorry. 32bit version. You can get millions of HyperVoxels to render in this version, if you're using regular points. But with particles, you'r elimited by the memory neded for the particles themselves now.

Last year, I was using particles and HyperVoxels, and I was lucky if I could get 40,000 of them to render. The scene would render fine in under a GB or RAM, but once the HyperVoxels kicked in, they really sent the memory usage up to the 2GB limit, and would frequently stop rendering. Now, the HyperVoxels memory usage is the least of your worries. They take about 1/40th the amount of RAM they used to.

In the 64bit version, I've heard of people rendering a few million of them on particles. Sweetness!


He Who Is Going To Try To Compress Those Videos More.

[Elmar Moelzer]

Hey Dave!
Very cool HV- asteroids you have got here. I dont know any place where you would see that many asteroids so close together, but it is really cool :)
CU
Elmar

[warrenwc]

Cool!:thumbsup:

[erikals]

Impressive http://forums.cgsociety.org/images/smilies/smile.gif

[mav3rick]

great

[Digital Hermit]

Hey Dave!
Very cool HV- asteroids you have got here. I dont know any place where you would see that many asteroids so close together, but it is really cool :)
CU
Elmar


(A close encounter thru planetary rings, perhaps)

What I do see is the potential for a bloodstream animation?... debris in water animation... boiling water?: etc..

Great render and animation! :thumbsup:

[chewey]

Those examples are very nice! Thanks for sharing those. Looks like 9 is "GO".
(as in thunderbirds are go? erm... oh nevermind...):thumbsup:

[Tesselator]

Yup! Kewl stuff! But I gotta say... you ain't seen nutt'n yet!

This is Dave Jerrard after all!

[Dave Jerrard]

Hey Dave!
Very cool HV- asteroids you have got here. I dont know any place where you would see that many asteroids so close together, but it is really cool :)
CU
Elmar
I was wondering who would be the first to point that out when I was starting this thing. I forget what I waas really trying out at the time, but this is what grew out of it. You're definitely right though. You wouldn't see so many so tightly packed like this, unless you were there when a couple collided & disintegrated. Then again, these could be smooth pebbles being dumped off a truck in the dark... :)

He Who Didn't Feel Like Waiting For Collision Detection For This Many Particles.

[Tesselator]

Saturns Rings look a bit like that... I think you would actually need allot more
asteroids though. :p

Shape of the field is different though.

[webhead]

Anyway, scientifically feasible or not, It's still some nice looking effect and sparks a lot of ideas about the potential here.

[JML]

really really impressive :thumbsup:

I just saw a few asteroides intersecting each other in the clip,
you could turn on collision detection on those to fix that, but it might take a while to calculate :D :D

[Dave Jerrard]

Saturns Rings look a bit like that... I think you would actually need allot more
asteroids though. :p

Shape of the field is different though.Actually, the rings are less dense than this from what I've been told. But yeah, I would need to increase the number by a huge amount and make the field several times larger as well.

I was thinking about doing a ring of these, but from this vantage point, it would be impossible to tell. Maybe later, I'll place a big ol' planet sphere in the background. :)


He Who Was Going To Add Stars, But They Wouldn't Have Been Very Visible.

[Dave Jerrard]

I just saw a few asteroides intersecting each other in the clip,
you could turn on collision detection on those to fix that, but it might take a while to calculate :D :DI was actually surprised that I didn't see more intersections than I did. There's definitely one fairly prominent one that happens about 2 seconds into it, upper left of center, but that's the only one I noticed. The profusion of shadows being cast onto these thing smakes it hard to tell if they're actually intersecting, or just falling into shadow most of the time.

And yeah, 250,000 particles checking for self collision would take a while. probably much longer than this took to render. As it is, it takes about 30 seconds to change frames with so many of these things kicking around, even if I do use a PFX file (which is over 900 MB).

He Who Didn't Render Farm This Thing So Didn't Need To Use A PFX File.

[Cueball]

Hi Dave!

Would you share the HV-surface settings please, the asteroids are looking
absolutly cool! :thumbsup:

regards,
Dirk

[Dave Jerrard]

Hi Dave!

Would you share the HV-surface settings please, the asteroids are looking
absolutly cool! :thumbsup:

regards,
DirkNothing really fancy here. Not even a bump map! How's that for being a texture slacker? :D

These are only little asteroids (scale really didn't matter in this scene), but changing hte particle size is all that's needed. The textures scale with that.

Warning: These do use a couple new HV settings that are only available in LW9 (the scaling & rotation stuff), so I don't know if these will work in 8.x.



He Who Would Test This But Is In The Middle Of A Render Right Now.

[Cueball]

Thanks a lot Dave!

I dont have problems with lw9-settings :)

[starbase1]

Not unreasonable at all for within Saturn's rings, at least with a change of scale...

See:
http://pds-rings.seti.org/saturn/artwork/plate_07.html
for particlke size distribution

I've been trying to work out how to do a seriously realistic 'within the rings' scene, and this might just be a way to do it with brute force!

Nick

[Matt]

What a wonderful set of tests, quite mesmerising!

[anieves]

when I first saw the still image I thought it was an asphalt closeup but in motion... holly smokes!

[Dave Jerrard]

Yeah, the motion really changes the look of it. I wish I had enough RAM to render a longer sequence. As it is, I can get up to about 320 frames before LW's out of memory for the particles, and when the particles disappear, no more rocks. :(

Just for fun, I rendered another version of it with the camera weaving through them (http://davejerrard.postresource.com/LW/AsteroidFlight.mov). Since it takes several seconds for LW to update Layout due to the number of particles (even with a PFX file), I disabled them to set up the motion path, so I was effectively "flying blind". Not that it would really make much difference if I could see the particles - there's so many of them the viewport is almost a solid color. I didn't crash my camera into a single one of them! Han Solo, eat your heart out!


He Who Also Did Some Interesting Orbital Dynamics Stuff Earlier Too.

[Weepul]

What were you using for the motion blur in that? I don't see any stepping, and I've never seen such an artifact-free image come from Vector Blur...

[zapper1998]

could you share the scene ?? please

Michael

[Dave Jerrard]

What were you using for the motion blur in that? I don't see any stepping, and I've never seen such an artifact-free image come from Vector Blur...The first four versions all used PLD 5-Pass and Gaussian reconstruction. This last one looked a bit rough with that level so I bumped it up to PLD 15-Pass and went with a slightly sharper Mitchell (Soft) filter. This increased the render times to about 18 minutes per frame. Not too bad for such a HyperVoxel-heavy scene at HD resolution.

Oh yeah. On the very first version, I re-rendered a few frames that showed stepping in them with a higher AA. I think I did them at either 9 or 12 passes, but only about 20 frames total got this extra lovin'.

As requested, here's the scene. Kinda cool that this was done with just one simple text file, huh? Just rename it to lws, and have fun.



He Who Should Add A Big Saturn In The Background Now.

[zapper1998]

Thank You

WOW, cool, did you try it with 64bit LW yet??

Michael

[Dave Jerrard]

Unfortunately, no. I don't have a 64bit OS yet. Or a USB dongle that I'll need to go with it. WHen I do, you can be sure I'll be bumping this thing up to see how many more particles I can get in it. As is, I can get a quarter million in under 2GB or RAM for just over 300 frames. More frames means more memory, and the particles are what's eating up most of the RAM. The HyperVoxels only seem to eat about 100KB now, at least on this scene, which is a LOT less than they used to eat.


He Who Has Heard Of People Rendering Up To Ten Million HyperVoxels With 64bit.

[Celshader]

He Who Has Heard Of People Rendering Up To Ten Million HyperVoxels With 64bit.

I think I've gone up to 12 or 15 million Volumetric HyperVoxels on the 64-bit machines here at work. I probably could've rendered even more, though.

[zapper1998]

I think I've gone up to 12 or 15 million Volumetric HyperVoxels on the 64-bit machines here at work. I probably could've rendered even more, though.
well it rendered in less than 4 minutes on the 64bit machine

Bumped up to 12 million HV's and I am under 4 gig ram, render time under 12 minutes.. all I did was raise the number of HV's, did not adjust anything else..

Cool scene, wow, all them asteroids, lets see if I can get a ship to fly thru them...

[Scott C. Zupek]

if you keep looking @ the last animation when it ends, the rocks keep moving even though they arent....oh.... ahhhhhhhh

[Bliz]

That cylindrical mapped camera animation is just blowing my mind.

I bet you could do some bad *** theme park rides with these new camera (wrap around monitor setups etc.)

[lilrayray77]

anyway you could compress the quicktime so us less priveliged users can download it?

[Scott C. Zupek]

anyway you could compress the quicktime so us less priveliged users can download it?

QT is free. Just go to www.apple.com/quicktime you want qt7

[Dave Jerrard]

anyway you could compress the quicktime so us less priveliged users can download it?
They are compressed. Originally, at the highest Sorenson 3 quality,t eh first one was over 100MB. I think all of these are using either low or medium quality, which is just high enough to avoid some nasty artifacting.

I can't use QT7 here since that screws up my editing software, which uses Quicktime. It's no longer supported since Discreet squashed it, so until I get something else that I like (SpeedEdit?), I'm stuck with QT6.


He Who Hates These Little Annoyances.

[lilrayray77]

no problem. Verison is supposed to be installing DSL in my area sometime soon, so hopefully I wont have to wait long.

[operation]

hey! next time turn on the GI !! :D
In space the lights come from everywhere! lol !
I am joking. :D

Nice work !:thumbsup:

[Dave Jerrard]

I did, but there was virtually no difference in the mage. There was a big difference in render times though. :)

He Who Wanted To Keep The Render Times Lower.

[cresshead]

err....WOW!

nice!

[pinchelunes]

thaks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!