Chaos Vantage | Quickly Turn Your Favorite Renderings Into Pro Animations! Here's How...

foreign [Music] so about a month ago I posted a rendering on Instagram of an office space that I was experimenting with and modeling and rendering and I really like the results so I thought it'd be a good opportunity to take this space that I'd made and experiment further with some of the new and advanced tools that are available for arcviz Professionals in short I wanted to generate some animations of it and I wanted to use real time to do it if you don't know real-time animation is where it's at it's so much more fun and so much more intuitive and it's awesome to have real-time feedback on things like depth of field and Camera placement and all those kind of things now my first thought was Unreal Engine 5. as you probably know from watching this channel I've done a bunch of experimenting with Unreal Engine 5 recently and made a full professional project in that software with animation and I've just kind of been trying to see whether it makes sense for my daily workflow you can see the many videos I've made regarding in this subject here on my channel and I'll put relevant links to some of those videos in the description in the case of my experimental office model I was able to bring it into Unreal Engine 5 using data Smith and it completely worked I was navigating the space in real time and it looked pretty good however the translation is not a perfect one so it would take some time of me adjusting and possibly re-importing again making adjustments in Max for it to look exactly how I wanted it to and that would take additional time and I didn't want to spend that time I wanted to quickly as quickly as possible take my rendering and turn it into an animation that looks very similar to the rendering this is where Vantage comes in I have experimented with Vantage in the past as you may know again I'll post links to that video after making my previous Vantage video I immediately declared that I would be working Vantage into my daily workflow and I totally did Vantage is absolutely perfect for this kind of stuff especially if you're already familiar with v-ray the translation from 3ds Max v-ray to Vantage animation is seamless it's painless and is accurate this is the perfect kind of tool that can be easily integrated into my workflow and it was an obvious choice for making an animation of this C so let's look at the process I used to get from v-ray rendering to high quality v-ray animation how long did it take how complicated was the process how real time was it we will discuss all of that and I think you will see from what I demonstrate that you too can quickly take your still shot rendering to a pretty nice animation quite simply quite easily and I'll show you how I did that and you will see how easy it is for you to do that as well at the end we'll take a closer look at the finished product and I'll talk about what I like what I didn't like and what I would do differently next time we'll also discuss throughout Vantage what its weaknesses are what its strengths are and what I think it's really really good at hopefully it will be useful to your workflow moving forward just as it has been to mine the first step to getting my animation was of course to have a nice 3ds Max scene that I liked that I actually wanted to animate so I built out this little office space it's really very simple and it just has a bunch of Cosmos objects and other objects filling out the scene with detail now this is obviously a very important part of this process knowing how to work in 3ds Max and v-ray if you need to learn any of that stuff how to create an interior scene an exterior scene everything you need to do about 3ds Max and v-ray check the links below for my existing courses they are super cheap and then of course you have to install Vantage so I have my vantage toolbar over here you have to decide whether you want a live link where everything is done in Macs and then just reflected in Vantage versus actually just exporting as a VR scene and doing all your work in Vantage and that's what I chose to do here so you just click this it creates the VR scene and opens it in Vantage and then everything you do from there will be done in Vantage we'll have full control over your scene and it's such a quick and easy transition okay quick is a bit of a relative term here but it's pretty fast okay eventually it all comes in and you can see that the translation actually looks really good the only thing that's messed up is kind of the overall exposure and and the aspect ratio that's one of the things I should mention that this is not a mistake this is just because I was controlling the exposure using the frame buffer and I was using the aspect ratio controls in the render settings and those two things just don't come across but that's all controlled in the camera and we can just adjust right over here so of course exposure value turn that up and the resolution preset is at 720 I mean that's a super lame resolution so we just turn off this and make it a square instead and then we go to the camera that we're adjusting here and we update it now it'll give you this option press OK only to save the camera resolution press save to discard all existing VRC and Camera data so now we're we're breaking away from what the VR scene was and that's okay in this case okay what I love about this is that in the light settings over here and I've got another tutorial that shows every setting in here that's not what this is about I'm just talking about the story of how I took this from still to animation easily one tool that I used that is very important is this essentially the light mixer over here and you guys know I love the light mixer more than any other v-ray tool but you can do it compact basic or Advanced okay so it gives you more settings as you go from basic to Advanced all right but really what I want is the compact that's all I need one thing to keep in mind is that as far as I can tell this is universal for the whole scene so the camera settings can be individual like exposure and depth of field and stuff and those can be updated but here if you do do this and you update it watch I'll show you so say we want this light whatever this light is okay that one the desk the under desk light 200 okay it's going to be 200 in every scene now when I go here we're at 200 for that one too even if I update this press OK and say let's say we'll put this at uh five for this scene and update it but then when I go back to here it's at five for this scene too okay so that's that's a universal change I'm doing and I haven't found a way to animate that yet I really want Vantage to be able to animate that that would be a really slick thing to be able to turn lights and on and on on and off and you saw in my finished rendering that I had both a night version of this and a day version of this and I wanted to animate it in Vantage but I wasn't able to so I needed to find a workaround and I'll talk about how I did that too but fingers crossed that in the future you can fully animate your light intensity inside advantage that would be sweet as it stands the way you would do this is you would animate the lights in 3ds Max then when you export as a VR scene that animation should come in because animation information is saved inside of a VR scene okay so you can do a lot of the work in 3ds Max before importing it into here and that's how you would solve that problem but like I told you animating in real time way better than animating into 3ds Max on your own so I want to be able to do it in here and I'm sure you understand the difference I don't want to set the intensity render a little preview and say yeah that doesn't look quite right and then set it again render again that's just not an intuitive way to animate but in real time you could just use a slider and be like yes slide slide slide uh that looks about right right there set keyframe boom right you can see how that'd be way better but as it stands we're mostly just animating cameras in here so now let's just look at how we animate the cameras and how it works you'll see it's super easy let's just take this one camera view right here and get the exposure and the aspect ratio correct turn this off do Square lock it again because exposure's got to be up okay let's take that view and then let's make another view right here create a new camera make sure your depth of field is all set up how you want it right the easiest way to do that is just by using this we can Focus up here we can focus down here all right you got to update it and then to animate you just open the animation panel down here and you say Okay I want to go from this camera okay I kept I kept hitting okay when it asked me about the VR scene thing I don't need to actually hit save all so it saves the exposure in here too and let's see I had to turn I knew I want to turn on depth of field and I want to make sure my depth of field is in the right place so like right there and then save those updates my other camera here let's make sure that the depth of field is going to here and it's turned on all good so that is Camera 12 and camera v-ray camera 10. okay so all I do is open the animation panel down here click insert camera v-ray camera 10 is our first one then we add a second one camera 12. it automatically puts this transition in between which you can see is a is a ramp what do you call that it's ease in ease out I like to put them as linear so you can right click on it and say linear and you can change the duration of it by right clicking and saying let's take five seconds to do this I mean those are basic animation functions but I mean we're done now we have this little shot here okay the quality doesn't look great because it's trying to figure it out as it goes but when you render it you can get much higher quality okay so I was pretty happy with doing it just like this and then all I did from there is add another one you know you can add another camera say v-ray camera nine and I just cut out these transitions here so that it would just cut directly to the next camera but on the moves you want to transition in between right so I don't even know what those cameras are but let's see it'll just do this shot and then immediately cut to another one and do some crazy animation that I hate but point is that's how you do it if I just added some time here let's see set duration to say eight see what it does there so it's just doing this weird animation obviously I wouldn't want those two cameras together but you can see what it does okay and that's how I did it that's how I did the whole thing so you can in real time go in here and direct your little movie by just doing little cuts of different cameras and that's all I did I added about five of them together and rendered it okay and you can see what I mean about how intuitive this is you can see it all happening in real time oh one thing that we didn't do is change the resolution here set this to 1280 at 1280 so it matches our cameras that's our real shot right there okay so just as in demonstration that's how you do a quick camera cut right there okay and you can add as many as you want so what I did to cheat the lighting animation or the lack thereof was set it up as a day scene render it as an animation and then just change all the lighting to make it a night scene okay so what I did was I turned down the sun intensity to 0.2 or even I mean you could put it at zero do whatever you want this is real time after all okay and then just adjust the lighting so that everything looks more like nighttime yeah and then I rendered it again so I had two animations actually I had a daytime animation and a nighttime animation and then I use some After Effects tricks to blend them together not really tricks just basic editing but I'll show you that too coming up that's how you do the basic animation I mean you can see it was super easy super intuitive to just go in here and animate your scene you can look around however you want and find the camera shot you want you can even use the video game controls wasd type controls to look around so I'm just using the mouse and and video game controls to find the camera that you want so you're like oh that looks cool boom new camera and then I want to move it to look at the TV or the computer screen boom new camera again now animate that so easy and you can play with the depth of field really easily too I mean it's very nice very nice way to animate I thoroughly enjoyed it now a couple other things you can do you can do free look if you want where I'm just in my scene and you can see the rendering is pretty good and I'm just navigating like a like a video game control right see if the arrows work too uh they do something different they they're more like the mouse okay so wasd is walking around and the mouse is where I'm looking we can escape out of here we can also turn on collisions and then when we walk around we like I've done this with with scenes where there's stairs and you can actually like walk up the stairs and stuff see I'm hitting the wall right now and you can see okay so this actually looks better than Unreal Engine 5. okay it's not as quick and smooth but it looks better I should clarify that what I mean is it looks better without any further adjustment and also I mean that the GI is accurate actually and it's kind of like fast enough right the GI and everything isn't perfect in this kind of real-time situation but it's it's close it's a little bit blurry and like it looks like the denoiser is just going nuts here but but that's okay because the lighting is overall good and you can navigate around and see and you can see exactly I mean you get a very good idea of what your finished camera is going to look like right so although the the denoiser is going nuts and like making everything look really smooth and blotchy the lighting is still accurate right more so than Unreal Engine would be because it's using more faking to make it go faster okay now obviously unreal can do the uh Ray the path razor and make it look very realistic and it'll be you know similar to what we're seeing in here but it's all it all has to be taken into account for intuitive animation and quickly taking my rendering to something that looks accurate lighting wise and material wise and everything and translates perfectly Vantage is where it's at for me okay when we're ready to animate it's very simple to do let's just quickly show that this is how I did it go in here set your resolution 1280 1280 because we're making a square Instagram rendering in this example now you can turn the denoiser off the denoiser is what's making it all look smooth okay and that's because it's taking a really noisy scene if you take it off you take off the denoiser like it doesn't look all blotchy and smoothed out but it does look noisy I prefer the noisy look rather than the denoised look so you can turn that off in the render settings and I didn't I did a couple examples where I did have it off the only the only issue is that like if you want it to not be super noisy you need to turn up your samples right so you can see my samples are set to 200 I think by Def fault it's 100 but you can turn this up to get higher quality it just means it's going to take more time to render each frame so these were the settings I used 200 I did use the denoiser on kind of would like to do denoiser off and maybe turn this up a little bit more if you want to get really high quality stuff but other than that it's just you know these settings are mostly self-explanatory you tell it where to save and how to save you can save it as an image sequence and an mp4 so it actually makes the video and saves all the images I took this into After Effects which I'm going to show you and so the image sequence was great After Effects works well with image sequences okay but you can just start now how long does this take that's a good question it certainly isn't rendering in like true real time okay and the samples is going to have a big say in how long it's going to take you can see this little animation I'm doing here it says it's going to take 57 minutes okay part of that's because my sampling set up high you can look you can see though the quality is pretty dang High I'd like to let's see see let's abort this and let's turn the denoiser off and see how it looks okay so in the end my animations were actually taking like five hours okay that might sound like a ton for a real-time animation and really we shouldn't call it real-time animation we just call it GPU animation right the real time is the feedback on what our animation is going to look like but when we actually go to render it high quality we're just maximizing the GPU capabilities to render it faster and five hours is much faster than a CPU rendering right this could take like five six minutes to render each frame using CPU rendering inside of v-ray and you multiply that times however many frames this would be maybe this is like a minute long so how many frames is that 1800 something like that yeah probably so 1800 times six minutes is a lot of time more than five hours okay so the point is for me is that real-time animation I mean the real-time stuff is happening inside Vantage where I'm seeing instantly like the depth of field feedback and the camera position feedback and then I can set it to render using GPU rendering and that is a very powerful tool okay and it's also way faster than the traditional way to do it that's also why I really want Vantage to have the ability to animate lights within Vantage because that's another thing I want intuitive feedback on in order to animate well personally because in arcviz that that's the kind of thing we animate right we don't usually animate objects very much but lights and cameras for sure we do okay so that's the animation that's the breakdown of the process I went through how it all looks what it's like so talked about the things I love about Vantage the things that it's that I wish it could do better and also just where to use Vantage in your workflow and how to use it again I think it's an awesome tool that's really essential for doing this kind of stuff let's look at what I did quickly in After Effects to get the finished result check out the finished result some more and uh yeah we'll finish this project up okay so I just want to show really quickly what I did in After Effects because this video is getting pretty long and this is supposed to be showing how to quickly take your renderings from still shot to animation so let's not spend too much time here but as a quick note like I said I took it into after effects and composited everything here's my here's my final cuts so this is the daytime scene and I also did a nighttime scene okay so I had two renderings I processed them both basically exactly the same way and then I just clipped them together or laid them on top of each other and Faded between one and the other to make the final video but in After Effects I was basically just processing the jpeg sequences for the PNG sequences okay so if we just look what I did here I turned each one into here's the overall the overall cut and you can see I took each of my cameras and turned it into a pre-composed composition so turned it into its own project basically each video and then I'm just kind of doing little Fades between them inside each one of these I just have the jpeg sequence then I have an adjustment layer which does that so you can see well let's get it off of that frame because that first one's blurred okay so you can see that's the adjustment layer and then the second adjustment layer is a a subtle vignette and that's it I applied that to all of the pre-compositions so they all look the same and let's just look a little harder at this adjustment layer here if I just look at the effects on this adjustment layer we have let's look at them all so it looks like I had a levels that was actually turned off a little too bright a curves that added kind of a more green tint to it by just taking the green Channel and lifting it up a little bit on the left side but that's also turned off okay then I used an add green if you look in here you can see this and you know if I had left the denoiser off when rendering I probably wouldn't need to add this noise back in it might look a little too noisy I don't know but I didn't like I really don't like how smooth the denoiser makes it look it looks really fake right so I should have rendered without the denoiser on in my opinion but I went back and added some green in to make it look a little more like you know a little more cinematic because film has Grain on it okay and then I did a hue saturation and that was shifting that blue color to be a little more teal I guess and that was about it okay so I didn't like how purpley the blue was looking all right so I assigned a similar adjustment layer in all of the camera Cuts okay again so this one comes becomes this with that slight vignette and I guess I should mention too that in Vantage I actually applied a little bit of a Lutz file to it so that shifted the colors a little bit already otherwise I probably would have played a lots in here but the point is in here I just did some very quick adjustments I did it for the the day scene so this is all daytime stuff and then I did it for the night scene as well and the cool thing about this was I could use the exact same file but just replace the jpeg sequence underneath and it would apply all the same things to it so it's a basically an exact copy of the other file so these are identical except that the jpeg sequence is either a nighttime lighting scene or a daytime lighting scene okay so that's it and then I process both of those and then I just took them back into my editing software and just laid them on top of each other and transitioned between one and and the other as I went through the video real quick just look at the adjustment layer okay same adjustments as before slight vignette that's it that's everything in After Effects [Music] thank you [Music] so that was a long-winded way of explaining how I took a pretty nice still shot rendering from v-ray and animated it fairly easily relatively easily of course explaining it took so long that in the meantime I got a haircut changed my clothes did all that stuff but you get the point hopefully there is enough detail there so that you can feel confident in doing it yourself too and you know it opens up a whole new world where our still shots it used to be like oh an animation that's gonna cause some problems as far as time and budget goes but Vantage and real time really open up a lot of new opportunities to to focus more on animation and movement and bring it to life a little bit rather than just always doing still shots because the the time is reasonable and the you know it's not going to blow your budget out so for me a guy that works in v-ray all the time and does still renderings very frequently this is a very cool tool because being able to offer the ability to go to animations quickly for client is important and Vantage definitely gives you that ability and it's pretty hassle-free and that's not the only thing I use Vantage for of course I also use it to preview my still shots as I'm working on them because it's giving you real-time feedback and you can do all sorts of things compose an art direct art director shot in real time the ability to do that is awesome and the cool thing is it works on still shots or animation okay so I discussed there's some things that I would like Vantage to add as features I discuss things that I think it's really really good at and I'd love to know what you think about this if you're using Vantage let me know let me know if there's something you know about it that I don't maybe I'm using it wrong just give me some feedback I'd love to know what you guys think what your workflows work look like and and if this affects your workflow or changes it at all as always thanks for watching I am going to be integrating this Vantage stuff into my 3ds Max v-ray courses those can be purchased down below for at a discount prize here on YouTube I mentioned some of them earlier but I'll have links to all that stuff I'll have links to any other videos you may need that are relevant to this one down in the links as well all the courses and also as always check out my free resources I've got models I've got all sorts of Industry resources about a career in arcviz all those kind of things just check out the links below for anything you may want or need and thanks for watching see you in the next one

Channel: Adam Z - Learn Archviz

Views: 7,687

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Id: pNiRQ12vnDU

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 16 2023