Steemit Office CGI animation by crypto3d

crypto3d(58)

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Behind the scenes

Finally, after a ton of tweaks and fixes, I managed to produce this short Steemit Office CGI sequence. The scene took a ton of optimization to achieve DECENT quality at a reasonable render time, as its exactly 460 frames long!

Render time: 460 frames x 3mins = 23hrs

The workstation I used to render this project out is a dual-zone Xeon CPU setup:

As per software, the scene was set up in 3dsmax 2016 and rendered in v-ray 3.5, post-edited in After Effects CC.

Making of (technical talk):

The scene is a simple v-ray sun + skyportal setup - my go-to for majority of interior scenes.

Optimization was the real challenge. As I'm used to ArchViz rendering with camera sequences averaging at 4-5sec, having 460 frames rendering at 20mins each wasn't an option (that would be 153hrs!), meaning my usual render settings didn't work anymore. I went on tweaking and testing for hours before I came up with this:

This reduced the render time to 3min/frame, a number I could live with. I rendered the prepass GI first, with Light Cache and Irradiance Map set to "Use camera path"

I rendered only 3 render elements:

VraySpecular - to enchance some of the reflections
VrayRawLighting - adding more shadow information to the scene, so it doesn't feel "washed out"
WireColor - in case any object needed tweaking later

As the raw render was already decent looking, there wasn't much post-editing required. Apart from basic levels and curves adjustments, I used the VrayRawLighting, overlayed on top the raw render with an opacity of 22% to enhance the shadows throughout the scene (excluding the logo).