So today marks the last day of the 99Frames – Social Animation Project and I finally got around to submitting mine.
Being new to R13 and with such a short time to do the project in, I found myself running into challenges which I thought I’d chat about.
Physical Render
I found the Physical Render to be great in terms of quality, however, on my computer at home, it was taking around 4 hours per frame at a resolution of 800 X 450px which was disheartening. I switched over to the standard render which sped up the renders to around 30 minutes a frame. The only issue was I wasn’t able to achieve the dynamic depth of field with the Physical Render has.
A work around to achieving the depth of field from the Physical Render and faster render times was to render out the full project using the Standard Render, then to turn off all the lights and materials and render out just a depth pass using the Physical Render. These depth passes took around 6 minutes a frame and through After Effects I was able to combine the depth of field using Lens Blur.
Interface
The new interface of R13 is pretty intuitive, it took a couple of minutes to find out where everything is but once I knew where to go, everything was in reach!
Subsurface Scattering
The new subsurface scattering engine works like a dream, the precise controls give you immediate feedback and true to life effects.
All in all, I think R13 is going to totally reinvent the way in which motion artists and animators design, so if you havent taken it for a spin yet, I highly encourage you to download a demo and start looking under the hood.
A big thank you to David Drayton @neosushi68 for this wonderful initiative, I hope 99 Frames becomes an annual project for people to collaborate and share their art with the world.
