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Home ? Your Videos ? Reworked my minions animation...

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28/08/2016 22:52:22

christian_clavet
christian_clavet
Posts: 26 		Hi, was quite busy playing games since last week (in particular No man's sky), but decided this weekend to rework a little my "minions" animation.

- Reworked the crowd, had 3 character, now more than 12! (All dancing and get afraid)
- Reworked the cameras, the cameras were not to my liking.
- Changed little things in the minions actions (pianist now is having a single eye like Bob (thanks to IKES for the idea!)
- Reworked the lighting, was too bright for a music show.

Here is the result:

Note: Because of the music used (Pitbull), Youtube warned me that the video can not be played back in Germany.

Notes on Muvizu performance:
I had no problem adding and choreographed more characters, the slowdown seem to happen when I get more cameras (used 6). At some point Muvizu was so slow that when I decided to name my cameras, that the text took 1-2 second to update per letter when I was typing it. It would be nice that we could disable the camera rendering (or decide witch camera that need to be refreshed). Once I added more cameras, the application performance started to degrade. At 6 it's was horrible!

So as a recommendation, do the camera work at last, keep the cameras at a minimum!

There also another possible reason for the slowdown, Muzivu was updated recently, and it might have updated with a 32bit version. Not sure, I have to investigate. Memory usage was about 2Gb when I saw the slowdown appearing. If it would be a 32bit application it would page a lot when reaching this amount of ram.

As for my rig, this is not an issue:
- Intel I7 Processor (I7 3770K)
- 16Gb of ram
- Everything run from a 512Gb SSD
- Video card: EVGA GTX 1080 Superclocked.

When it was lagging at the most, the CPU what idling at 25% (Load seemed balanced on all 8 logic cores), only 2Gb were taken from the ram, had more than 8Gb free. As for the geometry I could manipule 100x times the amount of polygons that I had in the scene with 3DS Max with this video card. It's not because of the crowd (at least not the geometry).

So perhaps the Muzivu developers could look more at the application with a profiler to know where the application is loosing the more time and improve upon that. The ability to disable rendering from the extra cameras could help, It seemed to me that once a camera is created, a RTT (texture render of each camera) is done at each frame and it this should only be triggered if we need it. RTT could be done 1-2 per second for the camera preview and not per frame. Also the ability to disable the camera rendering (checkbox?) would be really useful. A idea I had is to increase the speed of update on the camera preview that the mouse is hovering over and let the other refresh slower.

If you have 6 cameras, the scene is rendered from each camera perspective! And if you don't absolutely need to refer to this (not doing specific camera work), it's slow down the work a lot!


Edit: Done a check with process explorer and the application is really 64bit. So should be able to handle a lot more ram. Checked when I start it, around 600Mb of ram is used and 15% of cpu is used. (no scene at all)
edited by christian_clavet on 28/08/2016
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29/08/2016 01:30:31

PatMarrNCMuvizu mogul
PatMarrNC
Posts: 1738 		with that kind of horsepower, I wouldn't expect any problems whatsoever.... which raises the question of whether hardware acceleration needs to be turned on in Muvizu, or does the software automatically recognize it and use it when its available?
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29/08/2016 05:03:56

christian_clavet
christian_clavet
Posts: 26 		Since Muvizu uses Unreal engine, it should use natively hardware acceleration. In fact, if you have not installed your video card driver, I would expect Muvizu to crash. The developers should be able to find out what is causing this using a profiler. They should have one made accessible for the engine they use. The multiple cameras RTT is probably one of the first causes. Most games will use up to 1-2 rtt for a game (most of the time for faking reflections (water)) and dynamically switch from camera to camera, but made only 1 active (rendering at a time). I created 6 cameras, and if they where active all at the same time, the scene was rendered 6 times at each frame.
edited by christian_clavet on 29/08/2016
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29/08/2016 14:10:39

ziggy72Muvizu mogulExperimental user
ziggy72
Posts: 1988 		I never work with multiple cameras open - never. One camera at a time or everything grinds to a halt on a complex scene (even on a fast machine). I never use the active cameras window (I think that's what it's called) - I just open each camera from it's edit window. What I've always wanted, and have asked for before, are check boxes along the top of the UI that let you toggle the visibility of each camera (so you don't have to go through yet another window to operate them).

Nice vid, the lighting does work better, and everything gets banned in Germany. I think they have giant fans along their border blowing the corrupt non-German air back into the surrounding countries. There's something wrong with Germany...
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29/08/2016 15:59:28

PatMarrNCMuvizu mogul
PatMarrNC
Posts: 1738 		regarding multiple cameras: if you absolutely HAD to create an entire project using no other software but Muvizu, the extra cameras would be a necessary evil. But since virtually all of us end up splicing a bunch of footage together in a video editor as the last step, it makes much more sense to work with one (or maybe two) cameras at a time. Once all the character actions are programmed, it's very easy to move the main camera to a new vantage point and record the same scene again.

And ultimately you have a lot more control at the editing stage if you give yourself a little extra footage to trim at the edges. (a luxury you don't have if you direct camera activity while recording)
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30/08/2016 00:52:13

christian_clavet
christian_clavet
Posts: 26 		ziggy72 wrote:
I never work with multiple cameras open - never. One camera at a time or everything grinds to a halt on a complex scene (even on a fast machine). I never use the active cameras window (I think that's what it's called)

Hi, Ziggy72!

I try to close everything too. If I have to, I prefer to only have open the "active camera window". It look like if camera even when NO windows of them are displaying are still rendering in the background. With 6 cameras, it take 1-3 second per character to refresh when I'm changing the name of a camera!

I reloaded the project, without playing with the camera, seemed faster. Checked the ram used and it was under 1gb. I really think there is some kind of "bug" related to the camera cut. Even if the windows are not opened, each camera still render in the background. (At least it seem to me, since I have no absolute proof of this since I don't see the source). It's really strange that a completed project take 1Gb of ram fully loaded, and when playing with theses camera, it goes up to 2gb...

PatMarrNC wrote:
But since virtually all of us end up splicing a bunch of footage together in a video editor as the last step, it makes much more sense to work with one (or maybe two) cameras at a time. Once all the character actions are programmed, it's very easy to move the main camera to a new vantage point and record the same scene again.

Hi, PatMarrNC
I think also we could only work with one camera, with a external editor. I would have to set a camera for the entire sequence, render it completely, and repeat the process for each wanted angle. Once in the video editor do the cuts there. But when this is used correctly in a game engine, there is 0% lag. It simply switch from a camera to another, not render them all at once at the same time.
edited by christian_clavet on 30/08/2016
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