VRay lines and the river

I have been working on a shot which is where the emperor says "you must cross the widest point of the river".

It is quite a simple shot because it is just a camera establishing the river so it goes from one bank to the other.

It did not take me long to create the camera and animate it. I did run into some rendering problems. Each frame takes about 5 minutes to render because of all the items and lights, textures etc in the scene. It has been a very slow process because I had to render the scene wife. Once in VRay for most of the scene and then mental ray for the river.

I had to composite them in After Effects and this was the outcome.



In the shot you can see a few problems. First of all you can see the edge of the scene. At the point where the camera crosses the river, there is no environment past the last mountain. Secondly, the VRay lines around the river do not match up in some places with the river itself. Thirdly, the camera is looking down too much so all you can see is the river and is not very interesting.

There are way to resolve two out of the three problems. The problem with the environment can be sorted by painting the rest of the environment in. There is a globe that covers the whole environment and it has the sky texture on. If one of the artists in the group (Sarah Strickland or Lily Blacknell) could paint some more environment, even if it was just a bend in the river, so it looks like the environment carries on for a while rather than stops dead. We could say there is a waterfall or drop there but the water would have to go in the other direction and there are usually rock at the top of waterfalls which would have to be modelled and placed in the scene. This would have to be discussed and then could be added to the sky texture onto the globe.

The problem with the camera can be easily sorted. I have made it so the trees and pavilion are visible for longer but so you can still see the water. This also allows the audience to see where the animals have to finish the race. It makes the shot a little more interesting for the viewer.



The last problem is the hardest to solve. The VRay lines do not exactly match to the river. The problem is, I cannot move the river layer around very much because it aligns with the stairs and edges of the banks. Even if I was able to move the layer around more, where some VRay lines do match, others do not.

After some research on the internet and autodesk and VRay help sections, I have found the reason for this. When I render the environment in VRay, it does not render the actual river itself but it creates a line around the plane which the ocean shader is assigned too. This would be fine and align perfectly except that the ocean shader, when rendered is not just a plane. The ocean shader has ripple and ebbs on the banks and against the sides so it is never just flat like a plane. Also, because the ocean shader interacts to settings like turbulence and objects, you could never render a black outline around it because it means the line would have to move as the waves move up and down.

The river and VRay lines will never match up completely but it is only a small difference and it could add character to the piece. It makes it a little bit more interesting for the audience.