Tutorial: Vray Sketchup Animation

First of all, we would like to thank our regular contributor and fast becoming tutorial writer Gerbe Dumahil. In this episode, Gerbe shares a simple yet very effective workflow of 3d Animation. Let us see his Vray SU set uo and how he stitched his still images using After Effects. This tutorial is divided into two parts; Part 1 the VraySu set up, and Part 2 the stitching of rendered image stills using Adobe After Effects.

Before going to the different tutorial steps, let us watch briefly this Vray SU animation courtesy of Gerbe Dumahil.


Vray for SketchUp animation test from Gerbe Dumahil on Vimeo.


PART 1: Vray Sketchup Animation Set-up

Step 1. Scene transition set-up in Google SketchUp
Set-up the animation scene and settings in Google Sketch-Up. Once the key frames (beginning and ending scenes) were established, we will set up the scene transition in Sketchup. Go to Windows/ Scene Transitions and click animation. Under the Scene transition, we will enter 5 seconds (its up to you how long this would be). It is also important to change the scene delay to zero "0".



Step 2: Animation Setting in VraySU
Here we need to choose the output size* (1) and the render output (2). We need to tick Animation on and select frame rate (3). It is very important to tick "include frame number" because we need the render stills to be numbered sequentially when we stitch the animation using Adobe After Effects.   

*Note: for the output size, you can select a lower output for the pre-calculated passes and then for the final render, you can select a bigger output size.

Step 3: Setting up the Irradiance Map (IR) and Light Catche (LC)
Now this is an important step to speed up the rendering process of the animation stills. Let the primary engine to be Irradiance Map and Secondary Engine as Light Catche.

Step 4: Pre-calculation of Irradiance Map and Light Catche 
In this step, both the Irradiance Map and Light Catch passes will be pre-calculated. We will tell Vray to only calculate the passes and not render the final image. To do this, we will select "incremental add to current map" mode in the Irradiance Map roll-out



In the Light carche roll-out, the mode will be "Flythrough".



Finally, in the Global switches/ GI, tick "Dont' Render Image". We will also tick :Batch Render".Then hit Render.



In the belowVray Frame buffer, the frame by frame passes were calculated but not the final image.



Step 5: Saving the pre-calculated passes
After the pre-calculation of the passes, we will save our irradiance and light catche maps. Then we will load them again, this time we will change the mode "From File" and load the saved Maps. (see the images below)





Step 6:Rendering the final images
After loading the files, we are now ready to render the final image. Under Global switches, we will now untick "Don't Render Image".



Here are my rendered files, all rendered files were automatically saved and they were numbered and named sequentially.




PART 2: Stitching the Vray Render Stills using Adobe After Effects

Open Adobe after Effects. Click composition and create New composition. Under composition settings, set up the file name, output size, frame rate and time duration.



Import the Vray rendered files by right clicking the project panel, import and browsing the initial rendered files we have rendered in Vray SketchUp.



Select all the files and be sure to tick "radiance sequence". This depends actually in your file type. Here I used hdr output.



Files are now being loaded in Adobe After Effects.



Preview the animation by going to composition, preview/ RAM Preview.



If you are happy, we can now export the scene with any Movie files that you prefer. Here I selected File/ Export/Avi.



That's it folks!