Topic: Possible Bug in Ambient shadow option during Movie Output?

[cly3d]

Hi,
A new fan of Lumion. I knew about Quest 3D, but the spaghetti-node interface had put me off a while ago.
Congrats that Act-3D have made Lumion so intuitive!

Anyhow, getting back on topic:

• I downloaded Lumion Free 2.5
• Imported a .fbx scene
• Added some Lumion Palm trees and birds
• Total Scene now shows about 110k verts
• Setup a flythru and tried to render
• Crash of Nvidia driver after about 100 frames of rendering

Background:
I'm running this on my HP HDX laptop (win 7 64bit, 4gb ram, Nvidia 9600m GT)
The reason im interested in running it on this laptop, is that this is the lappy I carry around for my conferences and workshops where I teach Stereoscopic 3D Movie-making.
in short.. It's a highly portable setup.
I realize that Lumion is geared for higher end cards etc, but my demo lisences for other software are on this laptop, and I want to use Lumion as part of the pre-viz section of my workshop.


Now from the process of elimination, this is what I came up with

1) I tried making the flythru in short chunks..1...2..etc in the film strip board
2) Set the movie to MP4, then Jpeg, then lowest quality etc...
No luck..still crashed the Nvidia card, which then recovers with a windows message but of course no more rendering happens

Now in realtime mode during designing, everything works flawlessly and no crashing.

Conclusion:

I set the ambient shadow correction slider to zero on the movie output settings page.
Bingo! No crashes.

Rendered the full 45 second flythru.

So could we look into this as a possible bug in the Routine that renders the ambient Shadow compensation (i forget the exact wording/name of this menu option that is on the final make movie page)

Regards.

P,s attaching a GPU snapshot of my system
 

[Morten]

Hi cly3d, thanks for your feedback.

It's not actually a bug that causes the graphics card driver to crash. Your graphics card does not meet the minimum requirements for running Lumion without problems - the card you're using is over 4 years old (Announced on 04/06/2008).

Check out the section about Passmark points here (your Nvidia 9600m GT only has 355 points, and 1500 points are required for simple Lumion scenes):

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+9600M+GT+%2F+GeForce+GT+220M
http://lumion3d.com/forum/f-a-q/lumion-2-minimum-hardware-requirements/

If you have no other option than to use this PC, please also make sure that Settings -> Enable low mem compatibility is turned on.

[cly3d]

Hi Morten.
 I completely understand! That's why i mentioned that I know the Gfx card is old, but the laptop is my portable system that i use for workshops.

However, one finer point from my previous post:
If I turn the slider all the way down to zero for Ambient Correction on the make movie page, then the complete video renders without errors.

So in essence, the card is working fine and Lumion can reside on this laptop for my purpose of showing it at workshops.

(As a side note: I show Directors and Cinematographers how to create a "look" on-location, sort of a virtual set. I use CryEngine's Sandbox for this, but it's more involved in setting up things. Lumion is very very intuitive.

I will be next showing this at the AbuDhabi Film Festival during my workshop: http://bit.ly/QykBYp)

If you have no other option than to use this PC, please also make sure that Settings -> Enable low mem compatibility is turned on.

Yes this I already do. Everything works fine in build mode. no issues whatsoever with the GFX card.

Thanks and keep up the great work with Lumion


P.s I sent a separate email to [email protected] regarding possibility of NFR version of Lumion Pro. Are you with Act-3D?

[Morten]

However, one finer point from my previous post:
If I turn the slider all the way down to zero for Ambient Correction on the make movie page, then the complete video renders without errors.

Hi cly3D, as you have found out, the Ambient Shadows are quite demanding. Try to turn on the 'i' option in the Settings window and check out the framerate in the upper right corner before and after you turn off the ambient shadows.

That bei said, it's great that you don't mind using Lumion without ambient shadows, but the reason we have to insist on the higher minimum hardware requirements is so that people who buy Lumion end up complaining to us about stuff not working properly due to their hardware.

P.s I sent a separate email to [email protected] regarding possibility of NFR version of Lumion Pro. Are you with Act-3D?

Yes, but I am not responsible for sales and licensing so you sent the email to the right address

[cly3d]

Thanks Morten

I'm quite happy with the FPS in build mode even on a scene with 150k verts as I tried out in Lumion.

I do use medium quality and 66% in build mode.
For the purpose of Pre-Viz this is fine when showing demos to Directors and DoPs.

Also I wanted to know: Does the Stereoscopic 3D output allow to animate camera "convergence"
or is this asking for a bit too much
I only ask, as the stereo output is disabled in the Free version, and I wanted to know how far we could go with stereo visualization via Lumion.

Another thing I'll try later is to see if stereo will work in Build mode in a window via a Quadro card. But that's all for later.

Cheers!
Clyde

[Morten]

Also I wanted to know: Does the Stereoscopic 3D output allow to animate camera "convergence"

These are the available sliders but you can't animate any of them.

[cly3d]

Sweeeet!
Thanks Morten.

At least something to work with. I'll see if I get reply from lumion sales soon.

An idea would be to have the ability to keyframe the Eye Distance (called interaxial of the cameras), and the Focus distance (vergence) of the cameras. This would make it a professional application for producing stereoscopic walkthroughs.

For film-making (in stereoscopic 3d) it would be great to be able to then take in 3D camera traking data from external software to use inside Lumion for compositing ...or...vice versa (exporting the Lumion Stereoscopic Camera data) to Compositors such as Nuke etc.

err...but I'm getting ahead of myself and completely off tangent from the original thread

Thanks for all the answers. I will follow development on Lumion keenly.

Best Regards
Clyde

[Morten]

Hi Clyde, I'm not the guy who has to implement changes but as far as I know, it's not so difficult for the developers to add a keyframe option to sliders of existing Movie effects. However, you're the first to request this, so if they were to decide to add this in a future update, it would probably be rather low on their list of priorities