Maniaplanet Forum

Using the sample materials from page 7, I tried to tweak around with the settings for a bit...
I know you don't want any samples for the project, this was just for the sake of testing for pitfalls in the settings, kind of... (please forgive me >_<; )

I did manage to find 2 major pitfalls that made rendering it at max settings either impossible, or a major test of patience...

1. Player shadows & Player Occlusion
Leaving player shadows on "all" makes the computer go haywire trying to calculate the shadows of every 1100 cars that starts at the same spot. it easily grabs all my ram & makes the whole process crash or go very, very slow.
Player Occlusion isn't really that much of a resource hog, but it's the source of those purple lines appearing, so i added that for good measure. :p

2. Car Reflections in the video settings
Not to be confused with car reflections in the launcher settings. When you shoot the video, having car reflections checked on makes rendering really slow for me. Haven't really tested it for that long, but when i spent 2+ min with it on, waiting for the first frame to finish calculating, while leaving it off got me 1-2 fps while rendering... I figured I'd better leave it off. ^^;

The rest can actually be left at max settings, though the headlights are really, really bright. :p
(set the shader quality to "fast" or lower to turn them off :p )

Result: leaving the rest of the settings as you described, I could render each frame in about 20-30 seconds each, about 160 frames in an hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQxzFnwOhiM
(quality suffers on youtube :p )

edit: made a 49x anti-alias video, removed the 9x version.

Now I am rendering the last "main" clip.
My laptop crashed again on me but I somehow worked around the Vegas crash.
I booted again in safe mode and renamed the ManiaPlanet folder and the folder with the test render. Then while loading the autosave Vegas told me that it cannot find the media and I made it ignore everything. Then I still had a file with all keyframes set and stuff. The main part almost comes to an end.

metoxys wrote:Never save uncompressed. It ain't worth it!

I don't see why not. Unless you have like a 20 Gb HDD, ofc. I have plenty of space to store huge files. I use RAW files for editing, I export to RAW avi again, and then use VLC to convert to .mp4. I don't like losing quality.

Jikap wrote: The rest can actually be left at max settings, though the headlights are really, really bright. :p
(set the shader quality to "fast" or lower to turn them off :p )
[...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQxzFnwOhiM

That.. really is bright.
I guess that's what happens when you try to realistically simulate 1k+ headlights in the same spot.

Okay! The "Main" Part is done I guess!
*insert Team Fortress 2 sound here that occurs when your team wins a round and the small scoreboard is displayed*

If the rendering times go on like this and ManiaPlanet at least TRIES to be stable, expect the final video in <7 days!

Atm rendering with one car per person who submitted replays. At very max graphics and 49x antialiasing. Now it's rendered 69 frames (@30 fps = 2.3 seconds) in 2 hours. I'm glad that I am working all day. I am not glad that this clip is 22 secs long.

Looking forward to watching the video

Yea, good luck rendering the rest!
May the rendering be done without incident. ^^

~5.6 seconds already rendered... it's getting faster.

Bad news, laptop crashed while I was absent.
Now because I am a bit pissed, the video will now be rendered without reflections and stuff.