Recording videos of Bongo animations

I didn’t have much luck with the built in render support for generating a video of an animation in Ghost view mode.

The videos were too large and had horrible compression artifacts.

I had more luck using the built in Windows 11 screen recording feature (for games).

It made much clearer and smaller videos.

It’s not ideal as:

  • it takes time to start the animation after hitting record
  • you see all the Rhino UI
  • you see the recording UI and the mouse moving to stop recording

I improved things somewhat using two monitors.

  • I dragged the timeline and properties panes off onto the 2nd monitor
  • I had the game recording windows on the 2nd monitor

This still isn’t great as the cursor moves when you click on the Bongo timeline pane and you need to correct to actually click start. Also, the game recording UI disappears and needs to be re-invoked to stop recording. (I pressed the XBox key on a gamepad to do that).

This is the result: (note the short delay before the animation actually starts)

I think that MS has an API to control the process from inside 3rd party apps so it should be possible to leverage their recording features under Windows so that things aren’t as clunky. Though that would only work for real-time renders.

What are the recording features like in Bongo 3?

Have I missed something obvious in Bongo 2 that would give me better results?

What settings do you use when you render the animation?

I think I tried AVI and mp4

This is an mp4 that is a reasonable size but has too many compression artefacts.

settings used

The uncompressed AVI is nice but is 1.8Gb in size :slight_smile:

Have you been trying to change the Compression options? Does that make a difference?

Hi @jmcauley , I’m happy to see you’re still working on your starship models. I have fond memories of working with your models to pinpoint some Raytracing issues!

From the two videos you posted I am having a hard time telling what the encoding artifacts are. To my eye there are a couple of drawing issues like on the leg doors

and

(note: the extra compression introduced by Discourse recompression to jpeg doesn’t help here - with these images there are actually compression artifacts that I don’t see in your videos).

The first image looks like z-fighting due to overlapping surfaces. The second image looks like regular aliasing problems of curved lines exacerbated by the surfaces these lines are supposed to be on.

Then again, I don’t know what to look for to be able to say what is an encoding artifact and what isn’t. Perhaps you could take a couple of screenshots and annotate what you see as the problematic parts? A rendered PNG frame with corresponding frame in video with your annotations to highlight the errors would help a lot.

Anyway, the question from @marika_almgren on the compression options would be good to have answered as well.

As a final word: I prefer doing the encoding of image sequences to video format in a separate software (or step) than the animation rendering. I’d stick with rendering to just the image sequence with Bongo.

I don’t think I ever changed the compression options.

The reason I think that is because when I try to change them I see a dialog that I’ve never seen before and then Rhino dies. It takes a second or so before Rhino dies.

It dies completely: one second Rhino is there and the next second it is completely gone. There is no crash report, no dump files. It is as if I had never run Rhino.

I managed to grab a snapshot before Rhino died.

I was RDPing onto a desktop computer from my laptop.

Things are fine if I try to edit mp4 compression settings.

Is this easier to see?

image

Here is an example. It looks like jpeg compression artifacts but I have definitely chosen png for the individual images. (I don’t know if that matters)

Look at the diagonal edges, you can see the jpeg squares where nearby colours blend into each other.

Whereas, this is what MS’s game screen capture produces. You can see that the image is just less noisy.

I’m starting a new job next week and I had a couple of free weeks to work on the starship.

I share what I have done here.

I added a physics engine to Rhino so I can walk around whilst modelling (it’s faster than exporting to Unreal). I added a jetpack because everything is better with jetpacks. :slight_smile:

I’m thinking of adding trigger volumes to open/close doors as I get near them. But that’s not high on my priorities.

The initial inspiration for the model was to have, essentially, a giant radial engine filling my engine room. That would be my “warp core”. I want to add a cylindrical gravity field so I can walk between the cylinders and around the engine room to end up, upside down, so I can then walk to the back of the ship into the hanger bay. (It is upside down WRT the rest of the decks.)

The yellow, highlighted, geometry is my collision geometry. It’s still a W.I.P. The warp core will be inside the cowl area at the front of the secondary hull.

The view from the other side.

Sorry for the off topic post, not sure where to put it.

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The artifacts appear to be co-planar faces. The weird triangular ‘mess’ is from two surfaces occupying the same space.

One way of making the video displays the problem, one way does not.

In the past I made videos from slightly different angles and, consistently, the Rhino built-in method shows artifacts and the Windows method of making videos does not.

In all cases it’s the same geometry so I don’t think that the geometry is the problem.

This is a known issue logged here. The video encoder for Bongo 3 will be getting a much needed tune up.

I would increase the Video Bit Rate in the MP4 compression settings. That should help clear that graininess up.

Thanks Joshua,

I’m happy with my current video but I will revisit this if I ever need to make another.