Animation still, too grainy.

[aflack]

Please see the image attached, its a still from a 30 second animation I am doing, I'm quite happy with the quality of the animation and have managed to get rendering times down to about 20 minutes per frame.

 

The problem is it just looks so grainy, there are .ies lights shinning down from the ceiling, vray environment is also turned on and a vray light is shinning through the window at this end of the room. Any ideas how to get rid of the grainyness?

 

Thanks

[Karlfucious]

Looks pretty good. I use Maya and not Max so im not exactly shure how vray area lights work but Im assuming its pretty simular to mental ray. Try boosting up your samples for your area lights. In Mental Ray too low samples on area lights will cause the exact same type of artifacting. Keep in mind that if you raise the samples your rendering times will go up.

 

As far as rendering times go. 20 min per frame seems pretty expensive even though you only have 30 sec to render. Is your animation pretty much just camera moves? If so you may want to consider baked lighting. With baked lighting you should be able to get your rendertimes down to 1 or 2 min a frame. If you do have animated objects in your scene baked lighting may not be an option. Instead you may want to cache your GI into a file. That way It doesnt have to recalculate the GI for every frame and should speed up your rendertimes quite a bit.

 

As I stated before I dont have vray as an option so I have never used it before but Im pretty shure that these speed tweaks should be possible to do with it and probably easier than MR.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

what are your AA settings?

[aflack]

I'm using adaptive subdivison -1:2 with a Catmul filter. I've realised now that the grain is coming from the fact I'm using a Catmul filter as well as the subdivisons for the vray light were set at 8. When I raise them up higher the grain gets a lot less but forces up render times.

 

I think the main reason the render times are so high is that the material on the kitchen work surfaces and back spash is brushed stainless steel and takes ages to render.

 

Is baking lights in vray easy to do if I could get render times down to a couple of minutes it would be fantastic but I have no idea at all how to do it.

 

Thanks

[Yaseck]

In Indrirect Illumination (GI) first bounce choose Irradiance map. And in the Irrandiance map setion choose preset "very high".

Increase also to 300 diffuse subdivs all lights in the Light Settings in the System setion.

And of course check all the lights and give them minimum 30 subdivs in the modify panel.

It should help.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think the main reason the render times are so high is that the material on the kitchen work surfaces and back spash is brushed stainless steel and takes ages to render.

 

blurred reflections are costly time wise in vray. the more blur, the more time. you can down your blur subdivisions, but the more you do this, the more noise the reflection will have. regardless of what your anti-aliasing settings are.

 

i haven't experimented around with it to see if this is true, but i am guessing you could decrease your max depth to help speed up the blurred reflections. max depth are how many times rays are reflected. if your reflection is blurred anyway, you are probably not gaining a lot by having 5 ray bounces for the reflection. maybe try using 2, and see what happens.

 

i am sure other people have ways to speed up blurred reflections.