mattcooper

Have you tried using a High Pass filter?

I've seen this happen when using distributed rendering, when one machine has a different version of Vray (if I remember correctly)

Ah yes, I think I've had this issue before where it doesn't like to load certain bit-depth tifs (I think it was 16bit), and I could never figure out why! Targa's and EXR's work perfectly fine though.

You want to convert an image sequence into a video file? DJV Imaging is good and open source, once you've loaded in your sequence just go File > Save, and simply end your file's name with the video extension you want to use (i.e. animation.mov), and click save.

Have you considered Maya? I use Max at my current studio but have used Maya for many more years, and it's an incredible piece of software, the UI isn't too different from Max's, and it looks and feels a lot cleaner and modern compared to Max, if that's something that's important to you.

Have you ever thought that perhaps he had enough money saved so that he could take time off and work on his masterpiece without having to worry about expenses?

Not necessarily. All of my personal projects have been done in my spare time, outside of paid work. There are weeks/months when I want to do personal projects and I'll spend my free time on them, and then there are months when I'd rather chill out and do other things that interest me. It's all about finding the time to do them, and even a simple scene can take months to complete because you're finding a little bit of time to work on it every now and then.

What lighting set up to you tend to use? And also, are you using a physical camera? If not, you need to use one, and if so, you'll need to adjust the f-stop, shutter speed etc, as well as the intensity of your lights rather than having an override in each light.

Great, glad to help! Yeah that will happen as brute force is notoriously slower to render a clean image, and you're right, playing with the noise threshold will help this. You can region render the noisier parts of the image and adjust the settings until those parts are clean, as i said, 0.005/0.002 is most likely going to be overkill so bare that in mind. You could also play with the custom settings in the denoiser to see if that can help you use lower threshold settings but still get a clean image.

No worries Yes that sounds right (although on my version of VRay it's called Noise Threshold, not Adaptive Threshold), and I'd keep Adaptive Amount on 0.85 (default). (and just to clarify, the LOWER your threshold settings (0.005 etc), the HIGHER the quality and render times)

Okay so the noise threshold is probably too low, I'd start with 0.008 and potentially go lower to 0.005 if needed. The DMC is way too high for a final render (I usually test with 0.02, and do final renders with 0.002 - 0.008, depending on the detail of the scene and how well the denoiser deals with it) so by lowering that value you should see the most improvement. The Max subdivs can be raised to 24 which is default (I think). And with the denoiser it should be as simple as using the low/medium preset

No worries! Good idea, I almost always use Brute Force + Light Cache instead of Irradiance. In terms of noise, what are your current image sampler and DMC settings? To almost guarantee clean renders I'd use an image sampler noise threshold of 0.005, and a DMC noise threshold of 0.002, and then adjust your min/max samples. Those settings will most likely be overkill and will lead to much longer render times, but those are generally good ways to fix noise issues (also add a denoiser render element as this will allow you to use lower/faster threshold settings, and play around with the denoise settings to ensure you don't lose too much detail). Also check your materials and lights to check they don't have really high values, and aren't completely white (as you've already discovered with your Light Material!)

I guess you're using Irradiance Mapping for your GI? In which case increasing the sampling should sort it out.

It's most likely because you're using a value of 25,000! Why do you need it so high?? Having really bright lights and materials that are close to 100% white are both things that kill render times. It'd be helpful to know what kind of scene you're rendering, what other lights you're using, your GI settings, camera settings etc.

The first thing to ask yourself is "why does my image not look like renders I see online?", and go from there.