loklomedia

Sorry... can't help. I gave up on vray. waste of time and money for me.

Either or... play with them and see. might get nicer results in the refract/opacity slot.

+100 rep points to Devin (Maxxer) for helping me out with the render settings.

thx... did you see PM?

I hate my life right now. So I rendered out a multiframe incremental for the exterior, every 10th (camera moved fairly slow, nothing else moving). I used the saved irmap (not using LC for exterior) from file to do a couple test renders. yeah... garbage. Looks hideous, and slower. This is with the High Animation preset for IR map as primary, none as secondary. IRmap was almost 900MB, which I assume is normal. see attached. I'm getting ready to just give up on this project and farm it out. What did I do wrong?? The interior just finished, but my IRmap is only 95kb. what did I do wrong with that one? I just checked, and noticed that "auto save" wasn't checked. I hope this isn't the reason. [rant]I hate expensive software that doesn't have a certain amount of logic built in to it, combined with hideous documentation, little to none on the mouse hover tooltips.[/rant] [rant] I have a hard time accepting this for 480p on modern machines.[rant] [regret]I shouldn't have jumped ship for a project with a tight deadline[/regret]

you could always add a slight dirtmap to the glass to catch more reflections. but darker outside, brighter inside, and less refraction on the glass. maybe play with the IOR?

ok now I'm confused. The Documentation for vray really needs some work. "Note that the irradiance map cannot be calculated through backburner. It must be calculated on a single machine" - although this is for multiframe incremental, I assumed it to be the case with the animation prerender pass - else, why not just calculate the IR with the beauty pass?? I've already got the LC saved, and the IR map is still only 55% done rendering on my fastest machine - at 10 minutes average per frame just for the IR map. holy-slow batman.

no, I've got 3 others for now, but one machine is borrowed, and needs to be returned Monday. So 4 quads right now, 3 next week. but the IR needs to be baked on one machine.

haha... both. I guess - is it normal to spend (waste) a week trying to get the render solution to look good? I guess I was hoping for 3-5 minute frame times. I'd be OK with 13 minutes if it looked good - and each individual frame does. But still blotchy. I need to render the IR map for a whole day+ on one machine, then render the whole sequence again with the saved files, and hope for the best, then re-render again if needed. I'll be back...

arrg I'm not cut out for this trial and error method of making an animation look good. I'm considering scanline again. Renders now taking 13-15 minutes per frame, and still no better at all. I saved the LC - which took about 45 minutes at 3800 subdivs over 653 frames. Now I'm baking the IR map again, taking ~10 minutes just to create the three passes of the IR map per frame. I'll never get this project done if I need to fart around like this every time to make it look good. Please... what am I doing wrong? I'm ready to throw the whole office out the window. This is a paid project, which was due two weeks ago, and I'm not getting paid enough (bid too low). I've got ~1 million polys, mostly vray materials, though some standard, and some A&D (I read in several places that A&D materials don't need conversion unless you need something specific/fine tuned). (these non-vray mats are from imported/merged objects). Even when dropping in a default gray vray mat into the mat'l override, it still takes 5-6 minutes to render at 848x480. I've turned the depth param to 1-2 for most of the prominent materials with any glossy reflection, trying to be conservative where possible and keep it looking adequate. Now an exterior render which used to take 3-4 minutes per frame is up to 30 minutes. man-o-man- I'm going bonkers.

looks decent - would also recommend the 2600 CPU. If your IT guys will allow you, you can install Max on the other workstations for work overnight for rendering large sequences.

thanks for that. Seems I read that somewhere... Any comment on my GI settings vs. render time?

ok thanks. I haven't found a reason for pre-rendering the light maps, especially if every frame - how is that different than just letting those light maps render per frame with the beauty pass? or is it because every frame's light solution is visible per frame, thus still providing a sort of blurred result? edit: does the same apply for exterior type animations? Even if only IR is used? my exterior is decent, but a but blotchy on the house walls, etc.

Thanks. - which setting is more influential for the blotchiness? I haven't had time to fully test on simple scenes on my own, but will be doing a lot more proper learning and testing next week. Since I'm also a student, my computers have a lot of 'idle' time potential - so I rendered 200 frames last night and this morning at 848x480 - here's a 240p version (mp4) http://loklomedia.com/files/loklo-interior-test1.zip - though the render times were slower than I'd like - 7-8 minutes on my overclocked Intel q9550 @ 3.4GHz (plus two q6600s and an i7 2600 - the slowest q6600 takes 12-14 minutes/frame). This test is smoother than I was expecting, but still not ideal. -A still is attached. So in pre-rendering the LC/IR maps - should I do every 10th frame typically? Does that give the smoothest results? Or will it be messed up with the rotating fan? (I suppose I could comp the fan in... but I don't have much experience with that, and don't have time to mess around with it. Thanks for any tips and pointers. oh... settings. they're attached now too. oh and camera and light settings attached now too, standard VraySky for env.

I will in about 7 hours... just heading out the door right now.