Animation with Vray is it possible?

[Eezo]

Basically I am doing my final project at uni and I am currently in the research and development phase. I want to create an interior walkthrough and I need some advice about render times. Vray seems to be a good choice for speed compared to other render systems but I don't know if it will be quick enough is it possible to render say a 15-20 second animation (25 frames a second) with vray in a week and if so what kind of quality should I expect for the render?

 

If it’s not at all possible I would be open to alternatives?

 

Cheers.

[Andrew Schroeder]

Sure it's possible. I'm not sure what your resolution is, or what your computing resources are though. Pre-calcing your irradiance maps for every N-th frame, and rendering from the precalculated file should lessen the GI processing time significantly.

 

If I were you I'd go the vray route and starting hanging out, reading threads and asking questions on the vray forum. Those guys will have the answers you're after.

 

Andrew

[Eezo]

Hi there, thats good advice ill do that.

 

I have followed this tutorial

 

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/VRayHelp150beta/tutorials_imap2.htm

 

Is this the method you are refering too it seems to get pretty good results. I have only 1 computer I am garanteed that I can render with but there is a possability that I could get say 5 or 6 computers networked to create a small render farm going that might help me out.

 

the walkthrough will be of an extreme sports centre by the way and the only thing I can think of that will be animated is the camera.

[jtiscareno]

Time will also depend on what type of material you have and your AA settings. I have epxerienced that the more vray material you have the better and faster vray works, having a standard material with raytrace on it itakes time to render, and vray material that have blurry reflections will take time too.

 

So try to have as many vray mat as you can have, no or very little "blurry reflections" on reflecting material.

 

Like it was said and I can atest that calculating the light cache and the IR map will cut almost in half your render time, the only drawback is that those two maps have to be claculated on only one machine, light cahce is fast but ir map calc will take time, specially with a small farm, plan on running it all night.

 

Also if you run your final animation on fixed rate AA it will go fast but you end up with jagged edges, if you want better AA go with the other two options but try to compromise time:quality.

 

Also another thing, dont render a huge resolution, just go with the NTSC TV standard image size of 640x480 and render to individual frames then compress.

 

Good luck!