Somewhere between Medium and High preset

[Matt Sugden]

Hi i'm looking for some help, i am currently running my animations with the medium setting in the irradiance map, which give me frame times of about 8-10 mins, which is just about acceptable for my current setup. However I have noticed that the high preset yields far better result with the small details in the scene and removes almost any flicking with the lighting solution, the thing is, it is hitting my frame times at about 13-17 mins a frame, which cripples me a bit.

 

At the moment I am having to calc the irradiance map for every frame as I have lot of animated objects, and hence can't do the pre-calc which would make life easier and faster.

 

so to the question, can anyone recommend some good settings or tweaks to the basic medium preset that would bridge the gap between the high setting?

 

I have tried using the 'medium animation' preset, yet I find I always get better result with the basic medium setting.

 

Oh I am using an older version of v-ray, am I right in thinking the new version lets you do irradiance pre-calcs even with animated objects? I have a lot of objects going from being invisible to visible in my scenes.

 

Thanks in advance.

[JamesTaylor]

increasing your AA settings should help, will also add to your render time tho, but what doesn't when it adding quality??

[Mr-JosE]

Becareful with the Irradiance map presets, you can waste a huge amount of time rendering if you do not take the time to understand what the settings do.

 

The Medium preset works with min rate of -3 and max rate of -1. We are talking settings for frames around 2000 x 2000 in size, on fairly detailed scenes. And letting v-ray complete 3 passes to calculate the irradiance map. The beauty of v-ray is that its adaptive. It can work out best where to put samples in your scene. So dropping the min rate to say -6, for instance, gives it more passes to better gauge where to take samples, to achieve a good solution. AND it will be faster. Its not wasting time sampling areas it doesnt need to...

 

...This links with the other settings. The clr threshold is how sensitive to changes in colour the irradiance map is, lower values are more accurate, the same follows for the normal threshold setting, lower more accurate. Both of these can be lowered quite safely. The final setting, the distance threshold will give v-ray a guide to where to take samples. Higher values here will make it take more samples at joints between faces, which can help get a better solution.

 

Saying all this, i don't know what your frame size is, nor the content of the frame. So you may need higher min/max settings.

 

Flickering however, is almost always AA settings gone bad. Try using the ADMC (AQMC) sampler depending on your version of v-ray. Its several miles better than the Adapative Subdivision sampler, especially on detailed geometry.

 

Oh and moving objects + IR maps is bad news. Try rendering moving objects seperately, probably with a brute force solution and composite with the static elements.

[Matt Sugden]

Hey, thanks for the reply. It's good to get some more detailed knowledge on the finer points. Typically my frames are around 800x450 for animations, so pretty small in comparison to my stills.

 

I'll try having a play round with the AA settings, I have generally stuck with, Adaptive subdivision -1/2 , and a catmull-rom filter, as I have often found that they yielded good fast results, for stills that is again. I am finding animation a whole other beast.

 

My scenes are mostly quite detailed, with lots of moving objects (so I'm using brute force), I've scene the old chaos tutorial about rendering in passes, but unfortunately my timescales don't allow for that.