Long animation final gather

[milfora]

Hi,

 

I'm currently looking at rendering 8x5000 frame renders at 1024x576.

First, I am looking to run the final gather map at half resolution (as recommended by so many on this site). Because I have vehicles moving as well as the camera, I am having to render out every frame as opposed to every 'nth'.

Because I render the FG out on a single machine only (1/64,1/64 AA), I am looking at about 16 hours to render a single FG map (averaging about 12 seconds per frame). Fortunately I have a few machines at my disposal to run a few at a time, but it it possible to spread the FG map creation out over multiple machines across a network?

 

I have looked everywhere in the manual (Max and mental ray), and the only thing I see that comes close is the fg_copy, but I cannot seem to find anything related to this app on my computer (do you need stand-alone mental ray in order to use this?).

 

Does anybody have any experience with generating large FG maps across multiple machines?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

AM

[Justin Hunt]

It is possible to calculate the fg over several machines but not recomended as each machine will generate a slightly different solution causing flickering. Sometimes its not too bad and quite usable other times not.

 

How much of the moving car is seen ? If the movment of the car is only a small part of the whole frame then go with the nth frame calculations. If it is quite significant then dont.

 

You could hide the moving car during calculation and unhide it for final render.

 

I have done a few animations with moving people and cars, did the nth frame FG and there was no significant lighting issues. Was rather effective .

 

jhv

[tayrona]

In this page you will find a very nice support (free) about rendering animations with max, mental ray and vray. there is a "live chat option" available. they always help me in those confusing issues, and rendering animations too, with very low prices.

www.remote-render.com

[milfora]

Thanks for your replies,

 

Justin, the vehicles take up a reasonable percentage of screen (up to about 20% when the camera moves past). I have run this scene before at every 10th frame and it resulted in some pretty horrible flickering. Your idea about hiding the vehicles for the FG calc sounds very promising - I had not thought of doing that.

 

Just out of curiosity, I would like to try rendering the FG across multiple machines. Could you please advise how to do this.

 

Many thanks

 

AM

[milfora]

Justin, you're a dead-set wizard!!!

 

I simply excluded the vehicles (over 200 of them) from the final gather solution, rendered off every 10th frame and now the flicker is gone!

 

Without the animated vehicles in the solution the FG generation times were also considerably reduced.

 

Do you usually exclude animated objects from your FG solution?

 

AM

[Justin Hunt]

gernerally I would if they are not the main focus of the scene. Same for Glass in windows. I set these to "Pass through" Fg samples in the object properties -> mentalray .

 

In some cases I have been known to exclude any small, thin objects (such as chair legs) as well.

 

To calculate FG over several machines just submit the job to backburner , any machine will calculate the frame it picks up. Just be sure to be saving the FG map to file.

 

jhv