anxious about render times

[chow choppe]

here are some stills from a lobby animation we are doing

what i want to know is that the following renders use Irradaince map at very low and LC at 150 subdivisions. Still i am getting good lighting and quality. Also render times are around a minute on 720 X 576. i havent rendered any animation with these settings till now for this project so i want to know wheteher this will give me good results for animation.

How can i improve this image as i see some noise on chairs etc.

 

Please lemme know ur inputs that what settings do i need to take care of while rendering final animation so that there is no noise, flickering etc

 

 

 

 

 

 

thanks

[kippu]

personally i donot feel that the quality and lighting is good enough , there is noise , light leaks and black polys and you are certain to get noise flickers during animation ...but if you feel its good enough then you should go ahead

[Claudio Branch]

 

...render times are around a minute on 720 X 576.

 

 

Decent quality usually comes with a premium price. What kind of quality do you expect from an animation with these kinds of render times?

 

You are going to need to increase your LC sub-d's and save it off first. Then reload the LC, run your IR map every 10th frame and save it. Finally load the IR map and submit your job to your farm.

 

I suggest that you run a brief 5-8 second animation test as a quality check of your GI lighting, material reflections, potential geometry interferences, etc.

 

Animation with decent quality GI lighting takes time. Trying to use the "Easy Button" approach is going to result in your project looking like TRASH.

 

My 2...

[lecameleon]

One of the things that you can do is to render out the passes separately to have a better control on the final animation composite. Since you mention flickering (you had asked me about it earlier too), one thing you should try is to use antialiasing filters that don't sharpen the image too much.. Unless you are looking at some insanely high quality renders you can get away with a little blurring in animated videos.

A lot of people tell me (as you have yourself suggested in one post) that we could render out twice the required size and then bring it to the required size in the comp tool. Yes, this is a pretty good idea.. but the question is... would you really need that much detail.. ??

 

Next.. apart from rendering in passes etc.. you could split out the objects that move in the scene and render out the static objects (say props, backgrounds etc) and then isolate the moving objects and render out those separately.. there are so many options here.. you just need to choose the right one and compromise on some things if time is a big constraint.. (which is usually with you )

 

And, HK, you would need better settings than the ones you have put up there as my other friends here suggested

[chow choppe]

personally i donot feel that the quality and lighting is good enough , there is noise , light leaks and black polys and you are certain to get noise flickers during animation ...but if you feel its good enough then you should go ahead

 

Yeah the quality is not so good in your opinion. That is what wanted to know and that is why i posted it here.i wanted expert comments. This is my first animation that i am doing so i ddint know if an image looks okay in still wheteher it will look good in animation also.

Can u tell me how can i improve the settings to have better Gi , no flickering and less noise. this was the purpose of starting this thread. still unanswered.

 

Thanks

[chow choppe]

Decent quality usually comes with a premium price. What kind of quality do you expect from an animation with these kinds of render times?

 

You are going to need to increase your LC sub-d's and save it off first. Then reload the LC, run your IR map every 10th frame and save it. Finally load the IR map and submit your job to your farm.

 

I suggest that you run a brief 5-8 second animation test as a quality check of your GI lighting, material reflections, potential geometry interferences, etc.

 

Animation with decent quality GI lighting takes time. Trying to use the "Easy Button" approach is going to result in your project looking like TRASH.

 

My 2...

 

Hi Claudio

 

glad to see that somebody has pointed out the mistakes and also told the solutions. i dont mind extra render times But i used these settings usings Brians vray modules for Practical exterior lighting. Have never done animation before so just wanted help from u guys.

 

And bro i know the process of rendering the animation like first saving the LC and rendering nth frame of IR map. I think u r right . i will have to render a 5-8 second animation to see the problems. But i was sure that my settings are not just good enough for animation so needed to know some good settings to start with like maybe 1000 subdivisons for LC and what shud i keep the Hsph subdivisons and interpolation samples to blur the GI?

 

Thanks for the inputs. will upload the test animation soon and will have ur comments and suggestions on that

 

thanks

[chow choppe]

One of the things that you can do is to render out the passes separately to have a better control on the final animation composite. Since you mention flickering (you had asked me about it earlier too), one thing you should try is to use antialiasing filters that don't sharpen the image too much.. Unless you are looking at some insanely high quality renders you can get away with a little blurring in animated videos.

A lot of people tell me (as you have yourself suggested in one post) that we could render out twice the required size and then bring it to the required size in the comp tool. Yes, this is a pretty good idea.. but the question is... would you really need that much detail.. ??

 

Next.. apart from rendering in passes etc.. you could split out the objects that move in the scene and render out the static objects (say props, backgrounds etc) and then isolate the moving objects and render out those separately.. there are so many options here.. you just need to choose the right one and compromise on some things if time is a big constraint.. (which is usually with you )

 

And, HK, you would need better settings than the ones you have put up there as my other friends here suggested

 

 

Hi Kishore

 

i will be using area filter finally for animation.

i dont have time to render at hi res and then compress. Have to deliver this by 20th.lots of work still to be done

 

KT can u suggest some good settings to start with in order to have a better quality for animation

 

Thanks

[lecameleon]

start off doing a primary + secondary = light cache with 2-3000 subdivs and the mode as flythrough... you save that light cache file and reuse it in the next render ("from file" ) .. with primary as IRR map set to medium animation (or if you can afford it.. to High (animation) ).. and use Multiframe incremental to save the irradiance maps.. This should save you a little time.. but there is no easy way out here.. if you need really good flicker free stuff you should use the lightcache for secondary with 3k subdivs and single frame mode.. and with the primary bounce as Brute force with settings of say 20-25..

A very low res setting would be to let light cache handle the glossy rays with a subdiv of around 2000 in flythrough mode.. and an IRR mode of incremental map in medium animation and antialiasing filter set low.. area should work fine.. what you have got now.. then once the renders are done go to your compositing package and add some blur to hide the minor flickering defects.. one good way of doing this the fast and dirty way is to vignette your focus of interest and let people divert their attention to the things that need to be focussed upon and get away with a little blurring on objects which you dont need too detailed..

 

 

*** You could also try the overlapping method in the interpolation samples settings.. mind you, not a very good method.. but quicker..

Edited October 16, 2008 by lecameleon
addenda

[chow choppe]

okay

lemme do some renders with these settings before rendering the animation

Can u come online?

[chow choppe]

The following image took 20 mins to calculate Lc at 2000 subdivisons on single frame mode and IR at medium settings

 

After that image took 2.42 mins to render

 

Please gimme ur commenst on this

 

Thanks

[lecameleon]

Much better.. but 20 minutes.. I am slightly surprised... that is ok I guess... with my four proc rendering rig that would probably seem a long time..

Anyways.. that is a much better render.. the question is.. who are your clients.. are they very choosy-picky abt the final render or can you get away with this? if this meets your requirements and you can go ahead with it, by all means do so.. but here is what you can do.. take a few frames of these and do a small avi loop out of them and see if you see any major defects.. if not, then just do a render and comp the images together into a video with the details slightly blurred.. a nice cheat for a short time..

 

 

Comments abt the image.. >>> the samples need to be increased a bit more.. you can see those dots on the upper concrete railing.. the reflection quality is slightly poor ... glossiness is slightly overdone and one suggestion >> the set pieces with the monitor and all that.. you can avoid those and put them in while compositing.. that laptop monitor I mean..

also, here is another cheat/workaround.. those couches in the scene and other such objects, you can go to object properties and uncheck visible to camera.. which means they are still visible in reflection etc.. then you can probably do a separate render with these objects at much lower settings.. one way of cheating..

[Claudio Branch]

 

i was sure that my settings are not just good enough for animation so needed to know some good settings to start with like maybe 1000 subdivisons for LC and what shud i keep the Hsph subdivisons and interpolation samples to blur the GI?

 

 

The LC sub-d's are divided over the length of the animation, so the longer the sequence, the greater the sub-d needs to be. I would recommend not making the sequence any longer than 15-20 secs anyways (keeps the viewer interested by showing different camera views).

 

I routinely use 1250-1500 for my LC sub-d's, Hsph Sub-d's at 50 and interpolation samples at 20-30.

 

Using the above settings, I recently did an exterior animation with GI/HDRI lighting and lots of V-Ray proxies for my forest of Onyx trees (each tree was around 50K polys). I was using a 720x486 format and seeing render times of about 45 minutes per frame.

 

45 minutes per frame is alot, but there is absolutely NO FLICKER. I am fotunate to have a robust render farm to accomplish the task.

 

When it comes to animation, put Quality before Quantity...

[chow choppe]

oh man 45 minutes is too high

i just have 4 machines for rendering