vray fly through animation with some object animation

[loklomedia]

I'm going to be rendering a fly through interior, and haven't actually rendered out a sequence yet. But.. in reading, I'm worried that the only way to create smooth interior fly throughs is using the method to save irr map to disk, light cache to disk, then rendering the final with these loaded. Is that really the only way? seems slow and clunky to get smooth results (besides brute force/cranked up settings).

I'm getting some blotchiness as it is now, and am playing with some custom irr map settings... slow...

[rant]

I bought v-ray thinking I'd get better results quicker; but that simply isn't the case. Wondering now why I bought it... giving me just as many headaches to stumble through the settings to make something look good as with MR.

[/rant]

Edited June 21, 2011 by loklomedia

[sanmb]

can you upload image ?

[loklomedia]

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

[Devin Johnston]

I'm going to be rendering a fly through interior, and haven't actually rendered out a sequence yet. But.. in reading, I'm worried that the only way to create smooth interior fly throughs is using the method to save irr map to disk, light cache to disk, then rendering the final with these loaded. Is that really the only way? seems slow and clunky to get smooth results (besides brute force/cranked up settings).]

 

Dwayne the only way to successfully render out an animation is to pre render LC & IR maps unless you're using BF in which case this step isn't necessary. The blotchiness your getting is the result of your LC & IR settings not being high enough, but be careful not to crank them too high or your render times will explode. Vray is very fast but only if you know what you're doing, if this is your fist time using it get ready for a steep learning curve.

[loklomedia]

Thanks.

The blotchiness your getting is the result of your LC & IR settings not being high enough

- 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.

Edited June 21, 2011 by loklomedia

[Devin Johnston]

Because you have an object that is moving (the fan) you'll need to use the "Render Prepass" mode in your IR map. This mode renders every frame of your animation out instead of every 10th. In animations where nothing is moving but the camera you can use multiframe incremental and render out every 5th or 10th frame. The more frames of the IR & LC maps you pre render the better your light solution will be. It looks like most of the flickering your seeing is the result of not pre rendering your light maps so by doing that most of your issues will be fixed.

[loklomedia]

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.

Edited June 21, 2011 by loklomedia

[Devin Johnston]

The reason to pre-render light maps is to stop the kind of flickering your getting in the example you provided. It's flickering because each machine on your network is rendering out it's frame just a little different compared to the machines around it. The pre-rendered light map tells each machine how to render and as a result there's no flickering. You have to use different methods of pre-rendering depending on what's in the scene.

[loklomedia]

thanks for that. Seems I read that somewhere...

 

Any comment on my GI settings vs. render time?

[loklomedia]

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.

[Devin Johnston]

Dwayne the render times you mentioned 13-15 minutes per frame sound quite reasonable for an animation. You could switch to scanline but the time it would take to fake the GI and get to the same quality level as Vray would eat up any time savings you might get when rendering. I know it seems unusual for you to have to pre render the LC & IR maps but that's just part of using Vray. Do you have a specific question or are you just blowing off some steam?

[loklomedia]

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...

[Devin Johnston]

Are you rendering this whole animation out on one computer, if you are then you shouldent need to pre render the light maps.

[loklomedia]

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.

[Devin Johnston]

No you can render the IR & LC maps using backburner on those 3 machines.

[loklomedia]

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.

[loklomedia]

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]

the render times you mentioned 13-15 minutes per frame sound quite reasonable for an animation.

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]

[Devin Johnston]

Dwayne Vray is a complex piece of software that has developed over a long period of time and it's really set up with ease of use in mind. I understand your frustration and maybe I can help, check you private messages.

[loklomedia]

thx... did you see PM?

[loklomedia]

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

[salvador]

Dwayne Vray is a complex piece of software that has developed over a long period of time and it's really set up with ease of use in mind. I understand your frustration and maybe I can help, check you private messages.

 

Devin, I definately need the same kind of help. I'm using the same overall pre-calc process but I'm getting 1 hour render frames and they look blotchy. I've been reading a lot but still cannot find some ground rules for interior animation with Vray, and the spot3D.com tuts really don't serve my purpose (although they are well explained).

 

Any chance I could get some help from someone who knows better? Thanks.

[salvador]

Great, great, great!!!

 

Devin, you rock!!!

 

Turned up this way in the end:

 

LC: 1000 subdivs - Screen mode, size 0.02 - use LC for glossies=on - use camera path = on - PRECALC LC ALONE = ~2 min.

 

IRMap: Used previous LC in secondary engine - 25 Hsp - 60 interp. samples - medium animation preset - use camera path=on - sample lookup=density based - the rest to defaults - PRECALAC IRMap ~8.5 hrs (certainly worth the extra 3.5hrs from before)

 

After a single test render, finally a nice and clean image. I must say, and this is important, I added an extra VRay light (sphere) on top of the camera and linked it to this camera as if it was a camera built-in light and for this light only, I turned off "affect specular" and "affect reflections".

Remember everyone to set your shadow subdivs for VRay lights to at least 16.

 

After all, I managed to downgrade my Adaptive DMC values from 1-24 to 1-8 without loosing quality and my render times will turn up ~15min /frame, which is totally acceptable. Like Devin himself said: "Displacement and VRay Fur will explode your rendertimes"; well, don't use them unless it's required and still we all need to make proper adjustments.

 

Thanks a bunch once again for your help. I'll try to post some image results when they come out.

 

Cheers

[arunkumarthonangi]

I am learning 3d visualization.I am very interesting about this new and forms

[samman]

Hi All,

 

I am really glad I came to this thread, I am about to start rendering my first Vray fly through for the exterior of a building and it seems kinda scary as I am supposed to submit the movie next week so I am planning to render through the weekend but as I am reading through this thread it looks like it won't be possible as you guys mentioned that it takes approx. 15 min. per frame and I know that I should use around 25 to 30 frames per second? do you think I should use fewer frames or what? I mainly have one machine and I can get another one. what is the best way for the fastest render?

 

Also, I have something like a metal wire mesh covering a lot of portion of my elevations, so I thought to model the metal wire mesh as it will look realistic and good instead of using opacity map to create the void in the mesh but ofcourse it will add a lot to my model polygons, is it better to skip modelling it or it will not affect the render time?

 

Thanks in advance to the reply.

[salvador]

Hi All,

 

I am really glad I came to this thread, I am about to start rendering my first Vray fly through for the exterior of a building and it seems kinda scary as I am supposed to submit the movie next week so I am planning to render through the weekend but as I am reading through this thread it looks like it won't be possible as you guys mentioned that it takes approx. 15 min. per frame and I know that I should use around 25 to 30 frames per second? do you think I should use fewer frames or what? I mainly have one machine and I can get another one. what is the best way for the fastest render?

 

Also, I have something like a metal wire mesh covering a lot of portion of my elevations, so I thought to model the metal wire mesh as it will look realistic and good instead of using opacity map to create the void in the mesh but ofcourse it will add a lot to my model polygons, is it better to skip modelling it or it will not affect the render time?

 

Thanks in advance to the reply.

 

Definately use maps. The more polygons the longer it'll take, specially for metals (and other materials) that have glossy reflections. You can turn down the render times way low but at the expense of quality. Try to find a good balance.