Reverse advise on animation, need some help!

[salvador]

Hello,

 

Regularly, people come here to ask for help to get goo quality on thier renders. Well, this time I already got it, but my render times resulted inacceptable.

I did a 5sec. animation of a house interior at 720x480 NTSC with Max+VRay. My frames averaged 78min each, which means the machine went on for an entire week around the clock.

I struggled a lot to get this quality but I suspect I might have brought a cannon to shot a fly. What can you guys tell me about it?

 

Video:

 

Settings attached. Thanks to all.

[dmv79]

Checking the vray log usually helps. Look for warnings and get rid of them. Your noise threshold could, in my opinion, be a bit higher... I saw light cache "from file" but on secondary bounces you got "none". Is that really it? If using light cache and the settings there are what you calculated with, it's too low. In short, again in my opinion, you got too high AA and low GI settings (the GI seems a bit strange/messy...). Hope it helps

[Devin Johnston]

Is your computer fast or slow, for a single processor machine that's average I'd say those frame times are pretty normal.

[John Dollus]

Your image sampler is working too hard. Do you have a lot of glossy surfaces in your image? Glass? Translucent objects?

Lights set to store w/irradiance map?

[salvador]

I first precalculated LC. Then used it to precalculate IRRMap. Then turned it off for rendering.

 

Thanks for the reply.

[salvador]

Is your computer fast or slow, for a single processor machine that's average I'd say those frame times are pretty normal.

 

i7

Nvidia FX580

8GB DDR

Win 7 pro x64

 

Ouch! I was hpoing none would say it! Animation is a rather new thing for me; thus, I'm not an expert (yet)

Thanks for the reply.

[Devin Johnston]

You may be able to shave a few minutes off your time by adjusting various settings but doing a high quality animation is just going to take time especially on an average machine without a render farm.

[salvador]

Your image sampler is working too hard. Do you have a lot of glossy surfaces in your image? Glass? Translucent objects?

Lights set to store w/irradiance map?

 

Glossies are IMO, the hardcore topic. There are several in it (check the video). Lights are never stored with IRRMap for interiors. I had bad experiences with this.

 

I wanted a flicker free animation. Adaptive Subivision helped a lot with this. But maybe I can boost the GI some more to take down AA a bit like daniel macedo suggested.

 

The IRRMap was like that to aviod splotches in some corners, but that shouldn't make a difference in final render times, should it?

 

Thanks for the reply!

[dmv79]

You're right, it makes no difference in final render times. I only mentioned it because I saw some artifacts in it. Always glad to help (even though sometimes I don't ). And yes, I do give my computers a massage when I see an animation with complex materials (refractive glossiness, transluscency, etc) coming up. Cheers

[John Dollus]

well, storing the light illumination in the IR map will take longer to generate the IR map but save you on the render time. For stills, it's not adviseable but for animation, you could really benefit from it since you are precalculating everything (as you should).

to speed things up, run diagnostics on you scene to optimize your image sampler and take a closer look at your light samples and material sampling.

http://interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray_dmc_sampler/demistyfing_dmc.html

[Nic H]

frames (720 x 486) like that on an i7 should only take around 10-15 mins AT MOST with a pre-calculated indirect illumination i would say.

 

firstly i wouldn't use adaptive sub d - this is better on large smooth uniform surfaces - not the complex glossy reflective materials you have.

 

try adaptive DMC and try something like 1/6 0.007 Clr threshold...you also have a super low noise threshold in your DMC sampler settings 0.003! put that back to 0.01 and .85 adaptive and control the noise via the clr threshold setting. that is whats holding up your renders

 

while you are there i would fix your imap settings - they are strange...far too blurry on teh interp setting - flip those around to somethign liek 80/30 and i doubt you need 0 as a max value. spread the samples from -1/-6 to undersample large areas and get them smooth while retaining the detail.

 

also enable use light cache for glossy rays - this will significantly speed your times up.

 

i bet you can get it down to very quick using these ^ maybe even so you can enable motion blur which would be nice.

[salvador]

well, storing the light illumination in the IR map will take longer to generate the IR map but save you on the render time. For stills, it's not adviseable but for animation, you could really benefit from it since you are precalculating everything (as you should).

to speed things up, run diagnostics on you scene to optimize your image sampler and take a closer look at your light samples and material sampling.

http://interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray_dmc_sampler/demistyfing_dmc.html

 

Thanks a lot John. I'll certainly look into it.

[Tommy L]

Post your DMC globals settings.

Check your lights and materials. Chances are you have materials with the sample settings for glossies set too high. You can test this by turning off glossies globally and rendering a frame.

Possible your shadow samples are set high in your vray light settings.

Pre-cache lights in the IRR map.

78 mins for a 720 render is pretty huge for animation. You could use area filter and drop your AA a notch, but the 78 min gives me a feeling its a material or light setting problem.

[salvador]

frames (720 x 486) like that on an i7 should only take around 10-15 mins AT MOST with a pre-calculated indirect illumination i would say.

 

firstly i wouldn't use adaptive sub d - this is better on large smooth uniform surfaces - not the complex glossy reflective materials you have.

 

try adaptive DMC and try something like 1/6 0.007 Clr threshold...you also have a super low noise threshold in your DMC sampler settings 0.003! put that back to 0.01 and .85 adaptive and control the noise via the clr threshold setting. that is whats holding up your renders

 

while you are there i would fix your imap settings - they are strange...far too blurry on teh interp setting - flip those around to somethign liek 80/30 and i doubt you need 0 as a max value. spread the samples from -1/-6 to undersample large areas and get them smooth while retaining the detail.

 

also enable use light cache for glossy rays - this will significantly speed your times up.

 

i bet you can get it down to very quick using these ^ maybe even so you can enable motion blur which would be nice.

 

Thanks for the reply nicnic; I'try that ! I think I'll leave the IRRmap as it is for this one because it's already there and try your approach for the next one. Very helpful

[salvador]

Post your DMC globals settings.

Check your lights and materials. Chances are you have materials with the sample settings for glossies set too high. You can test this by turning off glossies globally and rendering a frame.

Possible your shadow samples are set high in your vray light settings.

Pre-cache lights in the IRR map.

78 mins for a 720 render is pretty huge for animation. You could use area filter and drop your AA a notch, but the 78 min gives me a feeling its a material or light setting problem.

 

Thanks for the reply Tom; I'll check those ones. The frigo has a low glossy value this usually leads me to glossy flickering or long rendertimes if I want it smooth; I guess I'll just have to fix that!

[Umesh Raut]

I am not adding anything special, almost everything has been covered in all the previous posts. Especially nicnic and Tommy L (thanks guys). Generally, for animations it is better to check few random frames' render times before that whole week episode and tweak at that level like AA n glossies, light baking with progressive add-up as the camera/frames advance, etc. If you happen to get Brian's (3DATS) or Chris Nichols' (there are still many more, just these two come to mind right away) tips and/or tutorials on vray, just try to check those for real pro stuff. Also, motion blur adds some degree of realism in to moving pictures and helps reduce or take away the flicker to a great extent. And I am sure you have rendered frames in stead of whole animation.

And last, the render looks great, congratulations on that.

Edited August 12, 2012 by umeshraut

[salvador]

I am not adding anything special, almost everything has been covered in all the previous posts. Especially nicnic and Tommy L (thanks guys). Generally, for animations it is better to check few random frames' render times before that whole week episode and tweak at that level like AA n glossies, light baking with progressive add-up as the camera/frames advance, etc. If you happen to get Brian's (3DATS) or Chris Nichols' (there are still many more, just these two come to mind right away) tips and/or tutorials on vray, just try to check those for real pro stuff. Also, motion blur adds some degree of realism in to moving pictures and helps reduce or take away the flicker to a great extent. And I am sure you have rendered frames in stead of whole animation.

And last, the render looks great, congratulations on that.

 

Thanks ! I had to put off this project, but I'll be taking over it soon. I'll keep positng.