Noise in animation - secondary settings too low?

[paulison]

nice animation. i like the people although some of the walking people look a bit uptight!

im amased at the times for each frame but i think for adaptive subdivisions you could get some time back with like -1/2 or something.

In addition to what everyone else said, i'm wondering if 45 Hsph is enough?. I usually have mine at 70 for stills but not too sure for animations...

by the way, the 3d people library from RocketBox is like $3500...damn!

[rcollett]

http://www.nc3d.com/temp/StationInt_v13_XviD.avi

So here's an update. It's nearly final, but I need to increase the image sampler a tad more. It's an adaptive 1,3 right now. I'm thinking that 1,5 should do it?

Irad Animation Prepass is -4, -2, HSph 50, Interp 60, Clr .15, Nrm .05, dist .6
Irad Animation Rendering Interp Frames 2


This gives me about 40 minute Irad press frame times, and about 3 hour final render times. I have noticed that the Interp Frames setting can add a lot of time to a render. Below are two sets of renders, the top set has a very low image sampler settings, the lower set has fairly high settings. You can see that as I change only the Interp Frames setting, the render times shoot way up (especially on the higher quality version).



At the Chaos party during SIGGRAPH, I remember Vlado saying that increasing the frame blending would increase render times, but I got the impression that the increase would be much less than what I'm seeing. I think he said something like 5-10%? I could be wrong tho. It's still an amazing time savings over all. The above animation had about 3.75 hr frame times and there's basically no noticeable GI flicker. In RC3, I was pushing 10 hr frame times and I still had some noticeable GI flicker.

Now we just need some good updates to the online manual. For example, I still have no idea what the different Path Samplers do. (Legacy, Latin Super Cube, Schlick) And, why do I have to specify the number of threads in the LC (Number of passes), why can't it auto detect how many cores are available on the machine?

Thanks Chaos!

[paulison]

just wondering if you think that maybe changing the interp setting from 25 to 60 has helped smooth things out or it is mostly due to the new interpolation between frames ?

gonna have to get myself a dongle now to try this out :P

BTW adaptive 1/3 is very very high for an animation. I know you want it to be sharp but can you afford these rendering times?. we generally try to tweak the settings to get it under 30 mins a frame otherwise it takes too long. The quality with your settings is starting to look good though IMHO...maybe 30 mins just is being too optimistic?

[vlado]

At the Chaos party during SIGGRAPH, I remember Vlado saying that increasing the frame blending would increase render times, but I got the impression that the increase would be much less than what I'm seeing. I think he said something like 5-10%? I could be wrong tho.

It depends on the scene, I suppose; if you consider that with the interpolation frames set to 3, V-Ray is loading 7 irradiance maps at the same time, it has 7 times more data to process for each shade than with a single frame irradiance map.

Now we just need some good updates to the online manual. For example, I still have no idea what the different Path Samplers do. (Legacy, Latin Super Cube, Schlick)

Mostly, leave the default here. In newer versions, only the Schlick sampler will remain, the others will be removed.

And, why do I have to specify the number of threads in the LC (Number of passes), why can't it auto detect how many cores are available on the machine?

Because, if that were the case and you were rendering an animation on the network on machines with different number of processors, each will produce a different result. This is the exact reason why the concept of light cache passes was introduced. In the beginning, there was no such thing, and light cache maps produced by machines with a different number of processors could be wildly different, even for the exact same scene... not good

Best regards,
Vlado

[rcollett]

It depends on the scene, I suppose; if you consider that with the interpolation frames set to 3, V-Ray is loading 7 irradiance maps at the same time, it has 7 times more data to process for each shade than with a single frame irradiance map.

I have also noticed that if you have larger irradiance maps (more irad points), it takes longer to process the blend. eg., If I render the irad set as -4 -2, I typically get 2.5MB map files. An Irad pass of -4 -1 creates maps about 9.5MB each. Now if I do a final render with each set of irad maps using same interp frames setting, the 9.5MB irad maps add a lot more time to render than the 3.5MB irad maps, about double in my test scene.

Mostly, leave the default here. In newer versions, only the Schlick sampler will remain, the others will be removed.

Ah, so the other samples will be removed in future versions? I had not heard that one yet.

As for using adaptive 1/3 for animations; I pretty much have to use 1 as a minimum, or my thin wires go missing in some buckets, and 3 is actually lower than I want for a high sample. Small parallel lines generate moire patterns even at 3 or 4.

Vlado: Is there any way you could add a Sampler Modifier to the VRay material? For example, say I have my Adaptive set to -1/2 and I make a material and set the Sampler Modifier set to 2, then when it renders anything with that material the sampler works at 1/4. I think that would be really cool!!! (this could also be a VRay Object property)

-Ray

[paulison]

thats an awesome idea. as you said, your wires go missing at lower settings...but the rendertimes of your entire scene is increased enormously just because of the wires.