House animation

[jujubee]

And sharpening filter would add a lot to rendering time. Also, you could take down the hspsh subs down to 50 and interp down to 20, and remove density basedfor sample lookup. All this wouldve chopped down times a lot.

But ultimately, I think its nice lighting and model, but I have to agree with others that the compression is hurting your animation here.

[dbibb]

I Know there are lots of ways to achieve a good result, so take these suggestions with a grain of salt:
-Uncheck "Use DMC Sampler Threshhold" Leave the Clr threshhold at the default .01
-Use the medium irradiance map preset. Set to multiframe incremental. Render every ten frames or so, depending on the speed of your camera. (You could get away with less in this shot)
-I don't imagine a fly-through LC should take longer than 20-30 minutes for your 870 frames with the amount of motion in your clip. How long did it take?
-Lower your noise threshold. .02 at the highest, .002 for better quality
-Raise your dynamic memory limit. If you have 4 gigs of ram set it to 3200. 2 gigs, 1200
-Make sure only one computer is rendering the Irradiance map frames, and it does so uninterrupted.

Anyway, just some ideas. Use whatever works best for you.
Anyone else do things differently?

[glorybound]

animation

I have 8 gig so I am assuming 6400 for the dml. What about resolution? I did the pre-calcs at 1/2 my final.

[glorybound]

remove density basedfor sample lookup. All this wouldve chopped down times a lot.

What should I set this to?

[glorybound]

Light Cache

What would a good light cache sample size be? And I take it I don't have to do a LC for every frame so I render a single frame.

[glorybound]

LC

just did a light cache, single frame fly through, and it took 6 minutes. I guess I mis-understood the on-line tut when it said make sure you have the total animation duration set. I was doing a light cache on all the frames .

On to the IRR.., which I am doing every 15th frame at a higher resolution. I'll report back in the morning.

[jujubee]

Well - removing density based - just switch over the one right above it - fast i think.

As for LC samples you could probably get away with 1500 subs on that dolly.

[Joost Ink]

also, for this kind of scene i would not use the world scale for lc, but the default screen. this would save you a lot of time probably.

[sv]

yes good advise - the only thing i'd add would be that a sample size of 2 for your light cache might cause problems in screen mode - I'd use the default of 0.02, screen mode and set to flythrough. Set both engines to Light Cache, Render every 1 frame, so that it's sampled on every frame, then bake your Irradiance GI at a much lower frame rate - as bob-cat says about 6 times, so that's what, about every 120 frames or selected frames.

I actually don't think that Hemispherical subdivisions add that much to the render times, i normally just stick them to about 80 and use medium presets - i don't think it adds that much but i mostly do interiors and you can notice it more here - your problem is more about the way you've calculated the GI - every 10th frame is loads....this should save you bucket loads of time.

[glorybound]

Animation

Just to clarify... you would suggest rendering all frame for LC? If I do a light cache for all 870 frames then we are talking 12hrs.

[dbibb]

Yep. Set to fly-through and for your whole time segment. It won't actually create a LC for each frame, but one LC that has points for each part of your scene that is visible. If you watch the LC, it will look all blurry.

[dbibb]

Just saw your edit:
Set your time segment for 1-870
Every nth frame should be 1
Set the LC to fly-through

This will create only one LC, but it will be valid for every point that the camera travels through. As others have suggested, you could probably get away with setting it to "screen" at .02

edit: don't follow this advise. See below.

[glorybound]

LC

So.... I have active Time Segments 0 to 870 and it is rendering every frame. The rendering process is currently 1 of 872 with hrs remaining.

[glorybound]

LC

Yep that is what I have, but it is rendering every frame, one file thought. The initial blurred VFB isn't changing from the initial pass.

[dbibb]

Sounds right. Don't worry about the "1 of 872." It'll just do the one frame.