Animation with Light Map

[Metin_7]

Hi guys,

Has anyone done any tests yet using the light map with animation? I have to render an animation with moving objects with VRay. I'd love to use the lightmap only, for primary and secondary GI, because that's a lot faster than using the irradiance map for primary GI.

But I'd love to know what the best settings are for achieving flicker-free animation with moving objects. If that's impossible using light map only, then I'd love to know what are the best irradiance map settings (or maybe photon map?).

Thanks very much in advance!

Metin

[GALACTUS]

I spent about an hour fiddling with a scene using lightmaps i got mixed results and due to time constraints went back to good old irrad with calculating every frame as i render. In world scale the filtering appeared to have an effect on the final render when i switched from nearest to fixed my renders turned out darker, will probably get to experiment in a couple of weeks. I believe Natty has had a play with it but if i remember correctly his scene did not have any moving objects. heres the link

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...ighlight=natty

Colin

ps if you come across any tips let me know please, i think lightmaps could be of great help to animation renders.

[Metin_7]

Thanks very much for your feedback, Colin. I'll check out Natty's topic about this. I'll let you know if I know more, please do the same, so we can share our knowledge on this front in this topic.

Cheers,

Metin

[tammo]

i did some experiments with LM and moving objects.
could not get it flicker free.

[Metin_7]

Me neither. Vlado...? Please help us out here.

[TishoChaos]

Hi !

Here is a small animation rendered with Lightmap for 1st and 2nd GI. There is no flickering in it. The settings are 500 lightmap subdivs and Fixed filter with 0.5 size.

[Metin_7]

Looks promising, but how can you get this result with such low settings? Or is that maybe the trick? Having so few lightmap samples that all differences are blurred out?

I'm still eager to know what the perfect values are for QMC for secondary GI. For example the old QMC GI values were much lower than the current 50 subdivisions.

Cheers,

Metin

[TishoChaos]

You can always increase the lightmap samples to 1000 or 2000 to increase detail and get no flickering again.

About QMC - you can use 8 subdivs for test renderings and 50 or if you like more for final images.

[Metin_7]

Thanks Tisho! How come in VRay 1.09 QMC was something like 1, 3 and now it's values like 50?

Cheers,

Metin

[GALACTUS]

Hi TishoChaos did you calculate every frame as you rendered your animation(single frame) or did you use the Flythrough method for it. i am asking because for interiors where you may have doors,walls or any type of structure moving it could be problematic(i hope it is not the case) as i find internal compositing a lot more fiddly than externals.
Also where scene scale and filter types are there any issues, or can they be used with each other .

Colin

[TishoChaos]

Metin_7: as we said many time before - there are substantial differences in the QMC between 10903 and 146 vers.

GALACTUS: I calculated the lightmap on every frame - it is fast enough for this particular small scene.

[GALACTUS]

TishoChaos, when i render my scene with the window glass set to cast and recieve shadows i get "material returned overbright or invalid color" and then it says no lightmap samples and renders black.

When i switch the objects properties to no shadows cast it works fine, is this normal?

[Metin_7]

Metin_7: as we said many time before - there are substantial differences in the QMC between 10903 and 146 vers.

I've indeed read that somewhere, but I also remember that Vlado mentioned that he would correct the differences in one of the newer beta versions. Now that could have meant that he would adjust the QMC engine to the values or vice versa.

Cheers,

Metin

[TishoChaos]

Galactus, do you have output maps on any of your materials?

[GALACTUS]

Tisho yep i think i do, i will go through the materials. I do know i have some standard mats with self illumination falloff mats under a vraywrapper material. Its strange i managed to render out a test with some frames and it seemed fine, however i have my samples at 500 and when i increase or decrease my samples sometimes i get the "overbright" error message and sometimes i dont. The animation though was smooth no flickering what so ever though it needs more detail which is why i wanted to increase the samples. Also need to optimize my settings as the render itself takes about 1hr where as the lightmap takes about 5 to 10 mins.

Regards

Colin