AS - beta 2 first test

[jshulters]

Hi team! Very intrigues by the tool so far and very excited about its potential based on the changes already made in beta 2. I had a project recently that required a very quick turn around, and due to bugs on my cloud rendering service I had to render it here on a single workstation. This seems like the perfect application for something like Lavina, so I did a comparison. You can see a direct video comparison at the link below:

https://youtu.be/Bpgj5aO6A3o

For the final deliverables at the time (1 30 second clip & 1 20 second clip), I used vray progressive at 1/100 with Brute Force/Light cache/nVidia denoiser. For the 30 second clip seen above, each off the 900 frames ran for 1.5 minutes, so I let it go overnight for about 22 hours. There's some obvious flickering issues, but it was good enough for this task. Once I updated to a RTX 2080 and downloaded Lavina beta 2, I exported a vrscene file and rendered that way to compare (default settings of 100 samples). Here's my thoughts on the comparison:

PROS
- WAY faster...3 hours compared to 22
- improved animation experience (Scene) made it super simple to export (compared to beta 1 issues we were having with only single frame exported)
- easy to tweak LUT, bloom, DOF, material glossiness to get an acceptable look

CONS
- WAY more flickering than low progressive CPU settings...don't think this quality would have been acceptable in this case
- the glossy floors just aren't getting the right kind of contact shadows that they do in standard rendering...everything feels like it's floating, probably because of the next item...
- anything other than 100% denoiser creates an unacceptable amount of noise that never resolves away (in fact, gets progressively worse)... attached image
- some stronger halo artifacts around various objects
- grey objects had unsupported texture maps (animated or Advanced Wood...not a big deal to replace here)

All this said, I think Lavina will be great for sending pre-render reviews for clients, unless it's just a matter of tweaking settings to get the bigger noise issues to go away (higher samples?)

Thanks...I'll keep checking in with tests on new versions.
John

[s.balabanov]

Hello John,

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback! I am happy you like the new additions. I have some questions regarding your observations.

1. You mention tweaking the material glossiness to get an acceptable look - which materials needed tweaking and in what way?
2. The halo artifacts - my guess would be the bloom on the lights, but please let me know if you mean something else.
3. How many Light Cache samples you used in Lavina? The option is in File/Advanced Scene Settings/Light Cache/Sample limit.
4. For your use case of doing previews of production scenes, do you find the workflow straightforward enough? Would you always create the camera animation in 3ds Max? Is creating a walk/flythrough in Lavina an option? I'd really like to get you feedback on this.

Best regards,
Simeon Balabanov

[vladimir.nedev]

- grey objects had unsupported texture maps (animated or Advanced Wood...not a big deal to replace here)

We don't support the Advanced Wood in V-Ray Standalone as far as I know.
So, this is something that won't work in V-Ray GPU or V-Ray Cloud, so it should be generally avoided.

- the glossy floors just aren't getting the right kind of contact shadows that they do in standard rendering...everything feels like it's floating, probably because of the next item...

That's because the denoiser is blurring the shadows too much. We will have to find ways to improve it in the future.

- anything other than 100% denoiser creates an unacceptable amount of noise that never resolves away (in fact, gets progressively worse)... attached image

The denoiser slider currently (beta 2) works in the following way:
0 - no denoising at all
100 - full denoising irrespective of the number of accumulated AA samples
> 0 and < 100 - based on the number of AA samples accumulated, the final image is a blend between the denoised and raw render.

This behavior has already been changed in our internal builds, but more on that when we release a new build.

The noise should eventually clear, but note that Lavina doesn't yet have adaptive image sampling, like V-Ray.
So even if only a small portion of the image has noise, all of it will keep accumulating samples, so clearing that final bit of noise might be way slower than V-Ray.

- WAY more flickering than low progressive CPU settings...don't think this quality would have been acceptable in this case

If it's possible, can you try lowering the light cache sample size (e.g. to 0.01), and increasing the sample limit (e.g. to 1000) and then rendering again ?

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev