Rendering Samples

[cgrant3d_cg]

Hello, I am new to Vantage but not new to V Ray. I am trying to find a good setting to render an animation, the typical Quality VS Speed, and on the help docs, they mention Samples, but it doesn't explain what type of sample. Are these samples the same as Lightcache samples??
Like V Ray calculating 1000 samples at the beginning of the animation, and then each frame uses those? or are those samples that the Antialiasing will try to achieve depending on the noise threshold?
I have tested an interior with 800 samples Vs 30, and I didn't notice a major or any difference really; the time per frame was especially faster with 30 frames of course.
Anybody that can explain this or point me where I can read about it?
I am old schooler, so I am OK getting nerdy about V Ray settings.
Thank you.

[glorybound]

I think the denoiser is doing most of the heavy lifting. I have been setting my interiors to ultra and my exteriors to high. I think that takes care of the settings. If you manually change a setting you go into custom.

[suzanne_doherty]

I've learnt that the higher samples are needed for animating things such as objects with non glossy reflections. Otherwise you'll see flickering.

Bobby is right though, the denoiser does a fantastic job. Just look at your renders with the denoiser turned off, and you'll see the difference between 30 and 800 samples.

[cgrant3d_cg]

Thanks for the input. Yes, I understand that the Denoiser is the king in this software. I was wondering because sometimes I need lots of frames as fast as possible. So to me knowing what to adjust to get the most out of my video card would be great.
So I keep reading and as mentioned here those samples are a general value or target so for moving objects ro fine(small)geometry more samples are needed, and for larges flat areas less samples.
Well try an error I guess, thank you.

[npg]

Samples in the render dialog are camera (AA) samples. We also have a noise threshold render setting which works similarly to V-Ray (stops sampling "clean" pixels) but unlike V-Ray we usually don't render until every pixel in the image reaches this noise threshold, instead we just sample until the given sample count is reached and let the denoiser clean up. This is similar to "max. subdivs" for the V-Ray progressive sampler, without having to square the value.

In specific cases you may need to increase samples to get rid of flickering due to excessive noise in the animation. You could render a raw frame and/or add render elements to see what is most noisy. Our light cache is similar to V-Ray's but also different It is progressive and does not reset if only the camera changes. The LC samples are usually enough (in offline mode we force a minimum of 1024) but there may be a rare case where increasing them improves the quality/stability of GI. For complex direct lighting (dozens, hundreds, thousands of sources) you may need to either turn on "reservoir resampling" or increase "light tree" samples to clean up the render.

[cgrant3d_cg]

Great thank you for this information everyone.

[Luma3d]

I usually keep sample at 200 for previs animation and set res at 720p...once I'm ready to run a final I bump samples to 500-800 depending on times and set noise threshold at .005.

[npg]

You could render a raw frame and/or add render elements to see what is most noisy.

Actually, with update 2.1.1 you can see the elements directly in the viewport with the new "view mode" option.

[cgrant3d_cg]

I usually keep sample at 200 for previs animation and set res at 720p...once I'm ready to run a final I bump samples to 500-800 depending on times and set noise threshold at .005.

800 Samples??? what is your final output size and how long it takes for frames??

[suzanne_doherty]

800 Samples??? what is your final output size and how long it takes for frames??

It does seem overkill to me. Surely at that point you'd be best just rendering though RT?

[Luma3d]

Just a range...sometimes I need a little more for interior scenes. I was getting 6 hrs render times on a 3090, but I have a new laptop with 4090 and getting 2hr render times. So not too bad.

[cgrant3d_cg]

Just a range...sometimes I need a little more for interior scenes. I was getting 6 hrs render times on a 3090, but I have a new laptop with 4090 and getting 2hr render times. So not too bad.

2 hours for how many frames?? I was thinking on Animation so it would be great to get 1 frame per second, anything under a minute is good when you have animations with today expectations.

[Luma3d]

I do 30 fps. @ 10 sec. So 300 frames.