animation - some good and some bad frames

[s_gru]

hi. using 2 4080 cards with 531.41 drivers. using latest version of Vantage & V-ray. 3ds max 2022. see attached images. the vast majority of my 2000 frame animation in vantage is OK. but maybe 5-10% give weird things like this.

it occurred to me that i might still have Nvidia Upscale on in the denoise render element in the 3ds max scene, which is exported with animation to .vrscene file then opened in vantage and rendered.

could anything in 3ds max like motion blur setttings or render elements affect what happens in vantage?
anything else i should look at?

thanks,

[s_gru]

Addition info:

Not using Light Cache

denoiser Spatial fitler strength 0.5
checked-temporal denoising
checked-spatial denoising spatial iteration 5
checked-temporal AA

in the lights i had 12 lights tree samples
i was doing 1000 samples
i had motion blur checked on in the render setup

[vladimir.nedev]

I am not sure, but to me it looks like an issue with the motion blur, so maybe render without it next time.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[s_gru]

yeah i'll try that. so that 2nd screen shot with the blur circle, wow that actually looks really cool played in the animation like some time distortion thing ha!

[s_gru]

that seems to have done the trick. i even notice it in "preview" mode. sometimes i will switch camera views and get a weird back&fourth shakey preview. as soon as i un-check motion blur it's gone. my current 40 frames of rendering seem to be artifact free. 2000 to go

[s_gru]

i rendered out an anim last night 18hrs and about 5 of the 9 cameras had issues including the same distortion bubble i showed above. i was careful to turn off motion blur in the 3ds max scene on the cams and in vantage. when i scrolled through the vantage animation and would lland on a frame that had issues, it would render in my vantage frame buffer ok. but if i hit render starting a few frames before, it would show up again. hm. this really is a bummer.

do my 2 cards have to be sli'd or nvlinked?
should i try 1 card?
can't think of anything else besides denoiser what would i look at there? using nvidia right now.

edit: you know what grabbed my attention is that the boxes are different on the cards. ones says gamming trio X and the other just gamming trio. according to msi afterburner, the bios is different on each card.

[vladimir.nedev]

do my 2 cards have to be sli'd or nvlinked?

It can add extra performance, but it is not a requirement.

should i try 1 card?

Yes, please, you could try just a short sequence, since you says it's reproducible.

If it's not motion blur that's causing this, then it must be a denoiser issue.
Once we know whether it's a multi GPU issue or not, we would need the scene for examination.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[s_gru]

OK. Something new.

i launched the render from within 3ds max using the render animation in vantage. i got a pop-up that gave me some settings. i turned off motion blur, set from 0-180 double-checked file save location & file type then hit render. so far so good, no issues at all. i also turned off (ugh not Final Gather, but whatever it's called... light cache!). i noticed passes were at 1200.

now, in my max scene, i have nvidia vray noise reduction, but i have that set to upscale mode. so i'm not sure if that has any affect? i do have the desired output dimensions 1080p. i'm getting about 36s / frame. i rendered a 210f animation directly in v-ray in max, this afternoon, and that turned out AOK too but slower ish. i got about 1m per frame and now i'm getting 36-40s/frame.

ok. i have 129 of 181 frames rendered, and all seem to be good.

i'm assuming all the other settings in vantage are set to the defaults i had setup earlier. so spatial NR and temporal NR and all that are checked in the advanced settings...

when i ran into the issues, i was using a vrscene file, now rendering from within 3ds max. OH i clicked on the button that says "GET SETTINGS FROM 3DS Max" whatever those settings are exactly?

when this one is done in 20mins i'm going to kick-off another animation a longer one 10 seconds from within max.

finally, both my GPUs are pretty much pegged at 100% (not like the up/down via the 3ds Max v-ray render - which was discussed in another post of mine).

[npg]

Back to you original post - render settings are not inherited from 3ds Max, they are not read from the vrscene file. Such settings are only stored in .vantage files.

The denoiser settings you mentioned like "Spatial fitler strength" etc. are for "Vantage denoiser" which is only available in interactive mode. In offline mode you're using the AI denoiser and it does not have any settings.

The blurry spot is caused by the AI denoiser, we've seen it before. If repeating the render for this exact frame does not reproduce it, but starting one or more frames before that does reproduce it, it means the bug is caused by the temporal mode of the denoiser ("reduce flickering"). It's either a bug in the denoiser itself or something is wrong with our motion vectors. If this blurry frame is 100% reproducible we could look at an EXR version of it where we would see the motion vectors.

The artifacts in the classroom scene seem to come from the motion blur. It's a limited realtime algorithm which does not work well for final rendering and I think it was a mistake to enable it for final, but someone requested it. Now we have to explain again and again that we don't have raytraced motion blur and this one is not well suited for final renders...

[s_gru]

thanks nikola. ok interactive mode is what i see on my screen when i do a live-link or "the tree" when vantage first opens. good to know what to call that - and that's distinct from rendering. i will play around with it more, but it seems like that kind of ended up sucking for you guy to have to run into this issue all the time. it is what it is i guess.

well hey, i finished the "render animation in vantage" (aka live-link animation from 3ds max) and it rendered out with no anomalies. i kicked off a 3rd animation after that and it also rendered w/o issue. working on a 4th one right now it's looking good too.

finally, i was going to ask - after reading some other posts, is it "preferable" to use the "render animation in vantage" as compared to saving a .vrscene file? or doesn't it matter/it's all basically the same thing?


EDIT: i will try the vantage file with 1 card late today and post my results.

[npg]

Some features only work when rendered over live link and don't work when loading a vrscene file. Such as deformable meshes.

[s_gru]

ok just quick update. i was going to start looking at these settings (see attached) but the top most one about temporal denoising didn't make a difference and with it or without it, it worked just fine.

so i switched moblur back on and sure enough started getting artifacts again. so it's just the moblur that is causing this as far as i can see. left both cards "on". as soon as moblur is off, it cleans up with no artifacts. oh and this is with the VRSCENE file. i wonder if somehow i overwrote the moblur when rendering vs setting it off within vantage. for these last tests today, i made sure it was un-checked in the render settings when you click on the render teapot down by the right side of the animation area.

it is a bummer but it's probably just a development/future development thing. i do like moblur and having the 4080's is helping cut those overall render times down with moblur enabled with 3ds Max GPU rendering. thanks for your attention to this and eek i saw a quite a few other posts similar!