Vantage render quality decreases after a 100 frames.

[benjamin_mumm]

Hallo everyone,

I'm trying to render a long (4500 frames) preview animation in vantage in 720p with "Render animation via Live Link" of 3ds max 2023, because i have animated vray proxys that don't update the animation when rendered with vantage standalone.

Here I noticed that after round about 75 frames, the render quality degrades an the renders are getting worse and worse. They are getting noisier with more artefacts each frame. Due to this I noticed the frame percentage counter of the "render sequence" popup window of vantage stops at the beginning of the animation at round about 20% for a short time before continueing to count up. Further down the animation the frame percentage counter starts increasing the initial percentage before it stops for a second and then continuing to count up to 100%.

For example at the beginning fo the animation it stops at 20%, at rendered frame 50 it stops at 60% and at renderet frame 100 it stops at 95%

Perhaps this is related to the decreasing quality of the rendered frames?


Is there a solution to a. render animated vray proxys directly in vantage or b. get a optimised live link connection to continuously export frames with the same good quality?


I'm using V-Ray 6 Update 1.1 (6.10.06 build 00001), the latest version of 3dsMax an Chaos Vantage on a Xeon with 64gb Ram and a 4090 founder edition.


Cheers and thanks everyone,

Ben

[benjamin_mumm]

Ok, after a few days of despair I wrote this text above, because I was out of options.

EDIT: I thougth, I had the following solution, but after a restart it was back to the old problem

"BUT NOW, right at this exact moment, it seems that I've figured it out myself. It was the combined denoiser that caused the problem. Once switched to the NVidia Denoiser, everything seems to render fine.

No stopping of the percentage progress bar anymore and consistend renderquality."


It wasn't the solution to my problem. So, anyone any idea?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi Ben,

The denoiser type shouldn't matter because the NVidia AI denoiser is always used when rendering high quality / offline renders. The lagging may be because of a network/HDD issue. The deformable/animated meshes get read, loaded and send each frame to Vantage to render so any hickup during that process could cause the progress bar to stop. Also saving the output images to disk can cause a delay.
Not sure about why the degradation of quality is happening though. Could you share a video or the whole project for us to examine? You can upload your scene to wetransfer / gdrive / dropbox / mega, etc , or use the help center (https://support.chaos.com/).

Best regards,
Alexander

[benjamin_mumm]

Hey Alexander,

thank ypu very much for your response. I'm very sorry, but I can't send you the project files because it's corporate work and I don't have the permission but I'll try to send you a video of the problem. In the next few days I'll try a fresh clean installation of windows 10 pro, 3dsMax an Vantage to exclude all possible issues regarding the os.

[npg]

Does the issue occur with Vantage 1.8.4? ("Show all versions" on the download page)

[benjamin_mumm]

Does the issue occur with Vantage 1.8.4? ("Show all versions" on the download page)

Yes, I had this issue with the Versions before. My hope was that the 1.8.5 would solve my issues. But it sems that with the 1.8.5 Version I have a new issue that locs the max FPS of Vantage to the refresh rate of my monitors when not in fullscreen. Therefore the usage of the 4090 is, when not in fullscreen, only 32%

[npg]

If the FPS is never higher than the monitor refresh rate (e.g. 60hz) it's most likely due to V-Sync. You'll have to disable V-Sync from the Nvidia control panel - either globally or just for vantage.exe

[benjamin_mumm]

npg Thank yout for your help. It was indeed the V-Sync option.

I've done a full clean reinstall of windows, 3ds max, vray and vantage but the problem stays the same.

I've narrowed the problem down to 3ds max submitting the changes of the animated vray proxy to vantage, and vantage starting the rendering bevore the updatet scene is fully loaded.

If i disable all the animated vray proxys, vantage functions fine as it should.

With enabled animated proxys, vantage starts rendering the next frame, before 3ds max fully submitted the changes of the scene. I can watch vantage starts rendering a frame, then after a few seconds the perspective changes due to camera movement an the animated proxys update. Vantage in this time keeps rendering the frame.

Over a long period of time, the point vantage gets the changes of the scene, is drifting towards the end of the samples limit.

This, in my oppinion is the cause of the degrading quality of the frames.


Is there a option to tell vantage to wait a few seconds befor it starts rendering the new frame, to let 3ds max finish submitting the changes of the scene?

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi benjamin_mumm,

I have logged the issue in our system and we will try to fix it in future builds.

Best regards,
Alexander

[benjamin_mumm]

Alexander.Atanasov thank you very much.

I hope it gets fixed in a future release.

Best regards,
Ben

[benjamin_mumm]

npg Alexander.Atanasov

It seems that I’ve further narrowed it down. If I scrub through the 3Ds Max timeline, before rendering a animation, frame by frame till I reach the loop point of the animated proxy’s, while live link is enabled and running, it seems that the Proxy’s are stored in a cache or something.

Therefore it would be great if you could implement a sort of animation cache in either vantage or vray and / or preload the whole animated proxy sequence in sort of a ram cache?

Or better, get animated proxys running in vantage stand-alone?

[vladimir.nedev]

It seems that I’ve further narrowed it down. If I scrub through the 3Ds Max timeline, before rendering a animation, frame by frame till I reach the loop point of the animated proxy’s, while live link is enabled and running, it seems that the Proxy’s are stored in a cache or something.

Instead of preloading your proxies like this, you can try setting their Preview mode to "Point".
I think in this mode, there is practically no 3dsMax viewport update for animated proxies.

Or better, get animated proxys running in vantage stand-alone?

This is already implemented for a future major release.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[benjamin_mumm]

vladimir.nedev thank you very much for your reply.

Instead of preloading your proxies like this, you can try setting their Preview mode to "Point".
I think in this mode, there is practically no 3dsMax viewport update for animated proxies.

Unfortunately this didn’t solve the problem.

This is already implemented for a future major release.

This is awesome. Can’t wait to get my hands on the new major release.

cheers,

Ben