Rendering animations - what's the current go-to method?

[Richard7666]

Howdy,

I have been focused on stills for the past several years so am a bit rusty when it comes to animation; anyone able to point to a tutorial or method on what's currently best practice for animations?

Cheers

[super gnu]

with vray 5? in most cases, default settings actually work pretty fine. u might want to fiddle with lightcache settings if you get any shimmer (instructions in the tooltips when you hover over LC settings) and you might want to reduce noise thresh/fiddle with AA if its grainy.. (i usually increase min rate to 2, to avoid tiny details flickering)

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hi Richard7666,

As super gnu mentioned, in V-Ray 5 keeping the default settings should suffice. Use the Animation preset (or Subdivs 3000/Retrace 8 ), and you should be good to go. You can have a further read at: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VMAX/Light+Cache+Settings#LightCacheSettings-Avoidingflickeringinanimations

[Richard7666]

awesome, thanks guys! I assume V-ray Next is similar? (I'm not on Vray 5 yet)

[muoto]

I usually (still) use the saved lightcache and irrmap method (every 15-20 frames). I found it globally OK, flicher free, and faster to render than using the vray next/5 animation settings...

[super gnu]

I usually (still) use the saved lightcache and irrmap method (every 15-20 frames). I found it globally OK, flicher free, and faster to render than using the vray next/5 animation settings...

it depends if you are animating the scene or just the camera... i could understand in certain "flythrough" anims imap and lc could still be faster, but in my experience the difference is minimal, and sometimes imap is even slower these days. (i have a conspiracy theory that they are slowing it down each release )

for fully animated scenes you can throw out all the old hacky methods and just run with the current recommendations.

[^Lele^]

As a rule of thumb, i'd say relative memory latency has increased (bandwidth too, and greatly, to be sure.) with many-core machines.
I wouldn't be surprised if those kind of calculations which needed to keep and re-access big structures in memory will have slowed down (IRMap, and LC with animated sequences), particularly compared to those which leverage more agile structures and fire-and-forget approaches (f.e. the LC per-frame, and BF).
Just a general thought, very loosely backed by data, eh.

As much as we'd like to see it gone, however, we have definitely not spent time making IRMap slower.
So far... ^^

[muoto]

Well, even for still images, i still use 99% of the time irrmap/lightcache as it is way faster in my renderings (archviz/product design) for good enough quality, compared to BF (still noisy) + denoiser (that kind of messes up the textures a little)

[Richard7666]

Is it viable to use Progressive and then the standalone Denoiser to 'smooth each frame out'?

In this case, would I just stick to BF+LC, set LC preset to 'animation' and and leave mode on 'single frame'
as I see Vlado mention precalculated lighcaches are deprecated? https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...53#post1075353

[^Lele^]

Correct on the 3d setup, and yes, it is viable to denoise in multiframe.
You may need one more frame to each side of your sequence (say, a frame 0 and a frame length+1), but the multi-frame mode of the denoiser is the only one out there able to actually reconstruct texture and geo detail from the surrounding frames.
Test it first on short sequences to get a handle on its strengths and limitations, but i'm sure you'll find it quite pleasant to work with (remember there is an UI for the standalone denoiser, no need to use command line parameters.)

[marc_mdig]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out best render settings for animations in vray 5 since the last animation I have done was with vray 3 in IR/LC multiframe inccremental and flythrough mode.
What exactly are the default settings in IR?
Then I seem to have an issue with an HDRI in the dome light - if I render I have noise in moving trees and some flickering although I denoise afterward.
If I render without the HDRI in the dome light the scene is fine.
Is it the HDRI or are there any settings I can tweak to fix this issue. (does the texture resolution setting in the domelight have anything to do with it? its on default 512)
Render settings are IR medium/LC 2000 on animation, sample 0,1 raytrace 5

Best regards,
Marc

[piotrus3333]

I’m recently rendering some simple interior tests on gpu with VRay5 in hd res and “good enough” approach (1-2min per frame on one rtx) and to my surprise bf+bf and nvidia denoiser work well.