I need animation help!!!

[BBullo]

I'm trying to animate my first scene in Vray. Although I've been doing still image with Vray for a while now, I'm finding the animation workflow to be a different animal.

I need help optimizing my scene/workflow for the animation.

I've been through the help manual tutorial, but it seems to pass over some of the details.

2 major problems, lighting in the scene is looking over lit and blown out with splotches, and the frames are taking 30 mins a peice at 720x480. I need to get them down around 2- 5 min / frame.

here is an example if what I'm talking about
Single frame rendered without loading a saved map



an example of the image reandered with the saved map


I can only assume that the splotches are comming from one of the saved maps, but wich one? I'm only using the saved IRR map with no secondary bounce since the 2nd bounced light sould already be stored, but if the LC was a bad solution would it carry this over into the IRR map?

Some information about the scene:
All Vray mats
All lab equip is proxied (scene poly count is around 6500)
all glossies are turned off


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qustions about optimizing the animation.....

(A)-should I turn off reflections for the LC and IRR map calculations, and only turn them on durring the final pass? If I can get away with this it seems like it would speed up map cal times significantly.

(B)-Does the size of the saved IRR map effect final frame time performance. My saved map is around 300 Megs. I read somewhere that Natty likes to keep his under 100 Meg. I don't know why mine is so high. I have 750 frames with med-anim preset, 20 HSP subd. Set to render every 8th frame. Its a slow moving camera, is this telling me that I need to space out my Nth frames more?
Does any one have a feel for what one could expect reasonable calc times to be for the IRR map like this?(dual 265 opterons 4 Gig Ram) This took my machine 16 hrs to calc. this seemed high to me.

(C) is it faster to use render in bucket mode while creating the save IRR Map?

(D) Is there an advantage to using Backburnrer to render out frames over just using the frame buffer window?

(E) Wouls a scene like this one be better calculated using screen mode over world? this part of the process took 30 mins in world mode.

thanks for your help

[trick]

First the most important question: during map calculation, do you have Irr.map set to Incremental Add and Lightcache to Flythrough mode ??

[BBullo]

I used Multiframe incrimental, thinking that it would be easier on my ram. ?????
And I have LC set to fly through.
When render out just the LC to check lighting solution, with no filtering it looks pretty good. good lighting and proper shadows.
its looking more and more like the IRR map might be the issue.

[BBullo]

Can I render reflectoins ONLY durring the final pass and have them turn out right?

[BBullo]

Here is an example of the presaved LC redered with filter set to NONE.
It looks pretty good overall. the shadows and lighting seem to be without artifacts.

[trick]

Seems Irr+LC settings are OK. How did you set up your lights: save with Irr.map ?

About reflections: all polygons that are seen by reflections must be sampled by Irr+LC to have correct lighting in these reflections. Normally if you don't render the final pass during map calculations this does not add that much time. If you have blurred glossy reflections (from LC) you can sometimes get away with this, but mostly leave reflections on during map calculation: it should not add more then 1 hour to the 16 you have now.

[BBullo]

No I don't have them stored with IRR map right now.
What do you think about the 16 hour render time for IRR map calc @ 300 megs? this seems high to me.

[natty]

hi ... the key to quick renders for animations is to have few lights ... you could probably use just one vray light here.. it would really be the only way to get those render times down to a good amount.

[BBullo]

With that in mind how would you go about lighting a scene like this?
Right now I have one big plane light in front of the window with small planes at each aisle. I guess I could use a white plane in the aisle with a receive GI set very high, but I don't think the single light in the window would do it for the scene.

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Also, when dialing in a saved IRR map is it a good idea to use incremental add starting with the lowest settings possible, and "adding" a higher setting map to the previous map saved?
Or would you be better off resetting the IRR map before each recalculation if you are seeing too much noise?

[trick]

For these kind of scenes I normally have these settings:

- Irr. map: high, HSP Subdiv 70/50, multiframe incremental
- LC: 1500/2500, 0.02/0.01, flythrough, screen
- VRayLights, onesided, store with Irr.map, subdivs 8-48 (depending on size: if you have one big area light in front of the windows set it to 48 subdivs). If you have spotlight lights you can choose to render without storing to irr.map but keep in mind this will slow things down.

When having a 750 frame scene it depends on the camera speed and the details how you have to set your frame distance. Mostly it is somewhere between 5 and 10, but you can also set up a "sample camera" that moves through the scene to sample all visible polygons. If you have enough time set it to 5, otherwise render some frames like 100,110 and 120 to see if there are problems. Afterwards you can always incremental add samples by rendering a frame between...

EDIT: I just noticed another thing. If ceiling lights only light the scene with VRayLightMTL and probably with a high (3-10) illumination value, this will certainly slow down the rendering. You can better set this value to 1-2 and place some long VRaylights (Store with Irr): it generally render faster, both in calculating the maps and final rendering.