Recommended approach to 5mil + poly walkthrough.

[re:FORM]

Hi there,
I just wanted to see if anyone had any suggestions for a good approach to rendering a stupidly high poly walkthrough animation.

Its the chinese style garden that I posted on the image uploads forum ('onyx to the max').

Loads of plants, polys, and proxies. Vray sun/sky. Translucency for the water. Displacement for the rocks. Basically every memory hungry thing I could manage

So, the scene is already broken down into proxy objects, but its so large it only renders on x64 due to the memory requirements.

Sampler : Adaptice QMC 1/100
rQMC : Amount = 1. Noise Thres = 0.01 . Min samples = 8
GI = IR / qmc
IR = Medium animation preset
Detail enhancement = World, 0.01m (is 1cm sensible, or should this be more like 10cm) Subdivs mult = 0.3

I read somewhere for scenes with loads of leaves, you should forget about using LC and use IR/qMC instead.
What other render settings might speed things up without adding flickering or artifacts?

Any recommendations for IR settings? I've not tried enhanced detail, so I don't know if it would be recommended for this kind of scene.

Thanks for you advice !

[Neilg]

Ive never used above 1/10 for the QMC sampler on an ani, and its usually on 1/4 if we dont have complex materials on the trees/plants.

Detail enhancement would butcher your rendertimes.

Ir - medium - 40/30 works well, are you able to pre-calc it?

[Clifton Santiago]

A few months ago I had a similar situation with a hi-poly scene that would only render on my 4 gig RAM XP64 workstations. I used medium IR/LC (1000, .02, screen) with LC for glossies. I got my frame times down to about 10 minutes (on dual 280 opterons).

I almost got the whole animation (4 sequences, 30 seconds each) rendered in-house, but I accidentally wrote over a .vrmap and screwed up an entire sequence.

So I had to take it to a render farm, only to discover that all commercial render farms I could find were only 32-bit operations. I ended up having to "dumb-down" the scene enough to get it within 32-bit memory limits.

Fortunately, both render farms I have used have now upgraded at least partially to XP64 dual opteron nodes, so hopefully this won't be an issue in the future.

[re:FORM]

Hi clifton,
I take it your 10minute render times are for PAL resolution renders not including IR calculations?
Did you have any displacement and/or glossies?

I have alot of vegetation in the scene (I lie, it is all vegetation!) and I've heard that LC is a bad choice for this kind of scene.

At the moment, I'm tempted to dum this scene down so that it runs on 32bit so I can use the rest of my machines in the office to help on the rendering.

Also, I though using LC for glossies in animation led to a risk of serious flickering? I assume you didnt have this problem?

I'd be interested to hear more about your config, ie render size, sampling, glossy settings, displacement settings, etc.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[re:FORM]

Are there any of the system settings I can change to reduce memory requirements?

Max tree = 50
min leaf = 2m
face/level = 6
(Im using static memory given that I've got most mesh's as proxies.)

[Clifton Santiago]

My frame size was 1024x576 (16:9), 25 fps. It was for an interactive DVD presentation/leave behind for an architectural design competition. I assumed the jury would be viewing it on their laptops and I just think standard PAL size is a bit too low res now for computer monitors.

No, LC for glossies prevents flickering. I think you're thinking of "use interpolation" in the material settings. I used to use interpolation, but I am having more demand for animations, so I've found LC for glossies is the best option. And its signifantly faster than just using brute force (e.g., no interpolation).

The drawback is you have to use the LC at rendertime because it is storing the glossy reflections info. Which means more memory consumption.

See what Vlado says about this here (last question on this page):
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R...ials_imap2.htm

Q: I must make an animation with a spray which you can see in the image upload, and I have many glossy reflect and refract, if I follow your tut how can I make my final setup? With lightcache for second bounce and Use light cache for glossy rays or without light cache and none for the second bounce? Does Use light cache for glossy rays and irmap in first bounce work fine?

A: You can have the light cache saved with the irradiance map. If done so, you can actually just turn off secondary bounces which will save memory as you wont have to load the light cache. However, if you have the light cache help precompute the glossies with the Use light cache for glossy rays option, then you'll need to go ahead and load the light cache when rendering

I didn't experiment with Max tree, min leaf, face level stuff for memory issues. I just streamlined the model, primarily by deleting the several hundred 3d people. I also reduced the amount of glossy reflections (I tend to add at least some glossy to almost every material) so the LC (.vrlmap) would be smaller, so it would use less memory.

Is this animation of the garden the same as you've posted previously? I'd like to see it when you're finished.

Are you in UK? There is an excellent and affordable render farm in Liverpool that I've been using. Only £0.17 per Ghz/hour: www.rendernation.com

Also, the 10 min frame time did not include the IR/LC precalc which was a couple hours for each sequence.

[re:FORM]

Thanks clifton, some good info there. I would have been interested in the renderfarm, but this isn't going to earn any cash, its only for the portfolio, so no deadlines to speak of that would warrant spending money.

Well, with glossies switched off, I am still getting slow rendertimes (not even including IR calcs) at a resolution of 490x270 (10-20mins) and the render still looks like it needs more samples. This is on a dual-dualcore 265 with 4gb ram!

So with your IR/LC setup, what image sampler did you use, and with that settings? I'm running adaptive QMC 1/8, rQMC adaptive 1, noise thresh 0.01, min samples 4

Does the 'raytracing' secondary rays bias have any influence on rendertimes?

[re:FORM]

This is probably a stupid question, but if I send jobs to backburner (ie still images queued) then DR won't work?

[DaForce]

Just a heads up, if your planning on using the IR map "Medium animation" preset, you should now that it does include Blur GI. Which may make things look crap depending on your scene. (its meant to help reduce flickering)
So you may want to disable that, you can do so, but choose medium animation preset and then change it back to custom which will keep all the same settings, then just turn the Blur GI down to 0.0.

And another side note, the presets are designed for a specific resolution in mind, i think it was either 640x480 or 800x600 when the presets were made. So just keep that in mind.

[jacksc02]

daforce - FYI blur GI has gone in 1.5 so no need to worry about it now

[DaForce]

oh... sweet.
Didnt know that.

Ta

[vlado]

This is probably a stupid question, but if I send jobs to backburner (ie still images queued) then DR won't work?

It won't work in RC3, but it does work now in RC4 (e.g. you can queue V-Ray DR jobs to Backburner).

Best regards,
Vlado

[jacksc02]

nice work vlado, now all we need is a DR manager of some sort and Dr will be perfect

[Clifton Santiago]

@ re:Form: I don't think those render times are excessive at all. The scene I mentioned was all exterior and you would expect short render times. But as I recall from the previous posts of your garden, you have a semi-enclosed space with lots of vegetation? The render times are going to be more like an interior space. Or like an interior space with no ceiling.

I just did an interior animation with 45 to 90 minute frame times on my dual opterons. On the commercial render farm which was only single 3.0 Ghz pentiums at the time, I had in excess of 6 hour frame times! Ouch. Fortunately it was for a big corporate client that was so happy about the photo-real animation that they didn't mind paying the bill.

[re:FORM]

Great news Vlado, For jobs like this DR would make a huge difference.

Clifton, you seem to have given me hope! Latest renders are coming in at 10mins a frame, and there's no flicker woohoo That's on one machine, once I get my hands on the latest build of vray, I'll be able to DR each frame which should make a big difference.

I assume I need to DR rather than send out a network render job as I'm not doing a IR precalc, but doing the IR and LC every frame with multiframe incremental.

Thanks again.