animation render ideal setup

[breader]

Firstly let me apologies if I have posted this in the wrong area or this is a post that has been answered before.

I am creating a series of short 30 sec animations at 720 x 357. These are animation of a house. the camera flys around the house and then a short internal.

Nothing about these is complicated there are a few moving object but all very simple.

I have rendered the first animation and although I am quite please there is a bit of flickering and maybe I could increase the quality but I don't want to increase render time.

I have read a quite a few article on the web relating to vray setting but can someone either point me in the right direction of some definitive info or give some general guidance.

I am using Global illumination.

I look forward to your help.

Many thanks

Brett

I have attached an image of my settings.
http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f2...settings-1.jpg

[werticus]

doing the render in stages makes it a lot faster and you can then increase the quality.

for example you render out the LC pre pass on your fastest computer then save it and render the IR over backburner and save it

and then render the final image over backburner (with it being dependant on the IR pass) that way its almost fully automated and each pass goes faster than if you did them all at once.

[breader]

sadly I don't have the facility to render over a network

[Subburb]

Hi, Breader.

There is something strange imoo...
your irrmap is configured in "mutiframe incremental" mode. This mode is suitable only for a walkthrough animation (camera moving only), but you said there are moving objects.
i assume you're tring to make a non-composited animation, and your goal is to find settings working well in this case.
i would suggest some settings, but i'm far to be a senior member
perhaps can you precise the kind of flickering you've encounterd : large noise or tiny noise in dark areas, ...
alyway..

LC :
perhaps can you increase the subd when you'll make your interior shots.
to avoid risks of large flickering due to limited number of subdivs, try to introduce some prefiltering. try with middle range value, like 16 or 32.
prefiltering will blur a little the lightcache, but will reduce large noise patterns, and makes light cache more uniform.
if possible, check the "use light cache for glossy rays", it will speedup the sampling pass when dealing with blurry materials. like this, you can use the gained time in a better AA settings.

IrrMap :
use "single frame" mode with moving objects(RC versions) (use animation prepasses with last vray version)
increase interp.samples to avoid irrmap noise apparition.
try medium mode instead of medium-animation mode, or prefer good. Sometimes low setting is perfect, and fast to render ! stronger settings don't mean better results in some cases... it can be enough and save render time.
50 hsph is enormous setting, as it is multiplicated by global subdivs multiplier. 50*8 = 400
you can lower this value and/or reduce global subdivs multiplier to have a multiplication result between 40 (exterior) and 128(interior)
with this gain , you can lower adaptive amount to 0.85 for example. this will increase general quality. like this you can raise the noise thresold to a less tied settings, like 0.005. This can gives you better results in less time.(Vray standard medium settings are really good...)

AA :
i think you problem is here...
aqmc sampler gives better results than adaptive subdivision sampler.
your actual settings are not suitable for animation , especially the -1 value. undersampling will introduce grainy noise in animation. i would suggest rqmc sampler with 1-4 for a first try, with use rqmc noise thr checked (if you use 0.005 as noise thresold value).
if you scene have a lot of tiny details, try 2-4 to help catching small details.

visit www.spot3d.com (animation tutorials) for more info about that.

hope it helps... i'd like to see the result...
Best regards,

[breader]

Thanks for your input.

I am just downloading 1.5 sp1 and will then try some of the tweaks.

Regards

Brett

[Subburb]

HI, Breader.
Any news ?

[breader]

News.

Sorry for the delay in posting an update.

I am now rendering an animation pre-pass and then the animation final render.

All seems to be working well with my new settings. The only question I have is with regards to the pre-pass IR-maps.

I have read somewhere that you can render an ir-map every 10th--20th frame then use this on the final animation render.

Is there any truth in this and what will be the effect on the final render???

[glorybound]

Network Render

I would highly recommend http://www.rendernation.com/ if you do not have a network to render on. I have no affiliation, I just used them on a project and they great!