Animation GI calc method

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Hello guys,

we will be doing soem flythrough anim in an interior, no moving objects, all nice and still , the only thing will be camera moving....
i am counting with a direct light (vray sun)

now, should i be using the old flythrough setting or should i incorpoprate the irradiance map animation precalc as well?
both methods with LC not storing direct light (as that apparently causes flickering as well)

the thing is ...i cannot afford flickering in the anim whatsoever so i am wanting to be sure everything is nice and smooth....

what would u suggest?

Thank you

Best regards

Martin

[natty]

Hi,

I would just do your LC set to around 1800-2000 on flythrough mode, and render every 10th frame with the IRR map set to incremental add set to high. Set your noise threshold to 0.003 and render with fixed set to 5.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

great...thanks Natty, will give this a try

[MikeHampton]

My understanding is the main difference is that with incremental, you can control how many irradiance maps you have to calculate, every 10th, 20th, 30th frame or whatever. Where with the animation setting, you have to calculate it at every frame. But with calculating it at every frame and averaging X number of frames together.. you can have objects animated in your scene, where you couldn't using the other method.

Now there is a slight risk in deciding how often you need to caculate the irradiance maps. If you have the time.. it's best to use smaller increments because the larger the increments, the more the chance that you might miss caclulating an IRR map of an area that's occluded by something. It all depends upon how the camera is moving. If you are doing a simple camara dolly.. you might get away with only rendering the IRR map every 60th frame OR MORE. If the camera is panning, tracking, zooming through, etc.. you will need smaller increments, because if you miss any areas, you won't notice till you rendered out the frames, then you will have to go back, render the irradicance map at the offending part of the animation and merge it into the previous IRR map. And then render those frames again.

But I am wondering, Has anyone done extensive testing with calculating the irr map using the animation settings yet? I am wondering if because it's taking an average of the IRR map over a series of frames, if we would be able to render the IRR maps at much lower settings AND still get a smooth GI solution (no flickering or blotchy GI)?

Has anyway experimented with that yet?

The one experiment I have done so far was with moving objects (blowing curtains and such) using the animation IRR map produced a VERY smooth animation. But I used HIGH ANIMATION pre-sets. I am wondering what it would look like if I used MEDIUM or even LOW? I know I would get flickering/blotchy GI using incremental (even ignoring the moving objects for a moment), but I wonder how animation IRR map looks at low settings?

When I get some time, I will try again with my test scene.