Animation with GI that doesn't flicker

[MikeHampton]

However, a more straightforward (elegant?) way to create a GI animation is certainly on my wishlist.

Agreed.. Not bashing vray at all... just discussing this one area of "problem". Maybe the word "consistant" instead of straightforward?

Like with scanline (or any non-GI engine), we had to wrestle with lighting. I might think.. "I want to put a blue light over hear to create a certain mood in this image", but I just couldn't put a blue light "over there". I had to wrestle with the render engine to try to get that blue light to behave like a blue light. Usually ending up with several lights in the scene to mimic what just one blue light source would naturally do in the real world, and it still might not look that realistic.

But now with Vray.. I can put a blue light over there and it more or less behaves like a blue light and illumintes my scene as a blue light would (ok.. maybe not automatically with caustics and more advanced lighting effects, but mostly behaves like a light). So Vray allows me to be more of an artist and focus on why I want a blue light over there rather than fighting all the technical issues of trying to get it to illuminate like a blue light would.

But we never had to worry much about frame to frame inconsistancies with lighting in a non-gi engine when rendering an animation. Now we (collectivly all of us) are wanting to once again do animations, using all the wonderful tools of vray, but with things moving all over the place without having to "worry" about the technical aspects of getting it rendered or the rendertime being too long.

Of course rendertime is ALWAYS the issue.. or all engines would probably be on the Maxwell bandwagon.. just be prepared to get out your calenders when it comes to rendertime, and that's even if you had a 1000+ computer renderfarm.

[Sascha Selent]

All for nothing?

...it's not the magic bullet yet.

As far as I understand the new fixed animation-mode in SP3 is fool-proof, isn´t it? Fool-proof is possible, see finalRender.

...having to render an IR map for every frame AND the render time hit of merging several IRR maps together to actually render each frame, I find is often a deadline breaker.

Pf, why not. Begging for a renderer that renders several thousand frames of full blown GI-animation on a single machine overnight - sorry, but this is impossible and it will be impossible for many years. I will be very glad when it is possible at all. Rendertimes will be okay and calculatable, because VRay is simply extremly fast compared tro other renderers.

If you have evil deadlines for heavy animation: pimp up your renderfarm - if you need it overnight: use rebusfarm.

Now you´ll say "too expensive, too much money": Yes, this needs money and someone has to pay for it and that is the client. I think too many people promise too much to the clients thus dumping prices. If the client demands animation he has to pay for it - otherwise there will be no animation.

I do not know how many discussions I had about the charge for rendertimes:

"Yes, I wanna have an animation with 11.000 frames. Money? But you press the button and the comuter does the job... why do you want money from me?"

"Yes, I need money. It´s not only one computer, dear client, there are 13 computers doing the job. Hardware is expensive, software is expensive, keeping them alive needs time - and they need to be replaced every 3-5 years blah blah blah blah blah ".

Sorry, you cannot expect all for nothing. As I said, I´ll be glad when it works at last and it seems that SP3 is the answer. If you need it now ask Vlado. I have no animation-job in the pipeline, so I can await the official release of SP3.

Sascha

[tricky]

The thing with a GI animation, for me anyway, is that I want to achieve a consistent quality from frame to frame, whatever that quality is. The quality will be determined by my client's budget (generally 15% what it should be!), but at least I want to be able to produce a GI animation with a consistant 'low' quality for his budget as oppposed to a flickering, ugly, painful-to-watch animation.

Low quality (grainy etc) I can cope with. What I can't cope with is flicker/blotches from frame to frame.

When a client comes through with a budget that is 75% what it should be (for what he is after in his own head), then I'll be able to up the quality somewhat to improve the overall 'look' of the animation, and render it without any flicker/blotch issues.

I want Father Christmas to allow me to achieve this situation intuitively and, yes, consistently.

[Sascha Selent]

I want Father Christmas to allow me to achieve this situation intuitively and, yes, consistently.

Do you use SP3? I didn´t try it, but if I did understand Vlado right it will solve this problem.

Hm, I think whatever renderengine you use you will need at least a certain amount of quality to achive suitable frames to blend between. So you will never be able to reduce rendertime for every budget.

[MikeHampton]

Pf, why not. Begging for a renderer that renders several thousand frames of full blown GI-animation on a single machine overnight - sorry, but this is impossible and it will be impossible for many years. I will be very glad when it is possible at all. Rendertimes will be okay and calculatable, because VRay is simply extremly fast compared tro other renderers.

Ummm... don't think that's what I said or was talking about at all.

Sure.. it would be great to have a few thousand computers and be able to render an animation in just an hour or two. Or to be able to render it in a couple of days by upping all the setting and using brute force (supposedly this is consistant).. thus producing consistant, repeatable results from one animation to another without having to worry about it. That's what I'm talking about. Irregardless of the number of computers, or how long it takes to render.. some of us (I would wager most of us) don't have 2000+ computers with the time/luxury to "fix" things and re-render if there is a problem. And I would wager that most of us don't have the time to constantly tweak settings to find what "works", or to render out multiple passes of each frame to composite, and all these other "workarounds".

Yes... I've found workarounds.. I've found tweaks and settings that seem to work... I composite in fixes.. I continue to find other processes as new "issues" pop up. All I am saying is that I would rather spend that time being creative.. than spending it just to make sure that the animation gets rendered properly without any glitches.

Maybe it's just me.. But even after using vray all this time, I still seem to find the render times rather unpredictable. Yes.. I agree it's very fast compared to other engines, and it's fast considering all that you can do with it. But I was able to predict the render time of the scanline engine VERY acuratly. With vray.. I still don't feel like I have a handle on it. I have a much better handle on it.. but I still seem to run into enough situations that weren't predictable.

For example.. I might have a scene that renders in 5 minutes at a given resolution. If I double that resolution (descreasing the max and min of the IRR map at the same time), I might "guess" that the render time is going to increase 3-4 times (usning my scanline mindset), however it often ends up increasing by something like a factor of 12. But then another similar scene may only increase by a factor of 4 and another similar scene might increase by a factor of 20. So if you have to increase the render resolution by a factor of 3, 4, 8, and so on... FORGET about trying to guess how long it's going to take to render... weither you are using DR or not.


My experince seems to be that vray's render times are not linear.. they seem to be exponential, and rather unpredicitable when you have to change something (like increasing the resolution). But then again.. .maybe that's just me. And I'm probably just comparing it to the scanline, where I could always predict it to within just a minute or so.

I think too many people promise too much to the clients thus dumping prices. If the client demands animation he has to pay for it - otherwise there will be no animation.

I definatly agree with you on this!! I like to put it this way. Time, quality, money. All clients want all three (they want it done fast, they want high quality, and they want it done on the cheap). So you can lay all three out on the table and basically tell them they can have any of the two out of the three they want.. but they can't have all three. No one can deliver all three without killing themselves for nothing.

[stevesideas]

this is the case with sp3.
The gi animation there is far superior.

If thats the case, can I please get the latest build...does the latest include the "far superior gi animation solution" ??

I have plenty of scenes im currently working on that will have moving objects, so anything that makes it a bit easier is great!

Vlado, any chance of aquiring the latest build. I have emailed you in the past and think maybe my mails go into the junk folder accidently.

[mike_kennedy]

An easier method would be great, we have a fairly powerful farm and I find Animation pre-pass to be prohibitive still and still has flicker, but we normally get around this by using brute force on a another pass on just the moving objects and comping it in, works for the most part and not too tough. GI and Animation is still CPU intensive for sure and anything to make it easier would be great.

[TRGraphics]

You guys are going to be much happier with SP3. It is doing a fantastic job with prepass animation for us here. Much improved!!!!! Thanks Vlado!

Also, I'm not sure what you did to DR, but it is working with far fewer problems now as well. I use it with all my stills and it has never been this reliable with MAX 2009 and WIN64bit.

Where do I send the check? I feel I should pay somebody for this!

[stevesideas]

I hope you dont mind me asking this about an animation Im currently working on.

I have one moving object in my interior scene. Would the best method be to use Brute force for first bounce and lightcache for secondary ? I am rendering out to HD (1920x1080) and have 50 frames to do. I have my lightcache up to 1800 at the moment which is taking forever. Is it not possible to calc the lightcache seperately and load from file and then render via backburner ?

[mike_kennedy]

We tend to do Imap for Primary and LC for Secondary for Interiors and Brute force secondaries for Exteriors here. You can Store the LC with the IMAP by making sure Store Glossies in Light Cache is turned off. I tend to set my LC File to Flythrough if I am going to use it with Glossies.
Cheers
Mike K