Best rendering method for a 1920x1440 360° animation

[smax]

Hello there,

We have a project where we would need to render 60s (1500frames) of a simple 360° rotation.
See image attached, (sorry for jpg compression) which is just a Work In Progress but the whole scene will be static and more detailled, but same zoom distance.

My concern is small object flickering (like we often have in vray little objects appearing on some frames and disappearing on others... very annoying...)

What is the best rendering method (primary bounces and secondary bounces) for this kind of project (1920x1440 pixels) ? what settings ?
I would go for IRMap in medium 80/60 in primary and maybe LC (2000 samples, world, sample size 1m) in secondary in flythrough mode to generate a big LC file ?
I could also use brute force as secondary.... ?
Our renderfarm is made of 4Gb RAM machine.

So i would like to be sure i get no object flickering at all and for a good speed compromise.

Any help ?

Thank you very much.
SMaX

[Neilg]

I would do something similar, but render the irradiance map at high settings 140/80 and the lc what you have but with a resolution of 1024x768. Something like every 50 frames should do for that.

It'll take a while to calculate and may be a little over the top, but it'll be pretty robust.

[re:FORM]

One thing I found out recently was that having a minimum sample rate of 1 for DMC sampling often causes buckets to flicker detail between frames. Raising this to 2 or more fixes the problem. An alternative is to lower your clr.thresh.

[tammo]

For this type of animation you could also render without GI.
Just a Vray light set to dome with a HDRI image loaded.
Or a combination with vray sun and domelight.
This way you dont have to worry about GI flicker and dont have to precalculate stuff.
It will even work for animated objects.

[smax]

hello,

Thank you for the answers.
Well i tried without GI with sun and vray dome. Whatever parameter or position of the Vray Dome, it won't give us any "brighten" shadows in the black areas.

So i guess i will go fo GI IrMap/LC, all prepassed, with some AA Area 1/6 or something so i get no flickering in AA neither.

But i was wondering about any problem on "objects" flickering.
Did you already encounter that kind of problem ? I don't know if it's GI related but small objects (like less than 1/50 of the image) tends to appear/disappear during the animation.

Thank you again,

SMaX

[Codi]

What Image sampler do you use for your renderings?
Adaptive Subdivision sometimes can miss small details, better adjust your Adaptive Subdivision settings or use Adaptive DMC for this kind of scenes.

There is one thing that I didn't get from your post, the thing that rotates is only the camera or is it the whole geometry?
The first case is quite simple/fast to render, you can get away with a precalculated IRMap and a LC in flythrough mode, while in the second case is harder to render and you could try to use Irradiance map in animation mode.

Welcome to the forum BTW

[smax]

Hi codi,

Well, to answer your last question: it's the camera which rotates (so yes prepass will work)

About image sampling, this is a good question.
I actually don't know the best sampling method for that kind of little detail rotating very slowly.

What you say on objects (or part of objects like little holes) being "forgotten" from adaptive subdivision sampling is interesting.

Maybe adaptive DMC is the best, but then what settings ?

Thank you

[Codi]

In my opinion yes, Adaptive DMC works best for this kind of scenes.

About the exact settings ... is hard to tell a setting that fits all situations.
In my jobs I use 1/8 and color threshold 0.002 for my fastest setting for animations and 1/12 0.001 for a flicker-free animation but with a much longer render times.

Regards