How do you think this animation was rendered?

[PGD]

Animation Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnS_R-gKHKM

In particular the interior section.

I ask as I'm working on a similar project now, and the V-Ray GI method is working great for the still images. But rendering an animation as long as this will take us an age to render! Which got me thinking, is this animation lit with with GI at all? Or it is some other method? The quality is good enough..

Interested to hear your thoughts

[Syclone1]

I only got halfway through it before I got really bored, Im not a fan at all of really long walk throughs where its just one big pan with the camera. Anyway the lighting its self looks incredibly flat and to me looks like scanline was used on it. These days you can probably setup an animation in V-Ray that will look better and render faster than scanline. Those are just my personal thoughts and opinions on it.

[PGD]

Architects love that long, drawn out shit (they do here anyway)

Any idea how you'd setup something quicker then? As my current LC + Irr setup certainly isn't

[Ihno]

If physical accuracy isn't important you could use a V-Ray Ambient Light with a Vray Dirt map in it's lightmap slot instead of GI.
Also Standart Lights are faster than V-Ray Lights. You can use them to add some directional shadows and direct light to the Ambient Light.
This will even look better than your reference i think although it will still look very unreal compared to a render with GI.

[AC5L4T3R]

What a hideous building. I feel sorry for anyone living in and around Sheffield. Shame, as Sheffield is a really nice city.

[PGD]

If physical accuracy isn't important you could use a V-Ray Ambient Light with a Vray Dirt map in it's lightmap slot instead of GI.
Also Standart Lights are faster than V-Ray Lights. You can use them to add some directional shadows and direct light to the Ambient Light.
This will even look better than your reference i think although it will still look very unreal compared to a render with GI.

So I've been looking into using this setup..

Initially my scene had VrayIES lights placed under the artificial strip lights, and a single frame took 17.4min to render.
Switch those IES off and the frame time dropped straight down to 9.1min!

Yes we lost a bit of light and the nice wash of light down the walls but thats quite a time saving.

So then I added the Vray Ambient Light with a Dirt map in it's lightmap slot and after some tweeking here's where I'm at now:


18-ambient light plus sun with dirt map min dis 2m by Phil Grayston, on Flickr

V-Ray Sun
One VrayAmbient light placed under those circular feature lights.
VrayDirt map in the Lightmap slot

Only thing is I can't see any difference when changing the radius of the Dirtmap. So here its set to 0.0 - should the radius make a difference?

VrayAmbient light settings:
Ambient light settings by Phil Grayston, on Flickr

I can render out a VrayExtraTex element with another Dirt map, then add this to the render - which does look a little better.

The render above is straight out of 3ds with no PP by the way. The Light & Irr isn't Pre-calculated at this stage either so the render time includes these calculations.

Any thoughts?

[eyepiz]

I wonder why it jitters so bad in some areas...

[PGD]

Jitters?

The Irr map is set to 'Very Low' for these tests if that's what you mean

[Ihno]

You turn the Ambient Light to GI, that means the Ambient Light is just visible for the GI rays.
I suggested to use the Ambient Light instead of GI.

Change it to Direct mode and turn off gi completely. Than the radius should make a difference.
And you'll get a faster rendering without prepass.
You can than turn down the color threshold to get rid of the Noise(jitters).
The placement of the ambient light makes no difference... It lights every surface in the scene no matter where it is. The dirt add's a Shadow in the corners which looks kind of gi like.

If you want to use GI, turn off the abient light and get the dirt with a Extra Tex Element.
Than you can add the Ambient occlusion in post. Which would add some details to the low quality GI.

[PGD]

Thanks for that ^

After quickly setting that up here's where I'm at. Much quicker of course, but very grey...


20-ambient light with dirt map-No GI-plus sun.RGB_color.0010 by Phil Grayston, on Flickr

This has the Ambient Light copied too (to an instance) so I have 2 in there to try and bump up the light levels without adjusting the camera settings.

Any thoughts?

[super gnu]

you need the ambient light on a low level just to "fill in" the darker areas without direct light.. much larger radius on the dirtmap. then lots of real lights in there to avoid the flat grey look. since you re not using GI youd even need lights pointing at the cieling in areas that are brightly lit to fake the bounced light.

also, get some reflections on your white walls.. will add interest where you have flat lighting.


in the end, if you are using a cached irradiance map, you may well find it takes longer to render with all the fill lights you would need to add than it does rendering from the gi cache.

[Ihno]

No GI = No Color Bleeding.
But it looks better than your reference.
You can use slightly colored standart lights to fake the color beeding.
Render a frame with GI and use it as reference. That will be much work...
But you can quickly add some difference to the lighting.
Turn down the Ambient Light a bit and use Standart omni's with no shadows to get different brightness in different areas.

Use Vray color in the unocclued input of your dirt and raise the rgb multiplier to bump up the light.
I think using two of them probably forces v-ray to calculate the dirt twice... Dont know..

in the end, if you are using a cached irradiance map, you may well find it takes longer to render with all the fill lights you would need to add than it does rendering from the gi cache.

Take a look at his reference video if that is enough he won't need to fake the whole GI... Using AO is already a advancement

Edit: They actually used AO, my bad.

[squintnic]

looks like it was rendered with a potato IMO
horrible horrible work

[Macker]

Not a fan of that at all.

[Alex_M]

Why not use precalculated GI and LC maps for your animation? I don't think it would take that long to calculate them given your cameras don't move with 100 km/h. You would most likely need to render them every 30-40 frames which would cost you just around 100 frames for a 2 minute long animation. And if we add to this that the new Vray version can render the light the cache map with all machines on the network, it would be even faster than before to create the LC map.