Noise and overall quality with 1.5

[mmikee]

Hello. I have been using 1.5 on the current project. It is a residential
home community in the midwest. There are 8 exterior models and one
interior. Let me first say that the exterior shots are not really having the
quallity problems that the interior shots are.
I am having a real hard time getting an exeptable noise level, especially
on the walls and cabinets in the kitchen animations. But there is a noise
problem in most of the interior animations. The rendertimes, per frame,
are pretty high and pretty noisy. I cant post the file here, but I can
email it to the chaos team. I am sure there are settings that I need to
tweek to get the speed/noise level under control. I am just not sure what.

I have some screens of render settings, typical light settings, and a couple
of material settings. ANY help would be greatly appriciated !















Thanks,
Mike

Ps...here is a link to the kitchen animation. It will be a little bit more noisy
than usual because it is a quicktime file.
http://www.aniprod.com/projects/KitchenNoise.mov

[Morbid Angel]

do you have vray lights positioned near your windows? can you show wireframes of your scene?
your settings look fine, regarding the noise adjustements.

[mmikee]

Hey Morbid, Thanks for the help.
I do have vray light at the windows. Here are a couple of screen grabs.
I didnt pull wire frames because the scene is so heavily populated that
it was hard to make anything out. I hope this helps. If there is any other
info that I can supply just let me know.

Thanks a million,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

that is a lot of lights...
There is a thing about area lights which can produce noise. If the object is too close to area light, it's cast shadow will become so scattered, that it will be unseen, but the noise samples which form the shadows will be present, that is what you will see as a noise. So raising subdivisions for the lights may help.

[TutanMark]

Try also unchecking "clamp output" in your color mapping rollout.

For interiors i usually prefer QMC Antialiasing (1/100) .

[jow]

Second what Dmitry said, have a look here-
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpB...ic.php?t=16270

[Clifton Santiago]

Sorry, Websense is keeping me from seeing your movie. Any stills?

Based on your settings, I would try using adaptive QMC for AA, turning up your Global subdivs multiplier to like 4 or 8 (to decrease area shadow noise), and turning down your IR HSph. Subdivs accordingly (to like 16 or 8, depending on multiplier). Also do you need your LC subdivs so high? And maybe World scale would be better for interiors.

Based on your screen caps, where you have 3 windows in a row, and a Vray planar light for each, if you made it just one light, it would be faster. And for your downlights at the counter, it might be faster with Max spots and area shadows enabled, instead of vray light. Maybe an omni light for the ceiling lamp would be better also.

[mmikee]

Thanks a lot for your responses ! I will give all these suggestions a try.
Ill post back with the results.

Regards,
Mike

[mmikee]

For interiors i usually prefer QMC Antialiasing (1/100)

Would this setting make rendertimes huge ? This scene is already rendering about 1 hour per frame. Also, what would be a good (in general)
amount of LC subs ? Is 3000 for this much camera movement to much ?
Thanks again,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

yeah...3000 is way much. I never go over 1500.
Plus if its interrior, you can do all kinds of precalculations for flythroughs.

[mmikee]

I used flythrough=3000, IR medium preset, multi frame inc set to every 10th frame, for a total of 300 frames. I take it this is way to much ? I always calculate the LC for animation using flythrough. Do lower LC samples contribute to noise ?

Thanks for all the help.

Regards,
Mike

[mmikee]

Also, doesnt 1hr per frame seem a little bit to long for this scene ?
Just curious what you guys think.

Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

no, but that depends on the sample size. For example if samples are too small, and they are recalculated for every frame, then you can assume they will behave like noise. But if they are larger and calculated over 10th frame then it wont be visible, much like irmap. Irmap doesnt produce noise. Noise is mostly produced by direct samples, such as light shadow rays, quasi montecarlo rays, glossy rays. Things that are unbiased, in the sence of interpolation. That being said, irmap and lc will also produce flickering. That is a different kind of flickering though.

[mmikee]

Thanks, Morbid.
So for the typical home interior(built to scale) What is a good starting sample size for LC ? Also, great explanation of the noise. That really helps.

Regards,
Mike

[Morbid Angel]

well im not really an interrior specialist. So someone else might help you with that. Its usually whatever works. The way I usually determine things. is I separate my rendering into tasks. For example, you have a built scene with shaders/textures etc. But you have a problem such as noise. What I would do in such case, is use vrayMaterial override in render scene global switches, and override it with just 128/128/128 grey vray mat. And adjust the quality of lc based on that. Test render an animation and see what is working. Its guaranteed to render fast because you have no complex maps/shaders and you will see noise issues against pure grey mat. Then once you figure out your lc, you can turn it off and test your vray lights, see how they work, once you have done that you can turn both gi and lights and render them together to see the results. With that done, you can turn off mat override, and be sure that next time you render your scene you wont have noise or flickering issues.