Animation Rendering Problems, noise and Loooong rendering times

[JOAN_LORD]

I would do the trick for Animated people, as sounds very clever, unfortunately I think it would take me a life time to change the settings in each Vray material as each person has about 7 dif sep materials, and 3/4 variations of each person, plus there vray proxie's so makes things that bit more harder to look at etc... I'll try it out in the next animation tho

[JOAN_LORD]

Just a quickie, I'm calculating the LC & IM Together, it's about 40 meg a frame, so in total i'm going to have about 50+GIG of IM, is this normal? lol

[Neilg]

Looking at your renders, I'd just use static GI. If the only lights that are moving are stage ones and you have other static lights contributing, do they really need to be part of the gi?
Render the people moving in the base, if they flicker, do a matte pass with just them on and single frame IR/BF and comp them in later. You'll have the shadows from the base so they should slot right over.
It'll be so much quicker.

edit - just noticed super gnu already suggested this. another vote!

[JOAN_LORD]

Thanks Cubiclegangster - Yea I've pretty much done everything Gnu has suggested, all working awesome so far, got another 20 hours before the Calcs are finished, then will render some test frames around the sequence to make sure there all good, then I'll render for the next 4-5 days lol. I'll keep you all posted!

Cheers

Also Whilst I'm on the subject of rendering animations, can anyone suggest the best approach to Render farms, is it good to buy pre made ones or get our IT department to make bare bones ones from cheap components sold seperatly? I can't remember how many rendering licences come with A Vray Licence, is it just one or 6?

[JOAN_LORD]

Hey Guys another Quick question, I've got another 10 hours to go on my LC & IM Cals, would it be ok to copy the files it's outputted so far to another machine (Irradiance Map's per frame), so that can start rendering the first sequence, or does it need to finish calculating all of the sequence before I can hit render?

[Neilg]

Also Whilst I'm on the subject of rendering animations, can anyone suggest the best approach to Render farms, is it good to buy pre made ones or get our IT department to make bare bones ones from cheap components sold seperatly? I can't remember how many rendering licences come with A Vray Licence, is it just one or 6?

I'm pretty sure it's unlimited.

Farm wise, buying old pc's and networking them would be cheaper, but so much more work and take up a ton of space. maintenence would be harder too. Buying a rackmounted setup with identical blades would be cooler, take up hardly any space in comparison and whoever you buy it off would probably have a good stystem set up for maintenence. It would be quite expensive compared to the other option.

Depends what you value more - time & space, or money.

[super gnu]

i was always a fan of building your own farm, and specced a few in the past, however recently ive been using renderfarm services (not to give free publicity but rendernation are very competent, they tend to spot problems with the renders and often fix them for you. also handle all the precalcs if you want.) and unless you are planning to spend months rendering solid, its initially cheaper than buying a farm. you can just pass rendering cost invoiced onto the client. makes them less likely to ask for silly amends when they see the separate invoice!

so currently, a fan of rendering companies. (one other benefit, is your machines go out of date quite quickly, and you have to invest quite regularly in keeping them up to spec. whereas "down at the farm" they deal with that side of things..)

[Neilg]

I think them going out of date applies less these days. You can get a high end setup, after 2 years double the ram and get another 2 years out of it. Rendering time/memory use isnt going up all that much for archviz unless you're sperging out with 1mm displacement on every surface. My renders take about the same time now they did 2 years ago.
Nowhere i've worked wanted to do the rendering anywhere but in house - depends on how your place feels about that.

[JOAN_LORD]

Well funny enough I've just found out a recent development at the company, there upgrading all the architects machines to quad core's with 8 gig of RAM! - so about 40ish of them in this office alone, should be enough right? lol.

Manger wise is Back-burner the norm / standard these days? - I use it some time's for multi-able Images some times, but don't like using as any little errors can throw it in the chaos!