BF + LC for moving objects animation - optimal settings? Fighting noise vs time

[Morne]

Hi all

I'm doing an animation with moving objects and VRayPhysCam motion blur and dof. My main object has a glossy reflection colour of 0,0,196 and Refl glossiness of 0.725

I'm using quadratic filter for animation
I tried various settings with various pros cons.

If I set mtl subdivs high like 128 and bf 128 but my dmc on 2,16 I get clean(ish) GI and Reflection channel but my samplerate channel is FULL of red and green so render times goes through the roof.

If I set my DMC to 3, 64 and lower mtl glossy to 32 and bf to 64 I get quicker render times, better sample rate, but my GI and reflection is noisy like crazy.

My average settings with sort of a middle ground is mtl subdivs 32, bf 32, dmc 3,24 then I get about 8 minutes per frame on an old quadcore with 8gb ram BUT it's a bit noisy which may not be that visible in the animation but would be nice to clean things up a bit - PLUS this is just a test scene with some main objects moving, I will still add HUGE LOAD of foilage with forest pack

Ideally I need something that will cap frame time at about 10 to 15 min per final frame including foilage on this specific system - BF + LC and VRayCam motionblur and DOF is a prerequisite. Absolutely can not have ANY flicker with this scene, and ideally as little noise as possible. Yes I know - if it was easy I wouldnt have asked the question

Oh and I have VraySun and Sky with the sun's shadow subdivs pushed up from 3 to 8.
Currently vraycam motblur subdivs is on 8, but the specific noise is not due to motion blur as my cam is linked to the specific object and thus moving with it so not producing any motion blur on that main object

Noise thres etc is default 0.85 and 0.01 (I did get cleaner renders with 0.15 adaptive and 0.01 default noise, but render goes up very high in times)

Comments or Suggestions?

[joconnell]

Turn on your Raw lighting and Raw GI passes too just in case your Sun / sky is adding lots of grain - To be honest you're turning on nearly everything nasty so something's likely going to give. Interior or exterior scene?

[Morne]

Yes I've got them on, that's where I'm seeing the noise, including the reflection and rawreflection. When the one goes clean, the other goes wack etc.

It's an exterior scene. U suspected it might be sun/sky giving hassles. Problem is I don't see where to increase the subdivs for the sun, I only upped the shadow subdivs from 3 to 8 but there is no subdivs for the sun like in a normal vraylight. I tried Under system > light settings > sun to increase the diffuse subdivs from the default of 150 to 5000 without a visual change. Then I thought ok maybe stick the VRaySky into a dome light and up the dome light's subdivs from default 8 up to 64, also no visual change in any of the elements.

It's an exterior scene and I could scrap the DOF and just go with zdepth instead.

Any thoughts? I look forward to some thoughts or suggestions?

Also, on that particular pc its an old Intel Q9550 Quadcore, so rendertimes could be capped at around 30 minutes. The final thing could be rendered on a 3930K so probably then it will drop back down to 15 min a frame.

[t3dm]

doing something similar... I have moving objects, lights going on and off etc..

attached a still, I have a domelight (with HDRI) set to 32 sub divs, only one BF pass (bf 32 subdivs) noise threshold at 0.005, DMC 1,6 and noise is not too bad at full 1080p. I was mucking around with irr/lc and it was just a headache for me,

have you clamped in color mapping?

[Morne]

Yes I see what you mean, that doesnt look too bad and in fact it looks acceptable and even, actually very nice!

Do you have have a sun/sky in your scene or only the domelight and small building light fixtures?

dmc 1,6 seems low, what does your samplerate element look like and what kind of times per frame are you getting and what cpu and ram?
Could you tell me more about your material glossy reflection amount vs glossy subdivs?

No I'm not clamping colour I'm working in full float at 720p, although I geuss I can probably clamp, I'm not gonna do much post except maybe some minor colour grading

[t3dm]

no vray sun sky, will do a test with it in though..

full 1080p is taking 25mins a frame... this is a complex scene though as that is just a crop, I have candles, loads of lights, ies lights etc.. not sure if my settings will work for you..

I have a problem with noise on highlights on another scene, the only way I could get round it was clamping+subpixel mapping (meant I lost some nice glow effects... just had to do them a different way) as basically the noise was due (I think!!) to the high float values and the sampler struggling to effectively sample the huge difference in range.

so back to this scene!! I was just trying to go BF to save a lot of headaches with various LC/irr render passes etc. i reduced all my lights (apart from the dome) to 8 sub divs, same with most of the materials (8 sub divs) and just got the scene to render quickly with BF GI (BF set to primary, secondary set to none) and got an acceptable GI, i'm doing more in post (DOF and Motion blur too) then reduced the noise and adaptive amount and got the result above..

what does your scene look like currently?

[t3dm]

on and machine.. this was on a new dual core zeon 3ghz.. so again my settings might be too much, but I do think your settings are really high (recently I have started optimising my scenes a lot more and tried to control quality only when I see an visual increase in quality.. i.e if a particular material looks noisy I will i will only then increase its sub divs)

[Morne]

I will post a "modified" scene with just a box in the scene tonight, basic principle the same and you can still see the noise etc...

[t3dm]

perfect! i can do the same..

[Morne]

Turn on your Raw lighting and Raw GI passes too just in case your Sun / sky is adding lots of grain - To be honest you're turning on nearly everything nasty so something's likely going to give. Interior or exterior scene?

I should probably add that my noise is mainly in the shadows and I have to zoom to 200% to see it, rest is relatively clean(ish)
Lighting and RawLighting is CLEAN, but I do see noise in GI and Reflection in both RAW and filtered versions.
In dmc 1,6 my sample rate is almost completely red and about 10 orange and 1 percent blue
dmc 2, 24 seems to work better

[Morne]

hmm ok switching OFF the quadratic filter makes a HUGE difference to the noise in that it's almost not visible now....
How will that however impact the frame to frame blending in the animation, won't it be too sharp?

EDIT: ok but that was with a 128,128,128 override mtl on. Switch override off then things back to noise central

[Morne]

I'm mainly concerned about the "vehicle". There will be plenty foilage added so you won't see the ground plane so much in the final

This specific stripped down version took 8 min 13 seconds on a Q9550 with 8GB Ram (this is frame 250)
vehicle mtl refl glossy 0.725 subdivs 16
quadratic filter ON
dmc 2,16
linear 2,2 NO clamping
BF 32
LC subdvis 1000
adaptive 0.85 noise thresh 0.01
vraysun/sky shadows subdivs 8



The noise on the ground is partly from motionblur subdivs at only 8. The vehicle isnt motion blurred as the cam is linked to it and moves with it...

[Morne]

here's a 2012 scene...

stripped.zip

I was thinking maybe even though the vehichle isnt motion blurred, maybe its noisy because its reflecting the ground which has very little motion blur samples.
Sorry I couldnt attached the textures as the zip file is then too big to attach. Just add any 4 textures...

[Morne]

hmm no takers?

[joconnell]

yeah got something alright but would you mind putting up the textures you're using since they'd make such a huge difference to the sampling?