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

[Morne]

yes sure here it is


then this last one is shown as bmp currently, but I converted it to a jpg otherwise the size is too large to attach


The terrain material is a bit of a mess (understatement), but it's from an old job so it was fine for test purposes

[t3dm]

strippedgw.zipsorry for the delay.. lost our server over the weekend... so pretty busy with that.

here is a quick file, done some small tweaks.. see what you think.. basically, only noise theshold (lowered the adaptive amount a smidge) and not using any filtering.. (is anything critial needing filtering at this stage)

BF subdiv's at 24..

[joconnell]

Here's two other options also, your base scene renders at 2:20 approx on my work machine. I've done a tweak to keep it around 2:40 but with better gi and reflections, and a second file which is more around 5:50 but very clean. In both cases I've gone for less AA, more GI and reflection samples, and it was mainly the lowering of the AA and DMC noise threshsold that made the quality and slowness difference.


stripped.zip

[t3dm]

here is another file.. its only when you put the bitmaps on that there is noise (i suppose we have to expect that!)

here is another option.. strippedgw2.zip

[Morne]

Here's two other options also, your base scene renders at 2:20 approx on my work machine. I've done a tweak to keep it around 2:40 but with better gi and reflections, and a second file which is more around 5:50 but very clean. In both cases I've gone for less AA, more GI and reflection samples, and it was mainly the lowering of the AA and DMC noise threshsold that made the quality and slowness difference.

I thought I read somehwere that it's bad to have so much "red" in your sample rate and then you should increase the max value to get rid of the "red".
Anyways thanks for your help John. Your quick 2:20 renders 20 seconds slower on my pc at 9:10 hehehe but yes yours is cleaner. Will try your 5:50 scene and t3dm's scene tomorrow somewhere and let you know...

John although I didn't fiddle or render your 5:50 scene yet, I did notice that the glossy subdivs is a lot lower on this one and the AA is about half and the bf subdivs gone up slighlty and you get almost double render times.
Also I see you switched off "use lc for glossies", how does this setting effect things?

OK stupid question but in your experience and opinion, will you see a big difference in the final 720p animation between the 2:20 and the 5:50 when played back at 25 frames/sec after it got encoded to H.264?

Also a quick question. On my "final vehicle" it has a lot of small fine detail such as modelled bolts and thin grill airvent slots, will AA of 1,4 or 1,8 not cause issues in these small details?

[joconnell]

Yeah - I generally go by these principles at the minute:

AA will bully all other samplers and make them worse so use as little as possible.
AA is only for edge and geometric detail so set your AA just enough to get red just around the silhouettes of objects or in areas of complex geo detail / bump / texture.
All other problems should likely be dealt with by finding the cause of the noise using your rawlighting and reflection / rawreflection passes. A big thing though is that the two of them are related - with glossy objects, they could have noisy sampling themselves, or be reflection an object or light source that has noisy sampling so it's a case of if you've got a scene that's got tonnes of glossies overall, then it might make more sense to use more light samples, or if the rest of the scene is fine light and relfection wise save for one material, go for just it's reflection samples.

In your 720p a lot of it comes down to motion blur - 2d blur is gonna mush over a lot of detail and make the h264 encoder's job easier. For less render grunt I'd maybe look at that as a solution?

And yeah in your final you'll likely need more AA in that case - again just watch your sample rate first, perhaps with an override material to start with - if you've noisy glossy bits going on the sample rate will be showing your the aa sampler going more red to try and clean up the light and material mess too. Stick on a grey to start (maybe even with your lighting off!) to see how much aa you need to get nice smooth edges on things, then turn on your proper lighting and again adjust your lighting samples till the sample rate is back to what it was, then turn off the material override and again do similar.

[t3dm]

I was using the GI pass to optimise this scene... mainly as the material reflections were subtle and most of the noise was in the shadow areas.. whacking the AA to 1,24 did improve the shadow detail and noise... its all a balancing act eh!

think my scenes we rendering in between 35 and 57sec on my new dual xeon... double that on some of our older spec'd machines.

[Morne]

In your 720p a lot of it comes down to motion blur - 2d blur is gonna mush over a lot of detail and make the h264 encoder's job easier. For less render grunt I'd maybe look at that as a solution?

I have a lot of wheels turning. Also the 1 "thing" turns very quickly. It does a 240 turn in Z and same time about 90 turn in y in about 2 or 3 frames (if frames is 25 frames/sec)
Would I use VrayVelocity element for this? Or can I just skip that and use my compositor to add frame by frame motionblur?

Some tips to fake the mblur in post so the render is a bit quicker?

[joconnell]

Bleh - wheels are a bit tough alright, no real way out unless you go with higher shutter rates so that they don't turn as much over the course of the shot but it looks strobier. We'll have to look at something closer to the final object to properly judge - drop a pm when it's nearer.

[tashko.zashev]

Hi Morne,

Some tips to fake the mblur in post so the render is a bit quicker?

You can take a look to the motion blur workflow described here:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...=nuke+velocity
I hope is useful for you case.

[snivlem]

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?

Looks good, are you using an AA filter?

[t3dm]

no AA filter.. I tend to do any blurring or sharpening in post.. not works on this scene anyway

[Morne]

Hi Morne,


You can take a look to the motion blur workflow described here:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/forums/vbu...=nuke+velocity
I hope is useful for you case.

Thanks I will take a look

[Morne]

OK so after tweaking and adding some things, here's the progress so far.
BF samples 24, AA 1,6 Quadratic filter ON, noise default 0.85 and 0.01

Override:


And also the SampleRate:


I geuss I could add a VRayAmbientLight with some VRayDirt for the foilage to speed things up a bit, will do some tests and see how it looks. I'm happy so far, so may even scrap the AmbientLight idea...

[joconnell]

Yeah it's looking good alright - you'll definitely need high AA for this with the amount of small detail in the trees - if you're doing slow camera moves with the tank then the leaves are going to shimmer like hell and there's not a massive amount you can do about it. I'd look into 2d post blur since there's no "spokes" as such in the wheels and the blur'll smooth things over. A tiny bit of zdepth blur to soften the background will take away some of the leaf shimmer, and then even a little bit of depth fading to make the leaves less contrasty and hide issues further.