V-Ray animation Distribution Rendering

[larry.vasquez]

I'm just wondering what the best practice is for rendering character animation in V-Ray across a network? I've tried 'Animation (prepass)' to create a Irradiance File. But it seems like when I switch it to 'Animation (rendering)' it still take quite a long time to initiate and builds a light cache even if I point it to the file created during the 'Animating (prepass)'. If creating a Irradiance file during 'Animating (prepass)' does it help to change the settings to something much lower in quality and bump them back up for production rendering?
Also, the 'Building light cache...' can sometimes take an oddly long time even on our beefy machines.
Just looking for help on best practice/workflow.

[vladimir.nedev]

I think the recommended workflow is to use Brute Force + Light Cache, and if you need faster render times, use the Denoiser as well.

For animation, you can save out .vrimg files and then denoise them with our external denoiser command line utility.
It can use neighboring frames to better denoise a sequence of images.

Greetings,
Vladimir Nedev

[larry.vasquez]

Thank you. So would one still use an Irradiance cache file? If so what would be the workflow there?

[vladimir.nedev]

No, the idea is not to use the Irradiance Map at all. This way, you avoid any artifacts/splotches it might cause and have a higher quality image in the end.

Greetings,
Vladimr Nedev