Hi,
I’m rendering an interior animation with V-Ray GPU (7 Update 4 DR2, 3ds Max 2024) and I’m getting an unexpected color shift between consecutive frames on the same camera.
Problem:
Walls change hue from frame to frame. For example, frame 510 renders with a greenish tint, frame 511 renders with a warm tint. Same camera, same scene, no animation on materials or lights. The issue is mostly visible on one specific camera (View05) and not on others.
What I’ve already ruled out:
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It’s not the denoiser (opacity 0.8 and 1.0 both show the same issue)
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It’s not noise/dithering — the flicker is a full-tone shift, not grain
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It’s not material animation — no animated parameters
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Toggling “Store direct light” in Light Cache did not fix it
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Noise limit doesn’t affect it (tested 0.005 and 0.025)
Current settings:
Questions:
Why could this be happening? I can provide the scene via direct message.
Attaching: [frame 512], [frame 513].
Thanks.
UPD1: If i change retrace 8 i have same result.
Perhaps the glass behind the camera is somehow affecting it.
This view too:
UPD2: I ran tests: I rendered at two resolutions with different settings. For some reason, the effect only appears at 1920x1440 in 3 frames, while at 1200x900 it doesn’t appear at all, even though there are 40 frames. Can you look at the link to see why?
Settings from the attached image:
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1200 x 900, Subdivs 3000, Retrace 4
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1200 x 900, Subdivs 8000, Retrace 2
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1920 x 1440, Subdivs 8000, Retrace 2
Link: Renders - Google Drive
I know you’ve said you don’t think it’s the denoiser - but even at 0.8 there is still a lot of the deoniser output present.
Which de-noiser are you using?
I don’t think all of them have frame to frame awareness - it used to be that the nvidia one wasn’t so great for animations. It has a temporal option now buried away somewhere, which can help.
Chaos recommends using the standalone denoiser in either case as it performs frame blending which reduces sudden shifts and changes in pixels.
You could try rendering out the animation with the denoiser render element turned on - you can then identify if it’s happening in the denoiser output, or the actual render output.
Another thing that crossed by mind, are you using automatic white balance on your camera? If that gets computed per frame - it could potentially shift green/magenta as screen content changes.
I am using the NVIDIA denoiser with the temporal checkbox enabled. I set the Light Cache subdivs to 3000 and retrace to 8, 1920x1440, 41 frames and everything turned out well. So does this mean that with high subdivs such tone shifts on walls can occur? I added the render to the folder at the link above.
I took a look at the clips and the 2 longer ones I couldn’t actually perceive any change in hue.
In the one that was just 3 frames it was easier to see.
Have you tried using the standalone denoiser?
Denoiser Tool - V-Ray for 3ds Max - Chaos Docs
No, I haven’t tried that yet because it requires saving all layers and takes up more disk space, but as I understand it, it’s actually due to high Light Cache subdivs, since I didn’t change the denoiser at all during this test.
Are you using auto white balance? That uses the light cache to calculate - that might track
Here is my setup. I couldn’t find an auto white balance option in the camera settings. As far as I understand, the D55 preset I’m using is just a fixed value, not auto balance.
yeah D55 is a fixed white balance of 55K
Hi,
It seems to be related to lighting.
Is it possible to send us the scene (with assets) so we can check?
Thanks!
Hi,
I uploaded the file. I noticed another issue: I ran the animation render twice, and both times the system hung/froze. The screenshots show the dates and times of the hangs.
Could you also specify the time and date of the hang from these two screenshots? I have added this in English as well.
Observed hangs / gaps from the screenshots:
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21.09.2026:
Render stopped at View02_1_frm_0190.png at 02:01, then resumed at View03_1_frm_0254.png at 05:51 — a 3 h 50 min gap.
Frame 0253 is missing.
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23.09.2026:
Gap between View05_1_frm_0446.png at 14:20 and View05_1_frm_0447.png at 14:46 — a 26 min gap.
Also the file order is non-sequential: View04_1_frm_0419.png at 13:55 appears after View05_1_frm_0439.png at 13:59.
Also, during the hangs, 3ds Max was using a very large amount of RAM — around 70 GB (observed today, 23.09.2026). This might be a memory leak.
The freeze occurred during the Light Cache creation stage today. The settings were 3000 Light Cache subdivs and 8 retrace. I didn’t change any other settings.
My system specs:
Thanks.
UPD: If I render on CPU, my render looks more correct in my opinion. On camera 3, the view through the window looks brighter on CPU, but on GPU it looks like evening lighting outside the window, even though the light is the same.
GPU:
CPU:
Hi,
Your scene uses a lot of VRAM, and the log shows that it requires more than the 24 GB available on our GPU. We recommend optimizing the scene to reduce VRAM usage.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gP0zxP1pufMH-0l32Ztvl5-JmTX-QBlE/view?usp=drivesdk
We recommend optimizing the scene to reduce VRAM usage.
Some plugins and wall textures are missing, but the scene was still rendered without them. There is some minor flickering, but it is different from what you showed us.
We also tested with:
- LC samples: 3000
- Progressive samples: 5000
- Noise: 0.01
These are the default settings and work well for this scene.
For animations, we recommend trying the Intel Image Denoiser instead of the NVIDIA one.
Here is an example with 15 rendered frames:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NU35_y2eiXHha2jgs9pTsjVvzMwyEiDr/view?usp=drivesdk
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/186vcgMbYSIgavt8ZKsNCLJBYlU2SDyJe?usp=sharing
When saving to EXR, enable “Save VFB color corrections to RGB/render elements” to keep the VFB color corrections.
There is no memory leak on our side.
On an RTX 4090, it takes around 2–3 minutes per frame.
Let us know how it goes.
Hi Martin,
I don’t use any third-party plugins except for Floor Generator, PhoenixFd (and no custom material plugins at all). Through trial and error, I actually arrived at almost the exact same settings you recommended. The only difference is that I fine-tune the Noise Limit per camera:
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Cam 1 & Cam 2: 0.01
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Cam 3 & Cam 5: 0.018
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Cam 4: 0.025
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Cam 6: 0.012
For animations, I use the NVIDIA Denoiser with the Temporal option enabled. The limitation with using the standalone V-Ray Denoiser tool is that it lacks an Opacity setting like the VFB has. Because of this, you’d normally have to save the original raw EXR, generate a fully denoised version (Opacity 1.0) through the tool, and then manually blend them together in post-processing—a workflow I really dislike.
To avoid saving extra passes and doing manual compositing, I currently use a Batch Render plugin alongside a custom script. This setup allows me to force the VFB denoiser opacity to 0.65 and save directly from the VFB to PNG. Fixes to the built-in Opacity bug (VFB-245) or adding Opacity controls to the standalone tool would make this process much cleaner.
With these settings, each frame takes about 2 to 4 minutes on my RTX 5070 12GB (so I imagine an RTX 4090 would be significantly faster!). V-Ray shows VRAM usage at around 5.6 GB, with GPU load at 99%. I rely heavily on the Out-of-Core feature to offload textures to system RAM — thank you for this feature, it’s an absolute lifesaver.
As a side question for future updates: are there any plans to fix the lighting difference between V-Ray CPU and V-Ray GPU? When using a daylight HDRI map, the GPU render looks noticeably darker — almost like an evening scene — compared to CPU. It would be great to see more natural daylight parity between both engines.
Thanks!
