Hello. I have been using 1.5 on the current project. It is a residential
home community in the midwest. There are 8 exterior models and one
interior. Let me first say that the exterior shots are not really having the
quallity problems that the interior shots are.
I am having a real hard time getting an exeptable noise level, especially
on the walls and cabinets in the kitchen animations. But there is a noise
problem in most of the interior animations. The rendertimes, per frame,
are pretty high and pretty noisy. I cant post the file here, but I can
email it to the chaos team. I am sure there are settings that I need to
tweek to get the speed/noise level under control. I am just not sure what.
I have some screens of render settings, typical light settings, and a couple
of material settings. ANY help would be greatly appriciated !
do you have vray lights positioned near your windows? can you show wireframes of your scene?
your settings look fine, regarding the noise adjustements.
Hey Morbid, Thanks for the help.
I do have vray light at the windows. Here are a couple of screen grabs.
I didnt pull wire frames because the scene is so heavily populated that
it was hard to make anything out. I hope this helps. If there is any other
info that I can supply just let me know.
that is a lot of lights…
There is a thing about area lights which can produce noise. If the object is too close to area light, it’s cast shadow will become so scattered, that it will be unseen, but the noise samples which form the shadows will be present, that is what you will see as a noise. So raising subdivisions for the lights may help.
Sorry, Websense is keeping me from seeing your movie. Any stills?
Based on your settings, I would try using adaptive QMC for AA, turning up your Global subdivs multiplier to like 4 or 8 (to decrease area shadow noise), and turning down your IR HSph. Subdivs accordingly (to like 16 or 8, depending on multiplier). Also do you need your LC subdivs so high? And maybe World scale would be better for interiors.
Based on your screen caps, where you have 3 windows in a row, and a Vray planar light for each, if you made it just one light, it would be faster. And for your downlights at the counter, it might be faster with Max spots and area shadows enabled, instead of vray light. Maybe an omni light for the ceiling lamp would be better also.
For interiors i usually prefer QMC Antialiasing (1/100)
Would this setting make rendertimes huge ? This scene is already rendering about 1 hour per frame. Also, what would be a good (in general)
amount of LC subs ? Is 3000 for this much camera movement to much ?
Thanks again,
Mike
I used flythrough=3000, IR medium preset, multi frame inc set to every 10th frame, for a total of 300 frames. I take it this is way to much ? I always calculate the LC for animation using flythrough. Do lower LC samples contribute to noise ?
no, but that depends on the sample size. For example if samples are too small, and they are recalculated for every frame, then you can assume they will behave like noise. But if they are larger and calculated over 10th frame then it wont be visible, much like irmap. Irmap doesnt produce noise. Noise is mostly produced by direct samples, such as light shadow rays, quasi montecarlo rays, glossy rays. Things that are unbiased, in the sence of interpolation. That being said, irmap and lc will also produce flickering. That is a different kind of flickering though.
Thanks, Morbid.
So for the typical home interior(built to scale) What is a good starting sample size for LC ? Also, great explanation of the noise. That really helps.
well im not really an interrior specialist. So someone else might help you with that. Its usually whatever works. The way I usually determine things. is I separate my rendering into tasks. For example, you have a built scene with shaders/textures etc. But you have a problem such as noise. What I would do in such case, is use vrayMaterial override in render scene global switches, and override it with just 128/128/128 grey vray mat. And adjust the quality of lc based on that. Test render an animation and see what is working. Its guaranteed to render fast because you have no complex maps/shaders and you will see noise issues against pure grey mat. Then once you figure out your lc, you can turn it off and test your vray lights, see how they work, once you have done that you can turn both gi and lights and render them together to see the results. With that done, you can turn off mat override, and be sure that next time you render your scene you wont have noise or flickering issues.
Morbid, is there a problem using the lightcache to speed up the glossies in animations in your experiance ? I read a little of both opinions and was
wondering your opinion on it, since you do mostly animations.
Last week I was doing an animation and I got the frame time down from 11 min to 7 min by checking “Use light cache for glossy rays.” But then I put glossy reflections in almost every material…
The downside is you have to use the LC map because it is storing the glossies (as opposed to using just the IR map which stores the LC light values). You will need more memory to load the LC, which can be quite large if calculated in fly-through mode.
Thanks for the info
I am still having a hell of a time trying to get render times down. The
animation that I have posted does have a lot of glossy reflections. But
every combo of settings that I have tried has still led to over 1 hour per
frame.
I am not sure what I am doing wrong.
Well, render time is in part you machine speed of course. And my animation was an exterior, but with lots of covered areas/canopies. The reason my frame times were so fast is because I was using static memory on my XP64 dual dual opterons with 4gb ram. I had to switch to dynamic memory to get the memory consumption low enough to render on a 32-bit render farm which doubled the frame time.
I know everyone is so busy these days. But if anyone can find the time
to load my scene and help me figure out what I am doing wrong I
would be forever gratefull.
I am fairly new to animation, meaning I used to do mostly highres stills.
So of course my workflow is not real optimised.
Anyway, I know we are all busy so, of course no offense if this is to much
to ask.
