Animation workflow help (AGAIN)

[ntavian]

From Default V-Ray settings, change LC subdivs to 3000, retrace to 8.0.

*Nothing* else.


Each frame will be its own self-contained unit, and there will be no risk of having to recalculate a (long) LC sequence to be able to cater for changes in a small section of the animation.


This is the method we officially suggest (it's in the tooltips, after all.).


Use the renderer Noise Threshold and max AA to control rendertimes (as you well said.).

So by following Lele's advice and going with the default settings and just changing LC subdivs to 3000, retrace to 8.0, I am stuck and confused with how to proceed with the PROGRESSIVE IMAGE SAMPLER to get a noise-and flicker-free frames for the animation.
how do I know whether to go with increasing time render-times, and if I do, how much time is enough to get a clean image and do I leave the Noise

TH @

the default of 0.005 or 0.0 and let the Max. subs do its job?
or do I go with Noise TH defaults 0.005 and set the rendertime to 0.0 and let the Max. subs do its job?

BTW, did I mention that I have animated lights that are changing

colors?

Also, w

hat about the light cache MODE? do I leave that at Single frame or Fly-through,


PLEASE HELP AND THANK YOU IN ADVANCE

[^Lele^]

You should *not* set noise threshold at 0.0, ever.
It would be equivalent to a fixed sampling with max AA, but it would also incur into the (admittedly small) penalty for noise level checking.

Start from the defaults, and set the LC as you did (leave it in single frame mode!).
From the default settings for progressive, set max rendertime to 0.0, choose a suitable noise threshold, and you're good to go.

My suggestion, before committing to the full sequence, is to render groups of (for example) three or five *representative* frames at different noise levels (start high, at 0.05, then 0.025, then 0.01, and then 0.005. again, just to illustrate the idea.), to ensure you like the results, both for rendertime and quality.
Remember you may be able to get very decent results through denoising, so you may not need to commit to very very low noise thresholds, and save yourself some compute time.
Mileage may -and will!- vary.

[Morbid Angel]

With animated colored lights LC might have a tough time, no? Unless you have a really high retrace in that case its as good as BF?

[^Lele^]

Not really, no.
Each frame is separate, so it won't know lights are animated in any way (outside of the moblur interval, which is comparatively tiny).
A retrace of 8 is high but not high enough to make an LC solution render as slowly as a BF, by a long shot (thankfully.).

[Neilg]

My suggestion, before committing to the full sequence, is to render groups of (for example) three or five *representative* frames at different noise levels (start high, at 0.05, then 0.025, then 0.01, and then 0.005. again, just to illustrate the idea.), to ensure you like the results, both for rendertime and quality.

I will add a piece of advice - never, ever skip this step. do this for every animation you ever work on!
that one time you get complacent and queue up the whole thing will be the time that a 5 frame test would've let you catch something weird.

[^Lele^]

I will add a piece of advice - never, ever skip this step. do this for every animation you ever work on!
that one time you get complacent and queue up the whole thing will be the time that a 5 frame test would've let you catch something weird.

Which is the reason i suggest it: i got burnt *hard* in production, once. And boy was it not lesson enough!