Animation rendering

[vkiuru]

Recently I've been toying around with an idea for a simple camera drive through a room. If I wanted a HD-TV resolution, would I just select the one from the Max presets or would it for any reason be advisable to double the resolution?

Also, which render farms have people used Corona with and would you recommend them?

Thanks!

[juang3d]

Well, you can use Rebus, and I myself have a small farm for freelancers and small studios, it's slower than Rebus but I include a review and optimization and advising service if needed/wanted.

Regarding the resolution, I rendered with 720p several animations, you can find an example here:

http://www.bone-studio.com/en/?portfolio=casacom-gigabit-pof

So the base resolution is more than enough, if you need an improvement in antialiasing and such things you can increase the internal resolution in VBF Settings.

Cheers!

[vkiuru]

Thanks, that cleared things up!

EDIT: Also, wow nice animation you got there!

[juang3d]

Thanks :)

Cheers!

[snakebox]

Well, you can use Rebus, and I myself have a small farm for freelancers and small studios, it's slower than Rebus but I include a review and optimization and advising service if needed/wanted.

Regarding the resolution, I rendered with 720p several animations, you can find an example here:

http://www.bone-studio.com/en/?portfolio=casacom-gigabit-pof

So the base resolution is more than enough, if you need an improvement in antialiasing and such things you can increase the internal resolution in VBF Settings.

Cheers!

Did you use the renderfarm for this job? it is really worth the cost of using renderfarms vs the job cost?
Seeing how slow corona currently is at rendering finished animation I find it really hard to even consider it for animation :/  I would hate to have to go back to something.... similar but different ;)

[juang3d]

I have my own small farm of course, to render an animation in a single computer with Corona is impossible.
The time per frame went from 25 minutes to 45 minutes, so the render times are high, IMHO the achieved quality justifies it :)

Cheers!

[snakebox]

Would you mind sharing exactly the settings you used?

I am having a hard time getting things noise free while still keeping render times to a point where its even worth trying. I have a farm of 20 computers here, but 2 hours a frame is just too long for any commercial project time frame.

So if you would be so kind, id love to see your pt - pt (or pt - hd) settings etc?

Thanks!

edit: rewatching your video, I am assuming you used pt - hd? interpolation accuracy position 100 ?  what was your precomp density value?  there is some flickering here and there which makes me think this btw. :)

[juang3d]

Yes, pt+hd, flickering can be avoided, but I had to optimize render times hehe, and the flicker was minimum.

Let me arrange an example scene with those settings an I'll upload here.

Cheers!

[snakebox]

It doesn't matter how much I crank the settings up on even a simple scene..  I have found no way of getting rid of the noise movement in the render.. even if everything is still, including camera, baked gi cache. everything is super alive and noisy.  as stills they look fine.. ive tried 200-300 passes, cache settings are way up. position 100, quality 4096 etc. It all looks decent for a still, but it's never the same from frame to frame, so it generates noise that moves and your eyes sees it instantly. 

That and then for some reason random render nodes, say 1-2 out of 20 will generate slightly different result compared to the rest.. every time.. there 1-2 machines, not always the same. It bugs me that even if I have all the time in the world, I still can't get a clean animation out using Corona currently.

Sure I could use PT + PT, but the noise vs time is not in any way shape or form realistic currently. So technically it's not an option.

Edit: and just to be clear, It's not about if the noise is there or not, that part makes sense.  The problem is that it moves, and it moves A LOT between frames.

[snakebox]

Here is an example of the problem (that I think most people know of by now, but I personally can't solve it with the current build).

It's a gif conversion of the animation, so colors are a little simpler, blacks aren't full black. But what it actually does is highlight the noise better.

Notice the specially the walls on left and middle (ignore the red teapot noise for now). at first glance it's not easy to see, but if you stare at 1 spot you will see what I mean. There is like a movement in big patches. This test scene is a simple quick to render, mostly direct light. When we are talking subtle interior spaces, this because a lot more apparent and an a huge problem.

p.s. Love the corona motion blur.

13.6mb

[Ludvik Koutny]

Why do you think GIF compression is related to Corona? And why do you think it's related to build? It's just GIF compression, that's what GIF does.

[snakebox]

Why do you think GIF compression is related to Corona? And why do you think it's related to build? It's just GIF compression, that's what GIF does.

Did you read none of the above? It has nothing to do with gif... it was just a mean to easily post it here.

youtube, vimeo etc compresses video to the point where everything is smudged and "smooth" so you would be able to see the problem had I gone that way.

[borisquezadaa]

Curiously i just take in to account the noise that video compresion smooth away when render animations, further away i let more noise if i intend to reduce noise later using some plugin.
That gives me  a nice window of acceptable passes that go high or low depennds on time budget.

[snakebox]

Curiously i just take in to account the noise that video compresion smooth away when render animations, further away i let more noise if i intend to reduce noise later using some plugin.
That gives me  a nice window of acceptable passes that go high or low depennds on time budget.

which plugin?  Using some of the available tools for AE I haven't managed to stabilize the noise without massive image quality losses.

Also keep in mind! I am NOT talking about the amount of Noise!  I am talking about the MOVEMENT of the noise.  The amount of noise generated is fine, it makes sense. The problem is that it moves, causing it to look like your walls are alive.

[borisquezadaa]

Denoiser II from Red Giant. I tend to use sligthly and let the video compresion do the rest.
And i know what you mean about noise, but i think is somehow part of the unbiased nature of the renderer and should dissipate with time only.

And in the words of the Allmigthy "We actually do not have to use any kind of noise reduction. One of the best properties of unbiased Monte Carlo rendering is that at any point in time, you have an unbiased estimate of the result. Only error present is the noise, which dissipates in time. The speed at which the noise goes away is very high at the beginning, but very small in the end. This means that while the clean result can take hours to render, you will usually have a usable, noisy, but unbiased and full featured result in matter of seconds.

I actually contributed to a paper examining different biased algorithms meant to speed up the interactive rendering, but we have found out that none of them was as good as the plain, simple, unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing."

The thing is that noise from frame to frame is "different" and it seems animated?...
(By the way i can spot nothing wrong in that gif except for their "gifness").