Animation tutorial or Guide

[mitviz]

Hi guys i am about to start a major project and would love to use corona as the main renderer instead of vray but somehow i cannot find a single tutorial on how to do animations with corona, can someone point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated

[maru]

Hi, we don't have any specific animation-oriented tutorials yet, but you can read about different usages of UHD cache to optimize rendering time here:
https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000515648

Generally, default Corona settings should perform pretty well in most standard situations, so my tips would be: PT+UHD for interior animations, PT+PT for exterior animations. You can also enable real motion blur in Corona if you need it, it should not affect performance very much.

If you have any specific questions or problems, we will gladly help. The best way would be to submit a new support ticket:
https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new

[james_g_brown]

Hey there,

I get the PT and UHD part of setting up an animation but when it comes to rendering the frames do you just specify how long you want each frame to render for in the Progressive Render Limits?

I guess you just have to do some tests beforehand to find out the optimal time for a frame?

Is that correct?

Cheers,

[maru]

That is correct, you need to make some tests, for example region-render the most noisy part. I would suggest using pass limit instead of time limit to make sure all the frames will render with identical quality.

[james_g_brown]

Yeah the passes is a good idea. Will give that a go.

Cheers!

[james_g_brown]

Hmmmm,

So I had a go and have been rendering some frames this morning on our small render farm and have one problem...

I calculated the UHD by using the attached settings and did every 25th frame to add to this.

I then loaded that in and sent my frames with a limit of 35 passes.

Everything was going ok however one of our nodes is taking nearly twice as long as the other machines to render a frame and then the lighting and noise looks different in that frame? You can see on the attached the frame on the right, which took longer, has much more visible noise on the back of the Macbook and to the chair in the foreground.

All our nodes are setup the same witht eh same version of Corona, Max etc...

Any ideas?

Have I created the UHD incorrectly maybe?

Cheers,

James

[maru]

This is odd. It looks like there is no difference other than the noise level. Does this node have the same system specs as all the other ones?

by the way, I would suggest turning down GIvsAA and LSM and increasing passes amount, currently it is 50gi samples and 150 (!) direct light samples per pass, which is probably too much

when rendering the final animation, you should also switch  uhd cache to "load from file" unless you want to load+append per every frame

[james_g_brown]

The node is exactly the same as all the other ones? I have removed it from the job and everything is fine. We only have a small farm so I do need the power of all machines. If you have any ideas please let me know?

The GI settings are a hangover from an image I did. I will look to turn them down. And yeah, I set the UHD to load rom file when I sent the frames to render.... :)

Cheers

[maru]

Do you have exactly the same updates (service packs) for 3ds Max and Windows (!) installed on all of the PCs?

[james_g_brown]

Yep. All the farm machines are setup in exactly the same way. Very weird how it was taking double the time to render?

[maru]

Random idea: when you go into task manager, aren't there 2 or more instances of Max running? Maybe for some reason it is doing the same job twice?

[james_g_brown]

There is another instance of max running, but this is to do with the Vray Spawner. Its not doing anything, just sitting waiting for a render.

[james_g_brown]

The Corona DR server was also running. I have turned this and the Vray Spawner off and am rendering some frames now. Will see if that helps.....

[maru]

DrServer must be running on all render nodes for DR to work. See here:
https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000501666

[james_g_brown]

I am not doing Distributed Rendering though? I have sent 200 frames through Backburner.

[james_g_brown]

It was going ok but then started to render the frames at twice the length of time again. I think I have figured it out though? The Backburner Server on the machine gave an error saying it couldn't read or write to the UHD file. SO I think the frame was computing the GI from scratch. Hence taking twice as long...

When I send frames and load in the UHD should the After Render box be as per the attached. So 'Save to File'? That is how I sent it so maybe some machines are trying to save to it at the same time and crashing? Should it be set to Discard?

Cheers.

[maru]

It would be probably safer to switch to discard. Are you sure that the node can access the uhd cache file?

[james_g_brown]

It can as it did 10 frames just fine, then gave the error about loading the HD Cache from file. From then on every frame is 8mins and noisier as per the image I posted earlier....