Corona vs Vray: moving object animation and rendertime comparison

[spdb]

Hi all!

Here at work, we decided to test corona for animation, and compare the results both in quality and rendering time.
For the same number of frame, Vray took only 3 hours to render this scene. Preset were quite low, rendering first the animation in flythrought mode, then the moving object with sphere fade method.
In corona, it was quite much longer.... At 9 hours of render time, only 83 Frames were rendered...
Our setting were PT-PT, PTS at 64 and MSI at 5.0 (in our test, the best setting to avoid noise in some dark part...), 50 passes for each frame.

It is rendered on a 6*bi-xeon render farm.

Corona result:

Really good lightning, no flick or weird moving noise, but 40/45 min per frame at 720p, it 's way tooooo looonnnngg....

Vray result:

Fast, but still noisy in reflection, but faaassstt....

No PP for both animations. At the moment we are rendering again with default PT-PT setup (still 50 passes), and we'll see the result. We also expect to test PT-HDCache test to see if we could reduce rendering time.

[cecofuli]

You are comparing two different engines

PT+PT  vs , i think, IM+LC

Try to use QMC+QMC in VRay and tell us if the speed is the same.  ;-)

[spdb]

Yeap, probably... But we are testing Corona to see if it's possible to use it as effective as we use Vray for our production (short deadline...). We can't wait 40 min for a single frame, and maybe some users will be interested with some settings tests...

[gootman]

You are comparing two different engines

PT+PT  vs , i think, IM+LC

Try to use QMC+QMC in VRay and tell us if the speed is the same.  ;-)

True, True, man:-)

[cecofuli]

If you cannot wait, use VRay =) Right now, there isn't a different solution.
Corona has a very good quality in PT+HD, but nothing similar IM.
Also, Corona has a very big problem in the noise pattern in animation (flickering)

LINK

[juang3d]

Try the same shot wit PT+HDcache, you will see pretty different render times.

Bear in mind taht you have to configure it correctly, the three values at the left of the HDCache settings must be higher than they are by default to avoid flickering, speciallythe position sensitivity (I don't remember the name) it should somewhere around 60 or 80.
I've rendered my last project with this and I'm very happy with it.
Anyways I think render times may be higher than with Vray, but IMHO quality is also a lot higher and man-time is a lot lower.

Cheers.

[spdb]

Hi, we are testing this weekend different solution (PT-HDCache, PTPT with less sampling...). We are here very interested by Corona, and we try to find the most efficient way to render animation, and not comparing 2 differents methods...
We just compare workflow and efficiency in our pipeline.
For me, Corona produce much more beautiful reflection, light, etc...  It would be great if we could render animation in the "same time" as we did with Vray for production. (something like 10 min per frame would be great...).

[cecofuli]

10 min/frame with Intel I7 970 @ 4.0Ghz ( 6 core, 12 threads) in FullHD (but also in HD), as Corona is now, it's impossible.
With a lot of trees, details, grass etc... in HD, in my test, it's about 30-40 min for outdoor, because of noise.
For indoor shot, something near 1 hour/frame (and, I had noise pattern flickering =( )
But this is a Corona problem, that Ondra know (I'm talking about pattern bug).

Maybe, if you will buy the new  Xeon E5-2697 v3 (14 core x2 CPU = 28 CPU = 56 treads) you could have 10 min/frame ;-)
but the new Xeon E5-2697 v3 price is... $2702.00 for one CPU ;-)
Add MB, 64 RAM, SSD, Case etc... the final price could be about  >$7.000 ^___^
For the Xeon 18 core (E5-2698 v3 ), we don't know the price.
IMO it's better to what the new  i7-5960X ($999). It can run at 4.3 Ghz and with 8 core, it's very similar to E5-2697 v3 as power.
I cost less than half. Obviously, with Xeon you'll have 2 CPU in the same machine. But the final price could be x4 more.

[CiroC]

cecofuli, how long it takes to parse a scene with loads of vegetation?

[spdb]

Yeap... Intel knows how to make people dream....

This 40 min render time is actually made on one bi-xeon...
we have 6 machines like this, with DR it take 10min to render. (quite fast)

But it's with 6 computers, and we are searching to have optimized render time for one machine at a time (today 40 min/frame...).

We are testing other setup, I'll upload results on monday.

[cecofuli]

In Corona there isn't so much to do. We haven't a lot of parameters like in VRay or strange formula for AA, Subdivs, DMC AA, DMA sampler etc...
By the way, just leaf geometry instead opacity (if you can) and wait. That's all.
Parse a scene can be some minutes if scene is heavy.

[Nekrobul]

If you cannot wait, use VRay =) Right now, there isn't a different solution.
Corona has a very good quality in PT+HD, but nothing similar IM.
Also, Corona has a very big problem in the noise pattern in animation (flickering)

LINK

Actualy it is possible to get nice rendertimes in corona (i mean 10-20 min per frame for 720p) it requres a delicate aproch in material creation and ajustments. I always use PT+PT 4-8 PTsubdiv for animation some times increasing light sample multiplier to 20.

For exampe simple MB test 1.2km road with couple of multiscatters with animated trees (5 variations) and some static hipoly stones 200k-300k per one and a hell lot of displacement for the sand texture in the scene.

Render took about 10h for 20 sec on fps60 on my 3930K heated up to 4.1ghz per core.

[spdb]

Great render, and interesting setup, for sure we'll try this, thx for sharing...
I'm sure we can have decent render time, even with PT-PT.

[Nekrobul]

Great render, and interesting setup, for sure we'll try this, thx for sharing...
I'm sure we can have decent render time, even with PT-PT.

Render from the same scene with same setup to see the amount of geometry. and compare the render time. 4k res

[spdb]

Wow!! 13 min, that's interesting!

For sure i'll try your settings monday to see how effective it is!
On our render farm i'm sure we can get that 10 min render time/frame with good quality.

Will post the result asap it's ready

[spdb]

After some days tweaking and testing differents setting, we've reached to render frames in 11/12 min, without flickering or big noise problem.
We are quite satisfied with the overall quality.

I attached raw render and one slightly denoise with Nuke.

[cecofuli]

Can you share with us your settings ;-)
It looks very, very clean! O__O

[juang3d]

For video I prefer the "no-denoise" picture, the noise gives the video a grain effect that looks great to me, I don't like the cg-clean pics :)

Cheers.

[Nekrobul]

For video I prefer the "no-denoise" picture, the noise gives the video a grain effect that looks great to me, I don't like the cg-clean pics :)

Cheers.

Do not listen to this guy.

It is better to add film grain in post pro.

12-13 min i say not bad at all )

[spdb]

Frames were rendered by a render farm (6racks with bi-xeon E5645 @2.4GHz).
We used PT-HDCache, default settings for PT, we precompute HDCache first (about 20 min with settings below).

Please share some optimizations if you see some!

[Ludvik Koutny]

Those HDcache settings are ridiculous overkill, especially for an exterior scene. If you precompute HDcache, it won't flicker no matter what, with these settings, you just increase your precomp time 10 times without any noticeable benefit quality-wise.

[spdb]

We tried some lower settings for HDCache, but frames took 3 to 4 min more to be calculated.
And some low settings give us flickering in some dark spots...
We are learning Corona, maybe we could be better next time...

[Nekrobul]

It is better to use PT+PT for animation to maintain noise regularity.

[spdb]

Yes we tried, but render time to avoid noise were way too high (about 35-40 min)...
Still testing different setting found all over differents threads on the forum, but it's quite hard to find an effective method...

For the moment, we are quite happy with our frame render time, but we keep searching great setting to reach fast render..

[Ludvik Koutny]

That's strange. If HDcache is properly saved, it should not flicker regardless of settings. Nor should lowering HDcache quality make rendertimes longer.

[Nekrobul]

Yes we tried, but render time to avoid noise were way too high (about 35-40 min)...
Still testing different setting found all over differents threads on the forum, but it's quite hard to find an effective method...

For the moment, we are quite happy with our frame render time, but we keep searching great setting to reach fast render..

Key to time might be hidden in the materials.

First things eating rendertime are opacity maps and CoronaAO

[spdb]

Key to time might be hidden in the materials.

First things eating rendertime are opacity maps and CoronaAO

Yes i agree... I've tweaked quite a lot materials in this scene, cause it was roughly converted from Vray...
Unfortunaly, we have a limited full geometry trees and plants library, and our clients often have specific requests about vegetation.
We have a blend material driven by AO for walls, I reduced its sampling to something like 8, don't remember.
Maybe I'll do some tests without...

[Nekrobul]

Key to time might be hidden in the materials.

First things eating rendertime are opacity maps and CoronaAO

Yes i agree... I've tweaked quite a lot materials in this scene, cause it was roughly converted from Vray...
Unfortunaly, we have a limited full geometry trees and plants library, and our clients often have specific requests about vegetation.
We have a blend material driven by AO for walls, I reduced its sampling to something like 8, don't remember.
Maybe I'll do some tests without...

You can try to turn of texture filtering in devel\debug settings sometimes it helps a lot but its tricky and might bring out fire flys, but sometimes it decreases rendertime 2x 3x times.

Also you can chek albeedo white stucko material seem to be overlitt

[spdb]

I've checked albedo render element, and no problem with that ( some slight pink area on the windows ( white 210 or 220), otherwise everything great).
We've test filtering option on the dev panel, but it produce some fireflies on the moving guy...
I've read this thead https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,3649.0.html about geometry vs opacity render time, and this one https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,4640.0.html about filtering theory...
Well, quite a lot to study!! Thx for your advices and comments, great to see such an active community!