Messages

16

[C4D] General Discussion / Re: team render

« on: 2020-08-28, 15:48:32 »

You use Team Render just as you would with any other engine. Yes, Corona needs to be installed on all computers. You can run TR through "Team Render to Picture Viewer", or you can use the web server interface for Team Render (if doing the second, be sure to run the Corona Licensing Server).

Hey Tom,

probably this question has been asked... quite a couple of times. :)

However: I did my first Test with TR today and everything works fine.

BUT: the renders take longer with TR than only rendered on the host machine.
Host: Mac Pro 2019 / 16 cores / 48 GB RAM.
Client: iMac Pro 8 core / 32 GB RAM

I guess the culprit is the fact that I have run this test only over WiFi router... ???
I see that before a still render starts, the network takes some seconds to negotiate. After render is complete, it takes 1-2 seconds to "collect the chunks".
In a test-animation of 50 frames I made, it was difficult to judge, where the extra time came from. I guess also from sending data back and forth in the network?


Installing a local LAN-network would be the solution?
What do you guys recommend? 10 GB-switch is fast enough?

Thanks in advance & greets!

17

Gallery / Re: Boleo

« on: 2020-08-15, 23:26:37 »

Totally like your work!

Great color composition, as well as the light. Nice airy interior and interesting camera perspectives focusing at what is important.

Very cool !

18

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-14, 00:07:15 »

Best solution against flickering: render in much bigger resolution ( e.g. 2x ) and leave the pass number roughly the same.
Quality will be good... and even better if you are going to reduce the size when editing the footage.

Plus a tip I read from Maru: lowering the GI/AA, and applying sharpen/blur.
Gets rid of even more flickering / noise.


No more head ache.

19

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-13, 15:23:10 »

Load and Append should write to the same file, not creating multiple files.

Hey Tom.

Yep, that's what I would have expected.

However, I'm doing a test of that same animation at full resolution with the "Load & Append"- caching right now.

Already the first frames show WAY ! less flickering (same settings), compared with the "simple" Load From File - method.


Aaaargh... why have I not known it before this night 200 frames got ready rendered???
Shaaaait. :)))))



UPDATE: after comparing more frames between the two animations... the impression to have "less flickering" with the UHD "load & append", seems to have been just self-suggestion / illusion based on positive expectation.
If there is a difference, it is very minimal.


I`m gonna try to reduce the flickering in After Effects.

20

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-13, 13:34:11 »

Right - Load and Append only during generating the cache (where you don't have to have more than 1 pass, and can do it every 5 or 10 or 30 frames, depending on how much things are changing). Then just Load during rendering.

And yep, accounts for all camera positions. Basically calculates it and saves it, loads what it saved, calculates it from the new position and adds that in to what's there already and saves that, loads that and.... and so on :)

You can test it with a simple scene, e.g. a cube where camera circles around it. Just calculate and save while looking at the front face, when animation moves to the back face, there's no Cache calculated for it. With the Load and Append generate process, then Load during rendering, there's info in the Cache for the front face and for the back face (the Cache now has info for various camera positions stored in it).

Hey Tom,

thanks a lot! All these priceless informations that actually belong in a Corona-how to-manual. :)

Gonna check the difference between the two UHD cache methods.

The only point I don't fully understand is: what do you mean by "every 5 / 10 or 30 frames?
To jump through the animation very X frames and save&append the UHD - which creates several files... and then during the animation to manually change the UHD cache file?
I can't imagine that you meant like this. :)

Sorry if the question might be stupid due to my misunderstanding... but I rather ask stupid stuff instead of doing stupid things in the renders. :)

21

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-13, 03:29:55 »

Hey Tom, thanks for the explanation... despite it's late at night. :))))

"Load & append" takes all camera positions of an animation into consideration, from how I understand you?
Which should actually be a big advantage... ( that may even eliminate that flickering occurring due to every new frame / camera position change).

So, "load&append" is chosen only while generating & saving the UHD cache. After finishing the calculation of the cache, one switches back to "load from file" during the rendering process.

22

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-13, 02:58:22 »

Do those walls have bump on them? The Corona HQ Denoiser does less denoising where there's bump (to preserve detail) so that could be the reason, would be interesting to see some frames. Various things you could try, such as, a VirtualBeauty with even higher denoising and a mask for the walls (eg Denoising of 1) and compositing that super denoised version in post; or you could try one of the AI denoisers, which don't know about the presence or absence of bump in the scene so denoise equally.

Of course it might also not be rendering noise, it could be other things, such as just the bump catching the light differently from different camera angles, or displacement set to screen space rather than world space and changing resolution as cameras move. Again, impossible to say what kind of flickering/noise is present without seeing the result.

Also, is Sharpen/Blur used? That can help, if not.

Hey Tom,

thanks a lot for your reply & suggestions.

AI denoiser is already used in the scene for reasons you mentioned. I actually always use the AI denoiser, since it doesn't mess up bump maps & round edges.

Yes, a little bit of bump is used on the walls. But from that big distance, it actually should not have a visible effect... in my understanding, at least.
But who knows.

You mentioned UHD caching with the "load & append" method. What is the advantage compared to simply "load from file"-method?


Thanks in advance for getting back.

23

About this Forum / Forum topics - not visible on home page

« on: 2020-08-13, 00:44:47 »

Hey guys,

the latest forum topics are not visible on the Corona starting page anymore - like it used to be before.
At least not on Safari browser.
On other browsers I haven't tried it yet.

24

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-13, 00:41:49 »

One more question, Tom:

at noise level 4% I find many surfaces - such as building walls - to still show too much noise. In the animated camera movement it gets much more visible as flickering
compared to still images.

Denoiser is already at 0.8

UHD is cached. So I would expect even less visible noise & flickering.
Yep, "flicker free" is also on.

Going lower with the noise level to 2% or even lower is no option for me...in terms of render time going exponential. And I find in general this is e very extreme step.
Not everyone has set up a massive render farm.

25

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 23:08:42 »

Looks more like cache flickering, UHD Cache for example if you are using it. Make sure "Animation (flicker free)" is checked for the Cache, rather than "Still". You could also try calculating and saving the Cache. See https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000515648-how-to-use-uhd-cache-for-animations-and-stills-

Or you could try using Path Tracing rather than a Cache (or you could try the 4K Cache, if you are using Corona 6 RCs, just to see).

Hey Tom, yes... seems like it was caused by UHD as GI solver.

Switching to path tracing eliminates that ugly GI splotch-flickering. But: it also calculates ca 20% longer... :/



P.S. after having saved the UHD cache to a file, should the menu point "After Render" be set back to "discard" ? Or can it remain on "save" ?



EDIT: problem solved thanks to your hints, Tom.
Saved the UHD cache. Now those splotches are gone, PLUS the renders now take 11% less for every frame. :)
That's one hour less for those 200 frames and for sure 4-5 hours in the whole project.

Very cool !


General observation: using "path tracing" as secondary solver generates a visibly nicer, less biased light calculation.
But the increase of 10-20 % render time is not worth ist in this specific project.
For other projects I will consider it though.

 
Thumbs up to you Tom!
Again showing how great the Corona customer "doctors" are.
None of our questions is too "dumb" for you guys, you are always going help.

10/10 !

26

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 22:41:02 »

Looks more like cache flickering, UHD Cache for example if you are using it. Make sure "Animation (flicker free)" is checked for the Cache, rather than "Still". You could also try calculating and saving the Cache. See https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000515648-how-to-use-uhd-cache-for-animations-and-stills-

Or you could try using Path Tracing rather than a Cache (or you could try the 4K Cache, if you are using Corona 6 RCs, just to see).

Hi Tom, thanks a lot for your reply.

Flicker free is activated.

I did not activate saving the precomputation file because in my tests this resulted in visibly wrong GI on many surfaces.
It looked like there was an additional light source in the front of the scene...

Strange...


As GI solver at the moment I have the UHD on.

Gonna stop the animation and give it at try with the path tracing as secondary solver.



Regarding the 4K cache: is 6 RC already stable enough?
Would have loved to give it a try - especially for the 4k-cache... but haven't dared, since people report so many bugs.

I guess I'll give it a try anyway... :)



P.S. Would you recommend to lower the denoiser (0.8 currently), since my noise level is anyway set to 4% ?

Thanks in advance!

27

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 21:09:59 »

General question to all of you guys:

I do get some non-beautiful flickering, big splotches in some areas. Could it be from too high denoising (0.8) ?
This would be my guess.

In the yellow balconies.
Noise level is quite low... 4

28

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 18:02:53 »

BTW, never render to .mov or other animation format, always to a series of still frames, and composite into animation later.

- If the power goes out in the middle of writing an animation format, you have to start the render from the beginning. With a sequence of stills, you just start from the first still that was not rendered already.

- If you discover your animation compression is all wrong, you have to start the render from the beginning. With compositing stills, you can tweak the movie compression in post just by re-encoding the stills

And so on :)

Hey Tom, thanks for the tip. Yes, I had read about this a while ago in threads.

Gonna do it in future.
But right now I was too lazy to bother with one more step in the workflow. :)
The frickin project is already so complex that my mind says: "let me rest bit". :))))))


 

29

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 16:58:00 »

Hello Designerman77,

I have just tried to render a scene with 107 frames with both native C4D renderer and Corona renderer on Windows 10, C4D R20, Corona v6 RC2. Both have resulted in 0 loss of animation frames.
Can you please share some further information with us? Such information would include:
OS and Hardware specs
C4D and Corona version
scene in which the bug is reproduced

I will try and render the scene on Mac later today.

Thank you,
Jan

EDIT: logged internally @ 547459475

Hey Jan,

as mentioned meanwhile bit lower: I noticed that the frames seem to disappear during the render process - and seem to re-appear when rendering is finished.

If you save the movie manually during the render, your missing frames will also be missing in the saved video file.
And in case C4D or Corona might crash, of course no chance to get the frames that were "deactivated" during rendering.... as they only reappear at the end of the complete render process.

30

[C4D] Bug Reporting / Re: Animation - losing frames

« on: 2020-08-10, 16:53:14 »

I have tested it on Mac as well, C4D S22, Corona v6 RC2, still did not lose any animation frames.
Can you also attach a print screen of your render settings?

Thanks!

Hey, thanks for asking.

Render settings are left totally basic. Only the noise level is on 4.
Resolution: 1920x1080