Improved Animation Support

[aaouviz]

Hi,

I've been making a lot of animations recently. Something sort of new for me. So, naturally now I have a feature request:

When saving the UDH file (to load from file for the rendering of each frame), why must we 'manually' do the saving first? Surely Corona could be smart enough to allow us to check a box that somehow renders the first frame (fully, with a fresh compute of the UHD), then saves this UHD cache (temporarily or somewhere specific for later use) and then continues the remaining frames using this self-created UHD?

The current process of rendering out a single pass render to save the UHD is awfully laborious. Especially when batch rendering animations...

Any feedback appreciated :D

[agentdark45]

Personally I'd like to do away with the UHD cache/animated UHD cache setup altogether.

Recently we've been doing a lot of animations with Fstorm with moving lights, objects and DOF with zero GI/AA flickering issues (and the speed is great too on a single 2080ti). The render times for the same scenes using Corona (on very good setups, even with heavy scene and sampling optimisation) was simply unacceptable.

Another point is that the animations somehow feel "smoother" in Fstorm despite both results being rendered at 24fps (with or without motion blur) - there's no choppiness on pans and zooms, but there always seems to be with Corona, and I end up having to use Optical flow to smooth out the Corona result. I think Corona really needs a revamp for animation purposes as the competition is hands down better. Case in point:

t=2s - this would be hell to render in Corona to achieve the same level of smoothness/cleanness.

However for complex interior/large exterior stills I still come back to corona for the vast plugin support and ease of use.

[aaouviz]

Agreed, fstorm does seem to be smoother.

Any other input from corona devs would be appreciated :)

[Fluss]

You can do the exact same thing in Corona. Use PT+PT (like Fstorm) and you're good to go, no GI pre-calculation. Now this is the debate between GPU and CPU. GPU is faster but limited by VRam. There is no perfect solution. Also, note that Fstorm heavily clamp GI to maintain fireflies (much more than Corona by default).

[sebastian___]

The Fstorm animation above is blurry and has motion blur (also 30fps), hence the "smoothness" , while a lot of Corona animations I've seen are super sharp, and extreme sharpness in a video is usually a no no.

[maru]

It's really impressive, and I would be genuinely interested in some technical details about that animation from Johannes:
- What exact hardware was used?
- What is the cost of the hardware used?
- What was the power consumption?
- What did raw footage look like (before post processing)
- What resolution was it originally rendered in?
- What was the original fps?
- Was there some kind of denoising involved?

Then we could take a look at Corona on a similar system (in terms of price, power, etc) and see if we could get similar results (in terms of quality, render speed, etc).

As to the "calculate UHD Cache for 1 second" workflow. We are aware that it's far from perfect. Hopefully it can be solved in V6.

[Fluss]

- What exact hardware was used?

Well it's two years old and I guess at the time he was on a 4x 1080TI setup.

- What is the cost of the hardware used?

So probably 4x the cost of a 1080TI when he bought them hehe :)
 
- What was the power consumption?

a lot
 
- What did raw footage look like (before post processing)

haven't seen it

- What resolution was it originally rendered in?

1080p

- What was the original fps?

do not know
 
- Was there some kind of denoising involved?

I think there was no denoising involved, Fstorm do not have denoiser and I never seen him denoise a render. They have beast PCs full of Titan RTX now and they always had beast machines.


What's really makes it working ->Real camera moves (it's a tracked footage), tone mapping for sure, animated DOF and exposure, motion blur and attention to details. Fstorm really is good at keeping details from distance (was mentionned multiple time already). Bloom and glare is also nice in fstorm. And that feeling of softness in the render while still keeping some details from far. And RESPONSIVENESS while working material -> GPU = instant feedback with a beefy computer, especially in that kind of scene.

I made some test some times ago and RAW images in Fstorm (no tonemapping at all) do not look better than what corona produce. So that's all about tone mapping and grading.

If you really wanna see how he usually works in Fstorm, check his patreon, there are some step by step videos. and also his youtube channel :

[aaouviz]

As to the "calculate UHD Cache for 1 second" workflow. We are aware that it's far from perfect. Hopefully it can be solved in V6.

Thanks for the consideration :)