Primrose Hill - Animation & Stills

[alexyork]

Hi folks,

Putting adaptivity and denoising to the test, this was rendered entirely using one of the recent daily builds and the render time savings were simply massive. Typically, before these tools, we were looking at around 250-300 passes per frame and approx. 30 mins per frame on our workstations. With A&D enabled this dropped to 50-85 passes per frame and 7-11mins per frame. Massive time-saving and no issues with flickering/weirdness/loss of detail.

For us the main thing that could be improved here would be a simple include/exclude option so we can enable/disable denoising where needed in a shot.

If anyone has any questions about our workflow let us know. Hope you enjoy ;) (Video best viewed with sound up!).

http://www.recentspaces.com/work#/primrose-hill/  to see them larger.

Cheers,

[johan belmans]

well done!

[Rhodesy]

Wow thats really beautiful and really clean! Those times are pretty darn quick even on a dual xeon. Im really struggling on an internal animation at the moment - sadly only on the C4D version so no adaption. Im still quite noisy at 30mins on my workstation at 720p. Any tips for optimizing internal animations? Im using portals which has made a difference but its still quite slow. Im also getting noise in direct light from the spot lights which I find odd and changing the AA/GI balance doesnt seem to help much just makes it longer to render each pass so it looks cleaner but takes longer. I am using some IES lights and sunlight/env is HDRI, I don't know if thats slowing me down. The external shots are pretty quick and need much fewer passes. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cant wait for denoising! Thanks. 

[iainbanks]

Thanks Guys, much appreciated.

Rhodesy - Pretty quick indeed, for the animation we stripped out everything that was unnecessary for the shots to speed things up.  Portals are great to help clear up noise.  I'm not familiar with what version of C4D is on but if its an older version of Corona then i know it wasn't the best at clearing up noise from IES lights. Best to just let it render in this case.

We generally use Corona sun and sky for these types of interiors so maybe try switching out your HDRi for the corona sky and see if that improves it a bit.

Also do a Albedo element pass to check that all your materials are behaving correctly and don't have any extreme whites or blacks.

Hope that helps

Iain

[Rhodesy]

Thanks so much for your help Iain, im a big admirer of your work (who isn't!). Yes checked the albedo and all is above board but I might try stripping out the IES for this to see if they are the culprit. I have quite a few lights in the scene to highlight certain areas and also thought that maybe having more light in the scene would help clear up the GI. But perhaps its working against me. Going to take some env switching gymnastics as the outside lighting works really well with the HRDRI. I will try and strip everything back though. Sadly myself and the architect are at odds with the client on camera paths, with them favouring the literal tour of the building which leaves less room to hide unresolved stuff.

The C4D version has the 1.4 core but still missing some key features.

Thanks again, Rob

[bluebox]

Great stuff guys, I'm a big fan of your works, keep posting !

[alexyork]

Thanks guys. Appreciate the kind words.

[Abderrahmen Ezzine]

Realy nice Work well done !! my questions are
What's your work flow softs and what are the specs of ur work station so i can compare and have a predictible time ?
Thanks alot

[alexyork]

Realy nice Work well done !! my questions are
What's your work flow softs and what are the specs of ur work station so i can compare and have a predictible time ?
Thanks alot

Thank you. Nothing unusual at all - just standard max 2016 with corona daily build, post in AE, running on dual xeon E5-2670v3 workstations (12 core at something like 2.3 or 2.6 not sure).

I would run the corona 1.3 benchmark and then compare against our entries (look for Recent Spaces on page 2 I think). That should give you a fair idea for comparison.

[JonG]

Nice set of images and video!

One thing distracts me though... The tiling on the ceiling in the first image.

[guest_guest]

@alexyork

what's your Adaptivity / denoiser settings??

[alexyork]

@alexyork

what's your Adaptivity / denoiser settings??

JonG - hah, fair point. Thanks for mentioning!

Guest - Adaptivity is default, Denoiser is set to 0.6 rather than 1.0. Personally I think the default should be 0.6. It seems to be a sweet-spot for best results without causing artifacts.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Don't you miss those good old mental ray days? ;D

[erkuttaner]

Impressive work.Could you show us a frame of animation with and without adaptivity/denoiser at same amount of passes?

[alexyork]

Don't you miss those good old mental ray days? ;D

At the time I loved MR. Gave talks on it, even. But no, I don't miss it :)

Erkuttaner - many thanks. I don't think we have any frames saved out with no denoising for this project but keep an eye out for an article soon with comparison images just like this.