Tips on achieving a Clean animation in less and 5 min per frame?

[cgbeast]

New to Corona.  How do I get a clean animation produced with rendertimes under 5 min?  Is it possible?

[romullus]

YES, if you want to render car on shadowcatcher in HD and NO, if you want to render interior or complex exterior in 4K. One thing is impossible for sure, is to give you meaningful answer with such little info provided.

[Noah45]

The results I'm getting for a 4-5min/frame animation is fantastic. End result of the 3min animation surprises my VRay friends. Deliverable is a 1080p smooth animation w/o noticeable noise. NDA's, of course for this international retail client prevents me from posting.

Intel denoiser/ some materials need modification (test them individually)/ all else set to 'default'

By contrast, the same images as stills are 4K/~40min (Noise level 5)

The turnarounds in retail are demanding so a <5min frame for animation was critical.

Edit: Intel 5960x/64GB

[maru]

You should first find out what is the biggest issue:
- noise?
- or anti-aliasing?
- or GI?
- or shadows?

When you know that, you can *try* using some extreme render setting values - but be very very careful with that, and always revert to defaults if there is no improvement!
For example, if you find out that most noise in your image comes from GI scattering on the walls, you can try setting GIvsAA in the Performance tab to 64. This should let you clean GI noise faster, but will make AA look worse.
You can then use Intel or NVIDIA denoiser to further clean up your image.
You can also save both denoised and non-denoised beauty using the CShading_Beauty render element, and then blend between them in post to see what denoising opacity works best.
More info on finding were the noise comes from: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000516731

[cgbeast]

I'm basically trying to get a handle on the best way to get acceptable, noise free frames at 1080p.  Should I set time to 5 min, should I set percentage, should it be passes?  Things like that.  I'm currently on a single machine, but my spaces are typically interiors, large open spaces, lobbies etc.  I was testing a small space...table, two chairs, and one window.  See render of space...see HD keyframe set to 5 min with corona denoiser.

[TomG]

It does "all depend".

If you are rendering the animation all in one go, then noise limit is best, as each frame will then be at a similar noise level. If you use passes or time, then as the camera moves from one room to another it may either be rendering too many passes for that room as it cleans up faster, or not rendering enough for that room if it cleans up slower. With noise limit, all the rooms will take as long as they need to get to a similar visual quality and give consistency.

But if you are dividing different rooms, scenes, camera angles up and submitting the renders for those sequences separately, you could test a single frame to find the needed number of passes for that camera angle/room/etc. and use passes.

If you absolutely can only spare 5 minutes per frame, for reasons of deadlines or machine availability, then set the time to 5 minutes. But then passes and noise may vary a lot from scene to scene and look inconsistent in the animation (but if you only have 5 mins a frame, that's all you have, and not much can be done about that in those scenarios - best to avoid those scenarios though ;) )

If time per frame is really an issue, make the most of denoising to get to a cleaner look for the image in less time. You might get away with higher denoising levels in an animation since all will be in motion and the focus is less on the absolute brilliance of the quality of each frame - best is to test a short sequence of 3 to 5 seconds and see, picking something with lots of fine detail, to see if the denoising blurs those details out too much or if that goes unnoticed while in motion. To save time testing denoising levels across short sequences, you could render to CXR and use the batch processing of the Corona Image Editor to apply different denoising levels without the need to re-render.