Animation in Corona / basics

[Michał Morzy]

Hi,
I'm preparing for the first animations in Corona Renderer. As I have no experience in this matter, I would like to ask for advice.

Can you tell me how to set up the camera, render setup for animation? What to look for?

Do you set the camera in motion blur to ensure smooth transitions and no flickers? if yes, are there any settings we can use for starters?

How do you use corona denoising while rendering animation frames? Do you use it?  If so, do you add noise in post-pro?

And finally a technical question about post-production? What software do you use to create animations from individual frames?

I will be very grateful for your help!

[GeorgeK]

Hey Michal Morzy, well this depends on many things but somethings should be a standard when about to render animation with Corona.

- For starters and regarding your camera setup you might want to make sure that the exposure of your views corresponds to the preferred outcome for your animation, so that you won't end up having certain parts of your animation where the camera is set on a standard exposure number and you might experience highlight burning. This can be avoided with auto-exposure at an extent or simply by rendering a draft of your animation to make sure everything is right.

- Motion blur you might want to use for any moving plants/trees or moving objects in your scene in general, once again a draft test is suggested prior to production rendering.

- For de-noising I would suggest Corona High Quality for animation. More de-noising can be achieved (quite limited) by after effects later in post production or some other pos-edit software.

- Preferably render your frames to stills, it's much safer and way better alternative than exporting video directly from your 3d software.

Last notes you really want to pay attention too, if your scene is heavy and detailed you will want to fix certain options in your render settings. If you use path-tracing/UHD then you might want to save your UHD pre-computation ticked with "animation flicker free" just to be safe, and load from file so that every frame won't compute a new cache. For exterior scenes I would suggest rendering with path-tracing/path-tracing.

On your render settings > system you might want to pay attention to your image filter, and in case you are going to use light-mix with high light values, or scene heavy in reflections/refractions. You will definitely need to increase your highlight clamping between 1,1 to 2,0 to avoid fireflies. Your render per/frame settings should be on Noise level limit, scenes with 3% or less are great usually for animations depending on resolution. Lastly make sure your scene is optimized clean of corruptions and bloated with track nodes, all your paths are properly set and the folder accessibility correctly set. Good luck.

[Michał Morzy]

Hey Michal Morzy, well this depends on many things but somethings should be a standard when about to render animation with Corona.

- For starters and regarding your camera setup you might want to make sure that the exposure of your views corresponds to the preferred outcome for your animation, so that you won't end up having certain parts of your animation where the camera is set on a standard exposure number and you might experience highlight burning. This can be avoided with auto-exposure at an extent or simply by rendering a draft of your animation to make sure everything is right.

- Motion blur you might want to use for any moving plants/trees or moving objects in your scene in general, once again a draft test is suggested prior to production rendering.

- For de-noising I would suggest Corona High Quality for animation. More de-noising can be achieved (quite limited) by after effects later in post production or some other pos-edit software.

- Preferably render your frames to stills, it's much safer and way better alternative than exporting video directly from your 3d software.

Last notes you really want to pay attention too, if your scene is heavy and detailed you will want to fix certain options in your render settings. If you use path-tracing/UHD then you might want to save your UHD pre-computation ticked with "animation flicker free" just to be safe, and load from file so that every frame won't compute a new cache. For exterior scenes I would suggest rendering with path-tracing/path-tracing.

On your render settings > system you might want to pay attention to your image filter, and in case you are going to use light-mix with high light values, or scene heavy in reflections/refractions. You will definitely need to increase your highlight clamping between 1,1 to 2,0 to avoid fireflies. Your render per/frame settings should be on Noise level limit, scenes with 3% or less are great usually for animations depending on resolution. Lastly make sure your scene is optimized clean of corruptions and bloated with track nodes, all your paths are properly set and the folder accessibility correctly set. Good luck.

Thank you! That is very helpfull.