Rendering animated people

[Lightedlines]

Hi everyone,

For a recent architecturale visualisation film, I had to put some animated peoples in my scenes and render them.
It led me to several questions.

The first one is obvious : what is the best workflow to avoid flickering.

For my part, here is what I have done :

1 : 2nd solver set to UHD Cache
2 : preset animation checked
3 : precomputation : calculate from scratch and after render : save to file
4 : render (1sc) and save the uhd Cache
5 : precomputation : try to load an append and after render : save
6 : launch final render

So this workflow gave me some good results when I'm rendering in local, except some flickering happening when peoples were far and close from each other.
But the big problem was when I sent these files to a render farm (rebus), wich didn't seem to care about the load + append even though I asked them repetedly, they never really answered.
So I hope some of you can indicate me a better way to render animated peoples and to deal with render farm or maybe you know one that gave you good results on a similar job ?

Regards,

[vblackrender.]

After set the UHD Cache to "Animation (flicker-free)", I would leave the "Precomputation" on "Calculate from scratch" and "After render" on "Discard".

You will loose few seconds on each frame, but this method is the safest for me. Never had issues this way and you should have no problems on a renderfarm.

[Lightedlines]

Hi vblackrender,

That's actually what I was doing on my first tests, and it is working most the time but in certain cases like when the character and the camera are moving toward each other, the fliockering comes back...
What render farm are you using ?

Cheers

[maru]

Do you know where exactly the flickering comes from? Are you sure it is from the GI? Maybe it is displacement, or some other feature causing this?

Regarding render farms and the UHD Cache save/load options - we do not see any technical reason why render farms would not support saving the cache to a file and then loading it for all frames. It is similar to just saving the output image file, which they all support. On the other hand, if a render farm decides not to support some feature, it is outside of our control. My advice would be to contact Rebus support again - we (as Corona Renderer support team) have very good experience with them, they are super professional, and trying to resolve the issue with them. Maybe they can suggest some other solution than saving the UHD file.

[Lightedlines]

I'm not exactly sure where it comes from, there is no displacement applied to the people, but it could be the normal map wich needs to be checked by the corona converter.
The thing is that when i render the peoples (only) with my local computers it workd fine.
Concerning the workflow, does it seems right to you ?

Regards

[vblackrender.]

What render farm are you using ?

I am using garagefarm, the support is very good and fast the most times, maybe you could try. You have free trial when you register there. Give it a try, other than that, I dont know what can cause that problem.