Ideal settings for Animated Film Title Sequence

[Lwmotion]

I'm a commercial animation art director. I'm loving what you guys are doing with Corona render. I'm in the early stages of producing a 30 second cg film title for a short film series and am considering using Corona Render V7 instead of Vray for 3dsmax. It seems pretty intuitive, easy to use, and fast but am concerned about the ideal settings for flicker free animation with good render times. My project sequence takes place in the dark interior of a vintage jukebox with moving mechanical parts and colored film noir style lighting. If I can get some great idiot proof settings and suggestions, I think I may use Corona instead of Vray.

Thanks in advance for any and all help,

Lawrence.
www.lawrencewyatt.com

[tomislavn]

I'm a commercial animation art director. I'm loving what you guys are doing with Corona render. I'm in the early stages of producing a 30 second cg film title for a short film series and am considering using Corona Render V7 instead of Vray for 3dsmax. It seems pretty intuitive, easy to use, and fast but am concerned about the ideal settings for flicker free animation with good render times. My project sequence takes place in the dark interior of a vintage jukebox with moving mechanical parts and colored film noir style lighting. If I can get some great idiot proof settings and suggestions, I think I may use Corona instead of Vray.

Thanks in advance for any and all help,

Lawrence.
www.lawrencewyatt.com

I think you might actually be ready to go with the default settings :) - Haven't done any animation yet with Corona, but I always get the best "stills" with the defaults.

[juang3d]

If you want to use HD Cache you'll have to cranck up some values, I dont remember the name right now, I'm not at the computer, but are the three values at the right of the HD Cache settings, the position, normal and the third one.

Put those to 4,70,4 respectively, this will avoid flickering, it's working pretty well for me and I'm doing a complex animation inside a house were practically everything is indirectly lighted.

Cheers.

[romullus]

It would help to know what kind of animation is planned. Does it involves moving goemetry, will there be a lot of indirect lighting, etc.

Anyway, here's some topics about animation on this forum. You may gather some useful info:

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,1974.0.html
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,205.0.html
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,3739.0.html
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,4263.0.html

[Lwmotion]

Thanks for the links and suggestions. Romullus I thought I made it clear in my initial post about the nature of the animation but the entire sequence takes place in a vintage 1960's Jukebox,
so you'll see all the mechanical action. Gears turning, record carousel whell rotating, mechanical arm moving and transporting a record to a turn table, etc... I attached a basic lighting and
depth of field test render as well as a screen grab of my settings as reference. It took about 30 minutes to render this 960x540 frame on my machine. I really wish there was more of a
streamed lined workflow for us in the commercial/film animation business. Seem this render is largely marketed to the Arch Vis industry. I'll try reading through your links again.

Thanks,

Lawrence.

[maru]

Are you using DOF inside Corona?

I can see you have a dark "interior" here with lots of glossy surfaces and strong DOF.

I would start with something like this, these are just suggestions:
-disable secondary solver (set to none) - as you have virtually no visible GI bounces (or maybe?)
-GI/AA = 8
-LSM 1 or less if this won't cause more noise (maybe 0,5)
-you can try lowering MSI and ray depth if it brings some performance improvement

And use progressive, not buckets.

[Ludvik Koutny]

I think disabling secondary solver instead of setting it to PT will do more harm then good. As secondary solver also takes care of reflections, refractions, etc...

Settings that LWMotion has posted are actually really good start. I would just decrease Light Samples multiplier to 1, and in bucket setup, i would try 6 initial samples, and 3-4 passes.

And yes, if the DoF is in Corona, and not post process, then i would also decrease GI/AA to 8.

[Lwmotion]

Thanks Rawalanche &  juang3d for the solid advice. I'll give these settings a try.

Lawrence.

[Lwmotion]

Need some technical feedback on my test render (attached). I'm having some serious issues with depth of field sampling.
I've attached my Corona settings which I thought would be high enough to resolve this issue. I attached my Vray
camera settings for reference. I'm also having material issues like my glass doesn't seem to have the dark refractive quality
in the thicker areas (not using thin walled option.) I'm still dialing in materials and lighting but I need to figure out what's going
on with depth of field sampling. I actually plan on making the depth of field even more shallow with maybe a F2 lens setting as
apposed to my F5 now.

Render times are also not that great (about an hour, see test render attached). I'm in the animation business so an hour a frame
should yield a usable final image. Any and all technical help would be appreciated.


Thanks,

Lawrence.

[Lwmotion]

I think I may be onto whats causing the crazy noise, I'm using a red Corona rectangular light in the background with Directionality cranked up to 1.0.
Just discovered this glitch in the documentation. Any other help and tips would still be appreciated.


Thanks,

Lawrence.