Overall fastest setup for animation?

[snakebox]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering if any of you have tried to render out animation in normal "heavy" interior scenes where you have decent settings and a fair amount of passes..

I have tried all (to me) logical options in terms of quality, and pt+pt / pt+hd , bucket or progressive etc, and overall it's just painfully slow, unstable as hell especially when using distributed, when rendering multiple frames locally, sending it to the network is even worse (using Deadline), as I just get errors and crashes.

So I am curious to what approach you fine folks use to get anything out in a reasonable time frame?

Thanks

p.s. using the latest daily build.

[Ludvik Koutny]

Latest daily is nowhere near stable and usable. And for animations, you should never ever use distributed, but let each computer render different frames.

PT+HD is not flickerfree. So either you have to precompute it and save it, if nothing in your scene moves, OR use PT+PT.

In animations, it often pays off to lower MSI to about 5-10. Little more bias, but a bit more noise.

[snakebox]

Thank you for the reply.

I am aware of how animation should work... but I understand the daily builds are unstable, however I find the "stable" 7.1A even more unstable for general work.

I will try the settings though.

Also distributed works fine for animation if you render it locally, and let the farm help frame by frame, rather than splitting it all out. Anyway, using Deadline I have had 0 luck sending the animation to the renderfarm 1 node / 1 frame like you normally would (and as you mentioned). Everything just crashes.

I will try the 7.1A again too of course.

[snakebox]

I can't seem to find a way to ONLY calculate the HD cache, while saving it out?

it seems like you have to render the entire frame (full rendertime) to save it, and then render the whole lot again with interpolation?!  both in 7.1A and latest daily.  Or maybe I am missing something? I guess I want it to work like in Vray, but maybe it's not even an option yet? (I remember reading somewhere it was being looked at but can't remember if it was for release or earlier).

Thanks for the advice anyway!!

[snakebox]

uh! I stumbled across this post!

Excellent info too,

https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=4704.0

[snakebox]

Okay so I am confused as hell... I can't get anything to work properly within a decent time frame.
I have dug up all the old threads (all the way back to beta 4) to see what people did and used.

I have an animation inside an interior scene.. So pt-hd should be good, except im animating.. so pt-pt, but its slower and more noisy?!

Also settings I find really hard.. if I crank the GI/AA up to clean things out (32-64) It is impossible to render depth of field... so if I put it to 2 or 4.. I get so much noise its pointless to even try. Yes all this probably doesn't matter if I let corona run for 400 passes... but looking how long it takes to get even 100 passes on a 6 core 3.5 ghz, I would not want to do many seconds worth of animation.

So... that said.. logically pt-pt should be the way to go right? Is there anything at all I can do to control the noise levels?

i have done a fair few tests using pt-hd and saving out the hd, only perfect result I got was setting the precomp intensity to 0.2 under HD, and then rendering 120-150 passes. Perfect result, but also around 1.5-2 hours / frame depending on specs. in 720p :/

My concern is that, as great as corona is at creating sick looking stills, with perfect light and realistic looking camera noise..  sometimes you just need to get something out, fast.. that is clean, and maybe not 100% correct. I am assuming this option will be part of the 1.0 release at the end of the month? 

If anyone has any ideas or tips, Id love to hear about them!

Thanks :)