Net render and Camera animation GI

[valentine12]

Hello,

I have the same problem, have you found the solution ?
Bad flicking on all my frame... It seems, it doesn't well register the IG cache...

thank you
Valentine

[dann_stubbs]

What on earth am i doing wrong ? I setup my scene with gi IR+QMC camera animation, GI lock is off autosave is on at the default location - i cannot set it to the shared netrender folder as the job has not been created yet; and save the file.


shouldn't you be setting it to IR + QMC NET Render if you are rendering GI with NET Render?

that will make all the clients race to generate the GI at the same time - with the fastest then submitting the complete GI solution to the rest of the render clients to use for the rendering.

the camera animation while works on one render client - when spread across three will have each render client generating it's own GI solutions which won't match (i.e. worse flicker)

(by the way... good luck with that setting - i personally can't believe that the IR + QMC Net Render option passes for a solution to the problem it is terribly inefficient)

dann

[Arjen]

GI set to IR + QMC NET causes all kinds of problems for me. Not only when rendering on the net, but also when rendering on one machine. Flickering, artefacts, you name it. Tried all settings, read the entire internet on the subject but no decent pictures so far. For my current project I re-did my entire project to exclude GI alltogether.
But Dann, if this setting is not an option, than what can we use with GI and NET? In my case both the objects, lights and the camera move, so I'm kind of lost...

Arjen

[dann_stubbs]

GI set to IR + QMC NET causes all kinds of problems for me. Not only when rendering on the net, but also when rendering on one machine. Flickering, artefacts, you name it. Tried all settings, read the entire internet on the subject but no decent pictures so far. For my current project I re-did my entire project to exclude GI alltogether.
But Dann, if this setting is not an option, than what can we use with GI and NET? In my case both the objects, lights and the camera move, so I'm kind of lost...

Arjen


believe it or not - the best setting and i have seen it used with 98% success (i.e. good image and no flicker)

is the IR + QMC Still Image

seriously - i've used it and had many RK users try it after 1. seeing countless hours of GI cache processing and 2. crappy results with the IR + QMC NET Render

it seems to be the winner to me.

dann

[Arjen]

As soon as time permits I'll try that. One thing I see when using IR+QMC NET and rendering on one machine, between frames it says something like 'updating irradiance cache records'. This can take up to three times it takes to actually render the frame (including the time to render the IR) and seems to take longer for each frame rendered.
I don't have a clue what it is doing then, but is this also happening when using 'still image'? I would do a quick test to see for myself, but all my machines are crunching frames at the moment and ah, was that the deadline going by?

Thanks,

Arjen

[dann_stubbs]

As soon as time permits I'll try that. One thing I see when using IR+QMC NET and rendering on one machine, between frames it says something like 'updating irradiance cache records'. This can take up to three times it takes to actually render the frame (including the time to render the IR) and seems to take longer for each frame rendered.
I don't have a clue what it is doing then, but is this also happening when using 'still image'? I would do a quick test to see for myself, but all my machines are crunching frames at the moment and ah, was that the deadline going by?

Thanks,

Arjen

yeah that is the issue with the NET option - on anything other then a few frames the huge data sample stored in the GI cache file becomes overwhelming... as it gets a sample, checks for it, adds it and then loads it for the render...

just too much overhead to be of much practical value to me...

with the still image option it does a nice high quality image and i've found the differences between frames (in 95% of most scenes i've run) are so small that flicker is not noticable...

i hope you have success with this option - i've had multiple users run jobs from R11 in 11.5 using this "still image" setting and it's been perfect - and it was a nightmare of fighting flicker in R11 - also a few broadcast commercials have been rendered using it and all came out very nice!

please post back when you get a chance to try it. (also note that my farm is identical hardware - so this may contribute to the success - mixing any hardware, even slight may cause the variances in math to be more pronounced) and may be more flicker issue etc.

dann

[paulselhi]

The thing is finalrender CAN do true distibuted render within the framework of C4D. That is each client rendering a bucket of the GI and the render, clients work on the same frame together

If Cebas managed to do this YEARS AGO, then why can't Maxon implement this ?

OK it may have similar problems with synching large gi files, i am not sure as i don't have FR but the point is it can do true distributed rendering and for stills there is no need for the image spliting recombining method

[bandini]

If you are on a mac you can download the latest version of my Render Elements plugin. I ran into the same problem trying to render over net and recently updated the plugin to easily solve this problem.

Check here for current version:
http://adamswaab.wordpress.com/2010/02/19/render-elements-0-6-96-mac-only-for-now/

Video of using RE just for this purpose:
http://www.vimeo.com/9589420

[bandini]

Just to add, with camera-only animation this should be a very simple process - and very easy to get good GI without any flickering.

Just do a prepass on one machine and set your frame stepping to a reasonable amount depending on how much camera movement there is. On a recent job where the shots were 200 frames long, I was able to get away with frame stepping of 20, so GI was only calculated for 10 frames in the sequence. No reason at all to calculate 200 frames. Just do it on your main computer - should really only take a few minutes. You can even do some tricks like calculating the gi at half res, turn off anti-aliasing, etc. to speed it up.

Then load up the saved GI and send that off with your file to net render. The thing is net render expects the .gi file to be named exactly the same as your scene file with .gi extension and placed into an "Illum" folder. All of this RE will do for you automatically now. So, it really is quite easy and time-efficient.

Hope that helps.
-Adam

[stoiQa]

In my tests, of course I got flickering.

What made the difference, in my case, was Interpolation method set to Weighted Average, with animation qmc preset and all set to medium.

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