Good News: Reducing Vue Render Times

#24

Well, at least for me, one of my problems I solved myself.

As for my plants flying off the ground, I finally found that there is a setting for such things, which actually now I use all the time to determine how much embedded I want objects to be, like rocks and trees and whatever, which works really well.
As for the effect of the tower poles sticking up and strobing, I have found the exact same thing and it works from one frame to the next, back and forth, and this is BEFORE I send a sequence of images to compile into an animation.
I can scroll through the frames and see that on one frame the dead tree plant off in the distance on a hill is tall, and the next frames it’s cut short while the next after that it’s back to tall again and it keeps doing this untill you either get too far away or closer up.

So, that still is a problem and like he said, it’s a verticle thing, as this doesn’t happen for sideways items.

…md :slight_smile:

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#25

Mark,
I had one instance where the plants popped up at close range as the camera slowed to a stop. I hadn’t experienced it again since the first tests. Are your plants flying off the ground at distance or at close range?

On the AA problem. Another suggestion from E-On is to increase the render output and increase AA to max then reduce the final output to the desired resolution. Yeah, I’ll do that. :rolleyes:
With things not going so well at E-On right now, I am keeping my Vue animation work on hold.

#26

I think it might of been both, but for sure, it was at farther ranges,
that much I know for sure about.
Meaning the flying plants.

Haven’t had enough time to test out the closeness of plants, rocks and other EcoSystem
items to see if they react the way you mention during an animation or not.
I’ll let ya know what I see next time I get a second to try another animation out.

I AM having issues with the still crashing for no apparent reason with the memory bit,
and this time I took screen shots to send to e-on.

…md

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#27

Hey Rich

Aside from the strobing on the masts, I am noticing a lot of GI artifacts in your render on the trees. Reducing the quality of the GI creates a lot of problems with the photon emission. That is one of the shortcomings of biased GI. I am working at film res and this is a huge problem for me as with the sampling I need to get rid of it, the render times are enormous.

Does anyone know if there is a way to bake GI into the trees? I know with rocks you can bake, but it would be useful for trees (even though they move around).

#28

I wrote a tutorial on the render settings for Vue 5 Infinite to help reduce graininess and reducing the render time. It is more for stills rather than animation, but it may help…

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Peggy

#29

Hi Dave - I had a heck of hard time with the strobing. It appeared no amount of AA was going to allieviate the problem. Finally a tech person at E-On suggested that I double the resolution and then res down to minimize the strobe. Not a solution in my eyes as it only lessens the issue which doesn’t resolve it, and Vue takes long enough to render. Unfortunately I don’t see GI artifacts being addressed by doubling the render resolution. Especially if you’re already working at film res.

It has been a while since I’ve run animation tests in Vue. I will update to 5.10 and see if E-On has addressed the issue.

#30

Rich,

Would it be possible to use a thicker / hazier atmosphere on your project? The haze “should” mask the strobing. Or, you could use a different model which doesn’t have the antennas / strobing parts when the building is far enough away to cause the effect. Granted this is hiding the problem and not fixing it, but flickering things call too much attention to themselves while the lack of flickering usually goes unnoticed.

Best of luck,
SirReality

#31

Jeff - I haven’t tried increasing haze or atmospheric effects as those would require altering the end look of my scene. If it can be called a solution one shouldn’t render narrow vertical elements against a high contrasting backgrounds. That could mask the strobe effect.
One of my bigger problems arose in another (unrelated) scene when I rendered a flight of WWII fighters that have vertical antenna. Vue has an achillees heal in with narrow vertical details.

I’ve updated my copy of VueInf and intend to run some tests to see if this has been resolved.

#32

Hopefull that update will help… if not could you set the antenas up to be transparent based on distance to the camera? Then they would fade-in as the camera got close enough to avoid the flickering. I know this could be done in Lightwave, but not sure how to do it in Vue.

Good luck!

#33

Hey guys.

In studios, a good technique to get better anti-alias with not much render time plus is to simply lower quality and render it in double size, then half the size afterwords. It works perfectly.

  • Jack
#34

This is from a recent email from E-on:

No Flickering in Animations Trick

If you’ve ever rendered animations of EcoSystems, you’ve surely noticed that you need to push the anti-aliasing settings quite high in order to reduce the amount of visual flickering. This flickering is caused by the enormous amount of detail inherent to the EcoSystem technology: in the distance, you could easily have several thousands of polygons for each pixel in the final image! This amount of detail is what causes the flickering.
With all the different rendering options in Vue, it’s sometimes difficult to hit the optimal balance in terms of render time vs. flickering. However, you may find the following to be a good starting point for your adjustments (keeping in mind that flicker-free rendering of detailed EcoSystems will always require long render times):
Turn off texture anti-aliasing and use systematic geometry anti-aliasing with only a few rays per pixel (typically 4 rays/pixel). This will be enough for the render engine to pick up areas where there is a lot of detail. By setting the max number of rays and the quality threshold to very high values, you will instruct the render engine to spend most of its time on these areas.

#35

rgdigital - thanks for that. I was told pretty much the same by their tech support about AA issues. I’m looking at Standard ntsc here. I know that Vue can be problamatic (stability wise) at Higher Resolutions. SO if working in HD that odubling for resolution could spell disaster. Will have to run tests on that.

On another note - Vue 6 Inf looks to deal directly with this Vue5 Inf problem out of the box. So “Maybe” less work arounds albeit the mention of looong render times.

Read under - [i][b]Flicker-Free EcoSystem Rendering Technology

[/b][/i]Vue 6 Inf Features

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#36

mmm… a little question about vue 5 & 6…
About 5, I can’t find the Advanced Animation options, so maybe it sounds stupid, but where is it?
And about 6, these kind of problems with renders taking tooo looong is resolved?

#37

Guys is this issue with heavy flickering solved in v6.
Ive seen few animation done in Vuw with Ecosystem and the flickering was horrible…

#38

flicker free? not by a long shot… has anyone gotten this to work?
we really need to figure this out for a very serious project. and we have more flicker
then the TV in the poltergeist movie

#39

I do not know how many people do not believe me about this. It save so much time!

Also, now that you have a larger image, it is easier to clean certain problems as well…

Of course there is an extra pass to downsize, but since most peopel have a quick color correct or adjustment so adding the downsize is a no brainer.
M

#40

hey titan do u have samples you have done using this?

#41

I do not have a before and after. I will see if I can make you one tomorrow.

While waiting, take any image, say a photograph that was shot at a high ISO and just downsize it. The grain gets sampled out. For fun I shoot a lot of photography, and I shoot with the 16 megapixel Canon 1ds2, and if I take an image at ISO 3200 and post it on the web downsized, it looks perfect. However, masking on the larger size is easier.

M

#42

I would be curious to see what your settings you are using.

#43

Okay here are the test I had one of the guys did. He did it in C4D but we get roughly the same results across all our aplications.

Obviously to see the difference, I can’t compress it. So here is a link to 4 different render showing the different versions, with the settings on each page… (The files size is about 25 MBs.)

http://www.rendertitan.com/RenderTITAN AA_testrenders2.zip

On the image that is Quad-Sized, I downsampled it already so that all the images are the same size for comparison purposes. I also included adaptive sampling for comparison as well. Adaptive is not bad for a still, but for an animation it flickers very badly.

Also, the Quad-Sized version aso holds mode detail. It seems that the render holds the detail at that rendered intent resolution so the Quad-size is Quad-Detailed and can be seen in the downsampled one as well. It also seems that the Quad size treats the scene better, which is most noticabl in the front center with the blue reflection.

Render fast but render smart!
Mark
RenderTITAN

EDIT: The render times are at the bottom left of each image.