I was looking with an avg. 1hr 10 minute frames rendering out to 640x480. I’ve cut that time considerably by adjusting the GI quality in ballance with the number of light samples used. A simple Photoshop Gausian blur of 0.5 would achieve the same look as the video still.
What was supposed to take 58 hours using 5 PCs has been trimmed down to 15 hours.
This is probably best used in a large panning outdoor scene like I am working on. Nothing stays close to the camera long enough to warrant the finer settings. The true test will be in seeing how the final render runs.
A Note:
I don’t know why, but the process of rendering to animation adds time to the render process by a few minutes.
I just encoded the latest test and it looks pretty promising. The grain isn’t as evident from the video compression, so I will up the Distance Blur on the next test.
In the Advanced Effects option its Default is 100 so I bumped it up 144 and increased the Harmonic Distance Quality to 60%. Everything else is at 50%. I am going to raise Distance Blurring to Intensity of 40% and Max Radius of .40
Thanks for sharing your findings as you progress along with Vue. For those of us looking to possibly add Vue Infinite to our toolsets, this is great information!
Saving to sequential images is also better because you can more easily do post work and compositing with them. In other programs, you run into longer times because of compression and whatever the program has to do to build the animation (temp files, etc.), so it’s probably the same in Vue.
Thanks guys. I did another test last night and expected to come in this afternoon to see it still rendering. I was surprised that I rendered more frames in 5 hours 45min. Fair being fair, it was a different camera using the same terrain but a different path.
I reduced the GI quality to -2.5 and ikept the number of Indirect light samples at 144.
>HELP< I am having a devil of a time figuring out how to smooth the camera rotations and movements. I can’t find the per keyframe adjustment. Any help would be appreciated.
Kevin, How are you able to save image sequences?
I can’t render my animations to TGAs. On E-Ons Infinite forums its been mentioned to be a bug.
I haven’t updated the software so maybe that’s why it works for me…maybe it’s a recent bug.
I just tried it again and I was able to quickly render out a sequence of TGAs …16 frames at 320x240.
Just in case for anyone not familiar … On Animation Render Options…Under Animation Limits… you can select Render entire animation if you’d like…Go to Channel Files, click on Browse and select Targa from the Save as …Animation Files dropdown list…enter your file name and check whatever other options you want and go to town.
I am still getting strobing on the building masts at a distance. I initialy believed the problem was related to the 320x240 res, but its evident at 640x480 even with increased AA settings. Bumping AA to 95% increases render time by 2x and doesn’t resolve the issue.
This is a problem because I have a series of bombers and fighter aircraft that have radio antennae and other thin details that I am concerned they will strobe at distance.
Any advice here would be greatly appreciated.
Another potential source for that kind of strobing effect is in the actual renderfarm. Windows boxes are particularly vulnerable to trash in the registry that never gets cleaned up. Exposed COM entries can destabilize a RenderCow, and anything that grabs the memory access from it can create strobing or other artifacts (in a fight between a foreground app and a background app like the Cow, the Cow loses every time, unless the OS is set to give priority to the background services). Since you’re rendering to targa, check and see if there is a correlation with the strobing frames; a consistent strobe (like every 10th frame, regardless) pretty much puts it in the controlling box and the apps there. A strobe that varies moves the issue out onto the farm, and it usually will be one box that is the culprit (based on a 5 node farm; there may be something in there that would expand the issue if you had a larger farm, but that is what I’ve observed on my systems).
It sucks having to deal with these kinds of problems. It almost appears that on random frames, the clouds are being rendered over portions of the antenna/mast.
Have you tried a test just rendering the building against a solid color background?
I can’t remember if you’re a Lightwave guy, but have you tried a similar move with said object using your primary 3D package to see if you’re getting the same problem there?
I had a similar issue once with LW (and NTSC) and had to crank up the motion blur in order to “fatten” up thin lines so they wouldn’t disappear between video fields. Your problem does however look different to what I was dealing with.
So, what do you suggest to eliminate this windows-related problem?
You can also change the priority of tasks, making background ones more important:
go to Task manager, select the process you want assign a higher priority, right mouse button, change priority.
For that problem, the solution depends on what the actual trouble is. If this is a dedicated renderfarm, then changing the priority to background tasks is a good first step. A good 2nd step is to use a 3rd party registry cleaner, like Norton Utilities, to find and remove all the dead shortcuts, dangling COM entries, and other detrius that Windows is notorious for. Almost none of the software existing cleans up after itself properly; install and remove something, and you’ll find a few COM entries and a couple of dead shortcuts at least. If I’ve isolated my trouble box and that doesn’t clear the issue, I uninstall the Cow, clean out the registry, then reinstall from the Vue install disk and let the app upgrade it. Infinite is pretty robust compared to previous versions of Vue, but it still has some vulnerabilities with packet collision. A sudden flood of network traffic can corrupt an update, giving you a time bomb. Infinite does a one-at-a-time approach, as opposed to the all-at-once of Vue and Vue4Pro, but you can still get data corruption if something on the network gets pushy, or you get a power flicker.
The best way to have a stable Windows install (particularly for a renderfarm) is to use a little application currently called XPLite. It turns most things in Windows into removable options. My current boxes have no IE, Outlook, a whole host of useless nonsense that adds load to the OS and takes up precious memory. A quick websearch will turn up the site it lives on.
EDIT[/b]: I think I know what may be causing the problem. It’s similar to the moire effect.
If you have astigmatism in your eyes, you may better understand the effect of thin concentric lines crossing one another. Its the same reason you shouldn’t wear tight pin stripes or fine lined patterns for a video shoot. The lines will creap/crawl into one another.
The masts are close and behind each other. They are also parralel to one another. In a rotation at distance they either blend or blink out. The further out as the masts cross each other durring the cameras pan, the greater the problem. I am running another test that rotates and pans up close to the tower.
[img]http://www.digitalworks.8m.com/Forumpix/AA_Problems_res_compare_01.jpg[/img]
In these two shots the camera is physically moved in close to the building masts.
Good news: [/b]The strobing is not a result of the render farm. A sequence of frames rendered from the same machine delivered the same results. If you can consider that good news. That’ snot to say that there may not be issues, but this one is not related.
Bad news: The side by side movie shows that the environment is not playing a role in the effect. The model rendered in Lightwave with medium AA does not exhibit the strobing effect.
Vue has a problem with strobing and I think its a result of the AA and Blur. The lightwave test presents a clearer transition from distance. The image shows the amount of geometry that strobes from one frame to the next. Increasing the AA does not resolve the issue. The model was also using double sided sufaces and single sided surfaces.
