Greetings to all Octane users,
I have used V-ray for still images with Rhino until now. For my diploma project i wanted to do an animation though. While Vray is not that slow in exterior scenes, it slows down incredibly in the interiors. The Quality is also not so great in my opinion.
For this video, my dual xeon (16 physical cores total) PC neded incredible 12,5 hours. Unfortunately video still flickers and has light artifacts.
My question would be, does it make sense for me to try out octane for this task with let´s say two Geforce 980-Ti?
It is the only alternative that comes up to my mind if I want to stay in Rhino environment. Even though chaosgroup is working on Vray 3.0 for Rhino I am also tired that vray for rhino is at the bottom of the priority list for chaosgroup.
flickering can be avoided by working with GI caches (if your scene is static). Also 16 cores sounds great, but at 1.8GHz I wouldn’t expect so much.
I use Vray all days and bought Octane for a high res product animation in direct light mode. In this case the speed was great. For interiors I would try use the direct light with ambient occlusion lighting like here:
But a problem could be the noise at glossy surfaces. Full GI could be much to slow. So, maybe optimizing Vray options/scene and using GI cache is the better choice. I would run some tests with the Octane demo.
I miss the focus of VfR developing too, but I see no general alternative for Vray.
thanks a lot for your tips. I have been using vray for Rhino a lot, but gosch i do not know what you mean by GI cache, I do use Irradience map Incremental mode, if that is what you mean, somehow it still is super slow. I think it is actually the perforated facade that makes it all so complicated to calculate.
The reason I am asking is I owe no CUDA card so, I would need to make some investments first.
I use Octane and love the results, but have to admit I haven’t tried VRay.
If you don’t mind sharing your file, and if there aren’'t too many textures involved
I could try rendering it on my system overnight. I use three different graphics cards
for rendering on two networked computers with a total of approx 3800 cuda cores,
which isn’t as much as two 980’s but works for me.
I haven’t got a Bongo license but could simply do a fly through animation.
How many frames were you rendering in the 12 hours ?
hi Ben,
that is the alarming issue, it were only 36 frames! I cannot render my diploma in this pace and unfortunately the video still had some flickering that bothered my eye. I will download octane demo and prepare the scene on my old quadro 2000 for you so that you have to only press a button.
There is only one texture, but it can stay a plain colour too, i do not think that is the real slow down cause. I will post the file here soon.
And thanks a lot for the nice offer and great new 2016 to you too.
d.
Happy to give it a go, what sort of light sources have you got ? Are you sure you can work out the Octane settings quickly enough to set up the light/emission materials etc ?
At the moment vray sun + environment sun map and 4 interior rectangular vray lights, I thought I would give it a try myself first, is the set up too difficult?
It’s not too bad, you may have to reduce the aperture, control the sun via the Rhino menu and create an octane material for the lights, you can download some materials from the octane database to give you an idea of the settings.
I tried to set up the lights, but you may have to fiddle around a bit with them. For some unknown reason, octane kept crashing when refreshing the view window.
What rendering method are you going to try out? I know that pathtracing takes longer, still it would be interesting to give it a try.
Here is a trial at 1000 samples at 1920x1080, which took about 90 seconds in direct lighting mode. Just trying path tracing now - much slower, says approx 12 min at 1k samples, ceiling is much more pink, which makes sense I suppose.
Do you find this acceptable ?
All your materials are quite matte, is that intentional ?
The straight curve and point at bottom of the stairs where for the path animation ?
Is that sufficient or what did you have planned ?
What resolution and how many frames did you have in mind ? And frame rate ? 25 ?
Hi ben, it looks really nice, And 90 Sec. is a really comfy time for one frame.
I wonder about pathtracing result. 12 min is a bit long though. Perhaps lower sample number would be sufficient? Is 1000 actually some kind of minimum?
My deadline in in mid. March so still enough time to experiment. I could imagine to go with Direct light (AO) or even Direct Light (Diffuse). Whole project is intended to be in a candy cartoon style, so hyperrealism is not needed.
Are there any issues with flickering when direct light is used in animations? Flickering is a problem wirh Vray often.
I render @ 15 fps and than interpolate to 30 fps in after effects. Saves some time but keeps smoothness. could we try out maybe 30 frames in direct light (diffuse) mode ?
I have already defined the animation, if it got deleted than i used the curve in front of the stairs for simple fly-through animation. (without target point)
I tried outputting a sequence, but am getting some artefacts -
I set a different camera path and target and at the start it’s a bit jumpy,
at 30fps without interpolation. No flickers except for the starry ceiling -
is that what bothered you or other areas as well ?
Rendering lights in the pink funnels slowed the whole thing down, because
the extra lighting needs more samples (2000) to get rid of noise, ideally could be
even more. Diffuse direct lighting takes about 3 minutes per frame at 1002x602.
So that’s only 20 frames per our, which isn’t great, and HD would take even longer.
Hope what I am doing is of some use, I usually do exterior renders with a daylight
environment and am not that familiar with all the different Direct Lighting settings.
Will still render overnight and then send you a short sequence.
Hi Ben,
thanks for an update. 3 minuter per frame are still fine. better than what I was getting here. I think I will go for octane for this project and wait to see if vray 3.0 (under developement) brings some improvement (it should). Worst case, I will shoot interiors in AO mode. I also do not mind the noise that much. I think, some of it sure can be removed in after effects.
About the flickering, in Vray there is a setting for the quality of antialiasing (called Image Sampler), the denser sampling removed the flickering in the “starry ceiling” but increases render time. Is there such a setting in octane?
Flickering only in this region is not the worst, after all stars do twinkle. (increasing resolution to HD may improve the situation)
If I could ask you for the last favour, could you render out 30 Frames in Diffuse Direct Light Mode (1080HD) @ 2000 Samples and send me the animation. I use mostly h.264 for decoding.
No worries, I will just finish the 1002x602 sequence and then do the HD trial tomorrow.
Will have a look at the antialiasing tomorrow - at present I am taking the sequence into
blender to output the movie clip and I think there is an antialiasing option in there as well -
or do you think it’s antialiasing in the rendering itself ?
I think it is the renderer option. 3d program should be responsible for antialiasing within the modelling viewport. Like I said, do not worry about it too much if it is only the ceiling, it has plenty of small lights, so it is hard to bypass, I think.
Hi Daniel,
attached is a sequence at 1002x602.
For some reason it was a bit jumpy when outputting as avi, then I tried mov and it is smoother, no idea why.
Hi Ben,
looks lovely, is that diffuse mode? May I ask about the rendering time? It also seems it is more than 30 frames(7 seconds), am I right? I think that is enough evidence for octane as the renderer of choice.
Big thanks for helping out.
daniel