Quote from: Bjur on November 22, 2012, 07:29:31 PM
It´s looking goood, m8!
I have a few questions regarding to your animation and animation settings generally..
- Were 82 atmo samples really needed if all is raytraced? If yes, why or because of what reasons?
Is it ray traced atmosphere? I didn't see that in his post. If so, then this is quite a mistake. If you were to render with AA16 and ray traced atmosphere than just about 2 or 4 samples is really enough.
Even without ray traced atmosphere 82 samples is pretty high. 32 or 48 samples is probably enough.
Quote
- Max bucket size: I tested different sizes a few times (no animation - Fill light setup, w/o GI) and i ended up with the standart 256 value for best average performance. Was 128 as bucket size rly working faster for you (over the time of some animation test-renderings for example or because 128 bucket size can handle GI renders better/faster)?
In my experience, and some others I believe, 128x128 is a bit faster.
You may be right though, that on average (many different type of scenes) it doesn't make that much of a difference.
Quote
- Quality Detail: I love to use 0.X5 values too. Is it just me or can someone confirm that such a value (straight at value ".X5") is looking more like the next higher value without to steal much more render time? Err.., for example: 0.64 is looking more like 0.6 in detail, but right at 0.65, all is looking more like 0.7 detail for me..
Quote
- May i ask you: What was your reason or benefit to go over ~AA 6 for motion blurred animations at high resolutions?
In some tests of mine high AA values were the reason my little, normally sharp looking picture, started to look kinda soft or muddy again. Beside the master of horror, the raytraced shadow itself, extra-high AA settings producing a lot of additional render time, especially in high resolution animation scenes i would bet..
AA16 can make things a lot smoother, but it also adds a lot of rendertime. It's a matter of determining how smooth you want it to have.
The smoothness of the result is determined by the pixel noise threshold. The lower the threshold the smoother the result *given that there are enough AA samples available to reach that result*(!!!).
This is quite complicated matter, but coincidentially I discussed this on Facebook with a couple of other members and I'll post it here:
What determines the final detail and noise = pixel noise threshold. This determines how smooth the result is.
The lower this number is the more AA samples will be applied (IF available!) and the smoother/cleaner the result.
With pixel noise threshold @ 0.15 the AA algorithm will stop @ 0.15, which is pretty noisy.
For instance: AA8 defaults with a pixel noise threshold @ 0.0375.
Thus 0.15 can *never* give better results than 0.0375.
The lower the threshold the better the result, IF there are enough AA samples available determined by the AA setting.
With AA16 @ 1/64th you will use a minimum of (16x16)/64 = 4 AA samples per pixel.
1/16 = 16 AA samples per pixel.
The lower the threshold the more samples you need.
What you need to find is which AA# (as a power of 2, ideally) samples down to the threshold the quickest.
The tricky part is that some parts of the scene don't need a lot of AA, so you should keep the minimum samples as low as possible, but if you keep it too low the algorithm needs to repeat the sampling too many times to achieve the threshold level and thus it takes longer. You would need to either increase the AA# if you use 1/4th sampling or only switch from 1/64th to 1/16th or from 1/16th to 1/4th sampling.
From 1/4th to full sampling can work, but there is chance that some parts of the scene needed more samples and those would be missed. Thus it is better to increase AA then.
I hope it is a bit clearer now.Well...it wasn't really....so:
What the pixel noise threshold does is stopping the AA application proces quicker / avoiding that if you use AA16 that all available 256 samples aren't applied, but stops as soon as the threshold reaches 0.15.
The higher the minimum samples the quicker you reach the threshold, but you may oversample parts that way and thus need lower AA or more adaptive sampling (1/16th or 1/64th).And then one was lost and the other understood it a little, so I hope it is clear to you
Quote
- Ray detail region padding and even more additional render time: Does it help in "fuzzy" landscapes or animations if the value is higher than the standart at max. 1?
This requires understanding of what ray detail region padding does, of course.
Here are 2 examples of when you would like to use ray detail region padding:
1) If you have water and out of frame geometry casting reflections into your water.
2) If you have shadows from trees or other geometry which are out of frame but are casting into your frame.
The number for ray detail region padding is a fraction of the amount you expand the camera frustum (frame, so to say).
1 means 100%, 2 means 200% and 0.5 means 50%.
Imagine your camera frame/frustum as a tile, then:
With ray detail region padding @ 1 you will create 9 tiles of ray detail and the centre one is your camera.
With ray detail region padding @ 2 you will create 25 tiles of ray detail and the centre one is your camera.
Why?
A setting of 1 extends the frustum 100% in all directions. So 1 extra at top, bottom, sides and bottom sides = 3x horizontal + 3x vertical = 9
A setting of 2 extends the frustum 200% in all directions. So 2 extra at top, bottom, sides and bottom sides = 5x horizontal + 5x vertical = 25
Briefly summarized:
A ray detail region padding of 2 is seldomly necessary, even 1 is rarely necessary. 0.5 suffices many times.
Quote
Never have worked with any plants till yet i have to admit. That could explain some things too maybe..
I am asking all the stuff because there is a chance of facing animation thingies soon. In the forum there is just a wild mix of opinions, hints, workarounds and results out of all ages..
Alex
Definitely true there's a wild mix of opinions and such. So is mine an opinion.
Although it may be based on extensive experience, it's definitely not *the truth*.
Only Matt can confirm the sense and nonsense of the opinions here, but he's painfully absent lately.
Oshyan knows a great great deal of animation and he's *very* helpful.
My suggestion is: go animate! start a thread here and ask for advice!
animate your camera, pick a couple of frames from the whole sequence and experiment with render settings. Try to find rendersettings where the total rendertime is the lowest for all your chosen frames and base those rendersettings on your eye.