It took 20 minutes on my 2,6GHz P4 on final (700x520).

I added focus and blur to create more depth in the picture but as allways when I add blur it looks all to grainy.

What tricks are there to get smoother blurr.

I think the manual says that you need to render at a high setting- like Broadcast Quality to get a good blur effect.

It's simple, you can not use Final mode and get good blur. You can try with Superior, but I recommend Ultra or higher.

Yep ultra or higher and increase the sampling levels. The grain is caused by low sampling. Also if you are using depth of field blur the foreground where your tric is standing should be sharper too. It looks a little out of focus to me, but again that will be fixed with higher sampling. Lighting looks great. Can't wait until pro gets HDRI. Scott

20 Minutes???!!!! Forget Vue5 for sure. It is not made for animators.

Gweb - that's why movie studios who want the quality level of HDRI, Global Illumination, Radiosity and such use VERY large render farms :) 20 minutes is nothing for a very high quality image... in any software that I know of.

hellborn - try rendering in User mode, and increase the max number of rays to 100 or more. Of course, rendering time with skyrocket, but it is really the number of rays that command smoothness with depth of field.

Unfortunately, Carrara can do alot faster than Vue. It took me 1 to 5 minutes per image. You know Carrara 4 and 5 have all the render features that Vue just offered. Vue and Carrara have pro and cons. Carrara does not have wind effect on plants. Vue renderer is too long. Both probably will be on particle system project for next market.

Rendering engines are tricky to benchmark when they are based on different algorithms and parameters. I tried my own test once, an HDRI scene with a model of a car, and tried to make the results look as close as possible. Carrara actually ran slower than Vue in high quality models for some settings. Also remember that Vue just came out with this new rendering engine. Carrara had time to tweak theirs :) Just don't give up on Vue yet.... there a lot of room for performance improvements.

" Gweb - that's why movie studios who want the quality level of HDRI, Global Illumination, Radiosity and such use VERY large render farms :)" Movie studios usually fake GI. Sure, 20 min would be nothing if spanned across dozens of high power render boxes, but when you're talking about rendering 20,000 frames or more, saving yourself even a few SECONDS per frame is saving you and your client money.

Another thing is that HDRI doesn't like to play nicely with 3D motion blur and DOF (two commonly used elements in 3D movie FX). It has a tendency to slow the calculations dramatically, and the result is often lower quality and unpredictable... ie., flickering and pixel crawling/roping. You need extremely high settings to avoid problems, and in complex scenes, this can be taxing even on a massive render farm. That's why GI and HDRI are still faked most often for animation.

Message edited on: 10/12/2004 02:30

As the HDRI light model looks so god and renders about just as fast as a light setup I wanted to see what result I would get if adding some out of focus parts. The ground is just the default plane. I did not even apply a material to it. If I get a blurr I like then i'll add some more stuff and make a more compleate render.

Also, the HDRI should not get the blame for the 20 minutes rendertime as rendering without the out of focus blur took only 6 minutes in Final.

Carrara has allways been known for it's fast render engine, now, if they just could make a decent user interface...;)

Message edited on: 10/12/2004 03:13

Or maybe I won't do that more compleate render at all as UPS just did deliver my XSI 4.0 Foundation including around 30 hours of training DVDs ;) ;) ;)

Message edited on: 10/12/2004 03:28

"Also, the HDRI should not get the blame for the 20 minutes rendertime as rendering without the out of focus blur took only 6 minutes in Final." If this is just for a still image, why not just fake the DOF in post? The results would be just as convincing, and render time wouldn't suffer as much. ;-) By the way, my posts above about HDRI and motion blur/DOF were directed towards use in animation, where low sampling of GI combined with motion blur causes unsightly flickering. For a still image, it really wouldn't matter.

I did more or less fake it in the photoshop version and I totally agree that it's not really nessesary to do it inside Vue. It's just that sometimes it could be a better choise and then it's nice to know how to do it. Also it's a nice challenge to not use postwork. But when it comes to create a wanted result in a limited time any trick's are OK by me. The 6 minutes comment where mostly intended for GWeb as it did seem to me as he thought that the HDRI was the reason for the 20 minutes rendertime (I could of course be wrong). ;)

I did put everything on max.
Advanced effect to 100%
Antialias to
Superior
Subrays Min 64
Subrays Max 64
Quality 100%

(I could not get the rays values over 64. I could set it to 100 but if I did close and open the dialog again it was back at 64 so I suppose thats max)

HellBorn, You don't need AA set to superior. AA just gets rid of jaggies - try setting it to Standard - hit the edit button and set min subrays to 10 maybe 15 - the main thing is set the quality threshold slider past the middle - leaning towards best - not too far just past the middle a little. Keep doing test renders and keep nudging the quality slider to best until you get rid of the graininess. This should buy you back a lot of render time. I did a test render that looked pretty good with min subrays 12 and quality slider a few nudges past the middle. If you were doing a studio type animation you would use z depth maps and fastblur in a post processing app like After Effects or Shake. Depth of field blurs are strictly for still renders - same with HDRI. Both are done much more efficiently after the render in multi-layered passes. But the HDRI really does shine in still renders. Good luck. I bet you'll be able to cut your render time in half with what I just suggested. Scott

Good tip. I could do the same with Carrara. :)

Scott:
What you suggest is about just what I did in the third image that I posted and I dont think it came out god enough.
It could of course be that there is a point somewhere between the settings for the fourth (52min) image and the third(20min) image that would create more decent rendertimes while still creating a god result.
However, finding that point also takes some time.

I will do another test using the same settings as in the last one except for setting the AA back to standard setting. If it looks just as good then there is of course no reason to use Superior and some time could be saved.

Rendertimes for stills are however not that a big problem as it can render while I'm at sleep and at work.

Animations are of course a different story...

Message edited on: 10/13/2004 00:55

Yes very different story. I wonders why all the animation tools are provided in Vue; wind effect, keyframe, mover etc.. Those tools are useless with this renderer.

Well, I don't find them useless, I use them everyday. But then, like mentioned in the posting above, you don't use HDRI and Depth of Field blurs in animations. You won't notice them anyway. They are for still images.

"Yes very different story. I wonders why all the animation tools are provided in Vue; wind effect, keyframe, mover etc.. Those tools are useless with this renderer." If you're as "serious" (your words, not mine) an animator as you say you are, then why are you using Vue and Carrara to begin with? Time to move up to a more "serious" animation package, and not concern yourself over the rendering times benchmarked by someone on only one machine, because you should have your work outsourced to a renderfarm anyway. ;-) Vue's renderer is perfectly suitable for most short animations by hobbyists, etc.. Saying it's no good for animation is misleading. It's definitely NOT suitable for professiona-level animations that will span tens of thousands of frames with things like motion blur and DOF or spot-on camera mapping for composite shots... but then again, neither is Carrara (which you seem to hold in high regard). Just my 2 cents. ;-)

I am Vue4Pro owner. I used some of it for Carrara.

I own a high end software and I gave up on it because of complex interfere. It is not very productive for single animator artist. I would need about 20 people to make the scene I want with my high end software. The payroll is too costly plus health care for their families. If I am rich I sure would but I am not that rich.

Carrara, Vue and some of other softwares are very fast, productive, and comfortable to work on 10+ hour per day. I have render farm here but I don't like to waste time resources on slow renderer. Carrara4 just released with network function. Thank god!

Message edited on: 10/13/2004 10:08

"I own a high end software and I gave up on it because of complex interfere. It is not very productive for single animator artist. I would need about 20 people to make the scene I want with my high end software. The payroll is too costly plus health care for their families. If I am rich I sure would but I am not that rich." This makes little sense to me. You have "high-end" software that you don't use because it's too complex? You would need 20 people to make the scene you wanted? I think you should spend a little more time learning whatever software it is you have, because I just don't see what kind of scene you could possibly want to produce in Vue or Carrara that would be more difficult to do in high end software (providing one had the proper knowledge). You don't need a payroll with 20 people to help you make a scene. That's absurd. Depending on what "high end" software you're using, there's TONS of plugins and free meathods out there to help you generate brilliant landscapes and skys, etc. just like you can do in Vue, and just as easy... But I don't want to take this thread too far off topic.

Some thing that exists in the more expensive versions have been removed but almost nothing that matters for single person usage(unless you need to setup a renderfarm as the licens is for 2 cpu:s).

Now back to the Dino:
I suppose this is the final render (might try to do one with some mist in it).
I did put everything at max.
I don't really like that it is so grainy so any tip on how to get less of it?
It's 1024x768 and took 4,5 hours to render.

Wow! That image really came out looking GREAT. One of the most impressive renders I've seen done with Vue in a while. Great atmosphere and use of DOF. I'm not sure about the "grain". That seems to be a known issue/flaw associated with Vue renders for some reason (even those I've seen done in Vue 4). Could have something to do with sampling or interpolation (which is what causes similar artifacts in other applications), but I don't have Vue yet, so I can't tell you precisely...

Two ways to get rid of the grain : - render in User mode with a lot more rays. - render in a much larger resolution and reduce the size of the image in photoshop or another image manipulation software. Rodluc2001 has a tutorial on that problem.

Well I did render in usermode with rays at maximum witch seems to be 64. At least, if I enter anything higher and then close the dialog and then reopen it again the settings are back at 64. Is it a Vue 5 bug? Apart from that I could of course render oversize but then it would take a day to render. The grainynes is not allways bad, in some work I relly like the paintish look. I'll se if I kan find that rodluc tut .

There is something very obvious about this render: notice the relative smoothness of the dino's hindquarters (minimal grain - it is using texture maps). Now notice all the procedural textures on the foreground grass, the tree bark, etc. Try setting the bump a lot lower on those procedural maps. Vue pro has an additional AA adjustment for procedural textures and it gets rid of this noise. I don't know if this feature is in Vue5. Your best hope is to take the bump way down on these procedural textures. A lot of procedural textures use way too much bump and it gets exaggerated when you use DOF or motion blur, etc. Another great feature of Vue pro is it lets you bake the procedural textures into texture maps. Again - maps are what hollywood uses everywhere, because they are noise free in an animation, very clean, and render many times faster. Try removing some bump and the grain will go away. Scott

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=786498

If I get some time over I will give it a try and se what happens.

And now for something else:
Last render (for a while at least).
And it's really strange.

I wanted to try to create some mist and some insects.
Neither worked very well but add more geometry.
I also did render at 1600x1200.
Everything at max.

Still the rendertime was less than the previous (3,5hours).

In case anyone want the 1600x1200 render i posted it to the gallery.

Message edited on: 10/14/2004 18:27