How to Render Flicker Free Animations with V-Ray

One of the hardest things to get right when rendering an animation, especially when you’re using many different machines, is ensuring every frame has exactly the same lighting when using Global Illumination, or GI.

Given the complex mathematics and sampling used by render engines to calculate the lighting, it’s quite common for flickering and other artefacts to appear in the render. In this video tutorial Joe makes the complex, simple as he shows how you can render flicker free animations with V-Ray. 

Watch the video tutorial below

For scenes where you have moving objects, and are being rendered with V-Ray, the best solution we’ve found is to use time-interpolated irradiance maps. These work by blending samples from several irradiance maps which helps ensure there is no flickering or differences between the frames. It’s also a lot faster than using brute force rendering.

There are two steps needed to render the animation:

1. Create the irradiance maps for each frame of the animation.
2. Render the final animation.

Step 1

Once you’ve opened your scene, the V-Ray settings for the first step are:

Step 2

Now render the whole animation.

You should see an individual irradiance map for each frame appear in the directory you specified.

Once this is done, you’re now ready to render the final animation. The settings for this are:

And press render.

We’ve found this method produces great results every time.

Happy rendering!