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.
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:
Once you’ve opened your scene, the V-Ray settings for the first step are:
| Setting | Value | Reason |
| GI | On | Enables Global Illumination for the scene |
| Primary Bounces Engine | Irradiance Maps | |
| Secondary Bounces Engine | Light Cache | |
| Irradiance Map Preset | Medium animation | |
| IM Subdivs | 50 | |
| Interp samples | 20 | The number of GI samples from each irradiance map used to interpolate the GI at any point |
| Use Camera Path | Checked | Helps to reduce flickering when the camera moves |
| Mode | Animation (prepass) | |
| Save | Choose a directory to store the irradiance map | |
| Don’t delete | Checked | |
| Autosave | Checked and Choose a directory to store the irradiance maps | |
| Light Cache Subdivs | 1200 | |
| Sample size | 0.15 | |
| World Scale | Checked | This is the right mode for animations where the camera is moving. |
| Use Light Cache for Glossy Rays | Unchecked | If you check this, you will need to keep Light Cache as your Secondary Engine in Single Frame mode for step 2 |
| Use Camera Path | Checked | Helps to reduce flickering when the camera moves |
| Mode | Single Frame | |
| Animation start frame | Playback start -2 | Ensures all the irradiance maps needed for every frame are calculated. If you start from the beginning of the playback, the first few frames will be noisy. |
| Animation end frame | Playback end +2 | Ensures all the irradiance maps needed for every frame are calculated. If you finish at the end of the playback, the last few frames will be noisy. |
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:
| Setting | Value | Reason |
| GI | On | Enables Global Illumination for the scene |
| Primary Bounces Engine | Irradiance Maps | |
| Secondary Bounces Engine | None | The light cache information has already been generated and stored in the first step |
| Irradiance Map Preset | Medium animation | |
| IM Subdivs | 50 | |
| Interp samples | 5 | Decreased as several irradiance maps are being used for rendering. If this doesn’t look right, you can increase it. You may have to go to 10-12 for interior animations although this increases render time. |
| Interp frames | 2 | How many irradiance maps are used for rendering one frame of animation. |
| Use Camera Path | Checked | Doesn’t have any effect any more. |
| Mode | Animation (rendering) | |
| Save | Choose a directory to store the irradiance map | |
| Don’t delete | Checked | |
| Autosave | Checked and Choose a directory to store the irradiance maps | |
| Animation start frame | Playback start | |
| Animation end frame | Playback end |
And press render.
We’ve found this method produces great results every time.
Happy rendering!
The V-Ray render engine is an award-winning solution for CGI that was developed by Chaos Group. V-Ray is capable of advanced visual effects such as caustics and refraction, making it particularly popular with artists and designers who need to create and render complex illustrative models and make photo-realistic visualisations. Many studios across the world use V-Ray for rendering including Method Studios, Scanline VFX and Pixomondo.
Conserve your creative energy for your next awesome 3D project and find the video tutorial you’re looking for in a few clicks.
Please upgrade your browser
You are seeing this because you are using a browser that is not supported. The YellowDog website is built using modern technology and standards. We recommend upgrading your browser with one of the following to properly view our website:
Windows MacPlease note that this is not an exhaustive list of browsers. We also do not intend to recommend a particular manufacturer's browser over another's; only to suggest upgrading to a browser version that is compliant with current standards to give you the best and most secure browsing experience.