i bought iclone  iray with lots of expectations for a high quality animation rendering. But still its not yet even close to arnold renderer in 3dsmax and maya. They are very fast and give a very good result. Iray in iclone has higher noise profile. Denoise is not a good solution as it blurs all the details. for instance fabric and skin pores etc. 

It took some digging to find out what "mi" actually stands for and it apparently originates from Mental Ray, which was bought by Nvidia at some point. 

So "mi" stands for mental images scene format. There is also "mib", which is the mental images binary scene format.

More here: https://www.migenius.com/doc/realityserver/4.4/resources/general/iray/manual/index.html#/concept/scene_file_formats.html?zoom_highlight=.mi.

The format is used by a variety of software packages. A short overview of the mi format can be found here: http://paulbourke.net/dataformats/mi/.

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76% of original size (was 661x19) - Click to enlarge

"What is an MI file?"

Short answer = It is an Iray data file

iClone has .iProject and .iProp and .iAvatar files, which are how iClone reads and writes mesh, texture, lighting, and animation data, etc.  In theory a lot of that could be written in OJB (for mesh) and JPG or PNG (for textures), but they stuff all that data into their own file structure for various reasons.

Similarly, Iray has it's own "language" and formatting for mesh data.  The .mi files include mesh data, camera data, render control information, and links to texture files.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
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Good question Jason. I'm not really up to speed on them myself, other than they're used to enable rendering of your scene at a later date without having to re-open your project. If my understanding is correct, it contains all the necessary components for a later re-render - hence it's large size ...


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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time! :(  - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

Sorry if this is a noob question. What is the MI format? I usually do my post production in After Effects or Premiere. I typically work with MOV or MP4. I don't think I've ever heard of an MI file. Does it work like an image sequence? 

Yep, great work at 40.

@Sonic - that looks really good!  

edited (corrected)...
@Mark ... Good analogy - even I can understand that. Well, here's Version 3 of this 'Temporal Smothing' attempt. Don't know if it's much different to Ver 2, but it takes less steps (no need for VirtualDub now). This uses a different Vegas Plugin - 'Boris BCC Flicker Fixer'....




I mean sure, it has issues - it's by no means perfect - but for a meager 40 iterations it's not bad ... Using 'Photorealistic' mode would probably require at least ×5 the number of iterations - possibly a lot more .... I suppose I should test out some avatars - but in any case others might want to do their own testing and someone else could probably improve on this ...

Edit: Upon further testing, it became evident that bright objects on a dark or black background don't respond well to this approach. In such a situation, the 'ghost-like' frames included in the 'averaging' - become very noticeable. So getting 'acceptable' results depends largely on the particular scene used.

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time! :(  - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1

This is usually true - and yes, the more complex the scene the less you'll probably notice flickering.  As for the GI flickering, imagine your camera is a ball cannon and it shoots out 300 balls covering your scene... when the camera moves a little and you shoot the balls again they are not going to bounce in the same way - so, each "cannon shot" is as good as the other just not the same.  Raytrace rendering is fickle, and you will soon discover that there are many factors that influence the final results - even at the Hollywood level you seldom get away with "one render" - it's always an iterative process.

Yes Mark - well these are the sorts of things that only the more technically minded would understand. I certainly don't, which is why I always resort to 'visual tricks' to get a certain result. From what you and 4u2ges are saying, the 'flickering' is due to the way 'interactive' goes about things. I understand that. But surely (apart from disabling Global Illumination), there *could* be some sort of 'frame averaging' ie: temporal filtering put in place to yield a better result (not perfect, but better). Anyway - for me, using 'Photorealistic' is probably not an option simply due to the time it takes to render. So at the moment if I want to use Iray, then 'Interactive' with temporal smoothing seems the way to go. I'll do some more tests over the next few days on different scenes. I'm *thinking* that static shots may behave better, (no camera movement), and that shots without large flat surfaces (walls) may also behave better ...

Thanks Mark, 4u2ges, Job, (and others) for helping to clarify what's happening with this - I really do appreciate your expertise ! ....  :)

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Please be patient with me ..... I don't always 'get it' the first time 'round - not even the 2nd time! :(  - yikes! ... 

● MSI GT72VR Laptop, i7 7700HQ 4-Core 3.8 GHz 16GB RAM; Nvidia 1070, 8GB Vram ● iClone-7.93 ● 3DXChange Pipeline 7.81 ● CC-3 Pipeline 3.44 ● Live Face ● HeadShot ● Brekel Pro-Body ● Popcorn FX ● iRAY ● Kinect V2 ● DaVinci Resolve17 ● Mixcraft 8.1