I was wondering what render settings people use to get the best results for animation. I’m thinking:
PNG sequence
Frame Rate 30
Frame Size Ultra HD
Final Render - Super Sampling High (3 x 3) High Quality DOF
Voxel Mode High

Am I missing anything?

Hi. These settings are already good. But it's not all. One capital thing : Your lighting setting and position . Without a good lighting, machine could not give you a best quality. On my youtube chain, people ask me is it Iray or unreal ? They are amazed when I answer it's native rendering with Iclone. I looked at Benny  Dee's light settings to improve my nativ rendering


     

Thanks. Where would I find Benny Dee’s light settings?

The first thing you need to do is turn off the 3 preset lights that come with every scene. Most of the time they make your scene look bad.

For outdoor scenes, add a directional light. You can then rotate that directional light for different "time of day" IE: Where the shadows appear from objects, and how long their length is. You'll then want to see whether or not you want to use IBL, or not. Some scenes look better with it, others don't. This also applies to HDR and Tone Map. I usually always run HDR, but not always the Tone Map. Where a lot of people go wrong is they set the HDR settings way too high, so really play around with those settings.

You'll then want to probably add some LUT filter effects, unless you have access to Magic Bullet Looks, or some other filtering plugins/software and do the color correction in post production.

Indoor scenes, you want to add point lights to various sources. Windows, lamps, (anything that is a light source) etc.

• I render in "Ultra HD" setting which is 4K 3840x2160.
• MP4 format with 8/8 for quality.
• Final Render On
• Super Sampling Checked
• Sample Size 3x3 (high)
• High Quality DOF
• All Visual quality settings turned on in the preferences except for Termporal AA.

IMDB: James Muia
Aviticus Dragon on YouTube

Computer Specs:
Intel® Core™ i7-7820X Processor (8x 4.30GHz/11MB L3 Cache)
Corsair Hydro Series H115i 280mm
Liquid CPU CoolerASUS ROG STRIX X299-E Gaming Motherboard
32 GB DDR4-3200 GSKILL Ripjaws V Memory
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - 11GB - EVGA FTW3

In scenes with a lot of shadows or any low key lighting, I would not recommend MP4 since it compresses too much. If you have a large drive, I would recommend TGA Image sequence instead, especially if you are color grading. 

iClone Certified Director and makes miserable Westerns.

I agree, you will want to render lossless. I use PNG, but I'm sure TGA has its advantages, I'm just not familiar with them.

Another advantage of using images sequences is that you can rerender just part of a scene if needed.

---

Benny dee didn't give a special settings, I just looked at all his videos at his channel and I've played with AO, IBL and spot lights, trying hours and hours to recreate his ambiance and lighting. You have to search yourself according to your type of scene and what exactly you want.

This is some examples you can see at his channel, all in Iclone native render







     

Thanks to everybody for the suggestions. I’ve got some work to do!

Should I render at 30 or 60 FPS? Also, will an image sequence produce a higher quality product than an image sequence? It seems like it would take a long time to add each frame of the sequence to Final Cut Pro unless you drag and drop them all and they line up. I’ve worked extensively in FCP but with video files and stills, never image sequences.

Some people see a difference in the way the animation looks between the two, and prefer one or the other for aesthetic reasons. But I began rendering in 60 so if I wanted to slow it down or add effects in my video editor, it'd have enough "information" to do so. Final output from there is whatever I set it to (YouTube standard or whatever).

On your second question I use DaVinci, but I'm new at it and haven't tried image sequences yet. Sadly, haven't touched Final Cut in years, but saw this the other day. I don't know if this will help, but you could see.


:-)

____________________________________________
Life-long learner and having waaaay too much fun with iClone! Youtube Channel: 3DChick
Book Covers: www.significantcover.com Largely Unfinished Fiction: www.nemontgomery.com