Are there any other ways to render besides Regular, iRay standalone and  iRay iClone? I want to put water in my scene but I find the regular render too cartoonish. I like the quality and look from iRay. Any other possibilities?

Thanks. I saw that after I posted and it explains it perfectly. It’s actually much simpler than I thought. When I first imported a short series of image files they were much longer than one frame and I was concerned that it would take time to fix it, but according to that video it’s quick and painless. I was shocked at how big a 4K file would be - 3GB for 7 seconds!

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.


:-)

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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.

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

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







     

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.

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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.

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.

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