Avoiding Crazy Color Flashes in V-Ray and 3ds Max
That effect of flashes, sparkles, or frames possessed by the spirit of digital glitch is more common than it seems, especially in complex scenes or with somewhat limited hardware like yours.
Main Causes of the Render Failure
From what you describe and knowing the usual sins of rendering with V-Ray in 3ds Max, the most frequent causes of these problems are usually the following:
- Corrupt Light Cache or Irradiance Map: When rendering an animation, if you're using Light Cache or Irradiance Map calculated separately for each frame without saving a previous map (or without proper interpolation), lighting differences frame to frame can appear, creating those flashes.
- Memory or Hardware Limitation Errors: An i3 with 8GB of RAM and an unknown GPU… well… let's say it's like trying to do fluid simulation on a Casio calculator. Low performance can cause random errors during rendering.
- Corrupt Files or Damaged Textures: Check that all textures are properly linked and that there are no strange formats or poorly compressed ones that could generate failures during the process.
Problems with Material or Light Subdivisions
If you have materials misconfigured (with low subdivisions or incorrect values in reflections, refractions, or glossiness), you can get unpredictable results.
Flickering Due to Lack of Sampling or Poor DMC Sampler Configuration
This generates noise that can vary between frames if the settings are too low.
Recommendations to Solve the Problem
- Render using a single pre-calculated Irradiance Map for the entire animation.
- Increase the samples in the DMC Sampler and in conflicting materials.
- Do a scene cleanup: remove hidden objects, check textures, and reset the XForm of the geometries.
Export a small test sequence (about 10-20 frames) in low quality, but with all the previous solutions applied.
If the hardware continues to limit, consider rendering in layers (render passes) and then compositing in After Effects or Nuke.