Exponential increase in render time? (Animation)
AliPop
Posts: 42
So, I am trying to learn how to do animations and stuff, using the basic frame-by-frame method (though I wish I knew the methods that look smoother) and doing quick little one second things and seeing how they look in proper motion. Well, I did a 36 frame animation, and starting out the renders were pretty solid at 5 minutes a frame, but now that I'm in the late 20s, it's getting to about 3 frames an hour. Having the program open on screen and nothing running in the background.
What I have is a GTX 1080 TI, 24gb of 2133ghz ram, and a 4.2ghz processor. Basically a meaty gaming rig. I'm basically rendering a 4:3 screen shape, so almost 1080p vertically but square shape when it comes horizontally. The only thing changing from frame 1 to frame 28 is the pose of the character, nothing additional is showing up on screen, or changing lights or anything. So, is this normal? And is there maybe a way to improve, or make more consistent, the render time for animations?
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Comments
Try changing to Iray preview mode before you render. There is something really weird about Iray reloading scenes for repeated renders that causes this sometimes.
You have not mentioned what the character is wearing.
Alot of Daz content has ridiculously high 4k textures
that are not suitable or even needed for characters in motion.
The Fact is that DAZ studio's IRay is not a good choice for
rendering animations as it lacks the optimization options
of other PBR engines Like Vray or cycles.
As you are new to animation I recommend you start with simple
open GL test renders to develop your skills before attempting
Full resolution Iray or even 3DL renders.
These don't slow down animation.
Surely they still put a strain on things though (e.g. memory management).
One other thing to look at is how many polygons are in play. Especially in objects far away from the camera. This is one area where I like Cinema 4D's LOD (Level Of Detail) feature which can use lower-poly models based upon camera distance.
Ultimately you really only have two choices to reduce animation time outside of lower frame rate or frame size. First, cheat as much as possible (flatten layers, reduce polygon count, optimize models, etc.). Second is to throw hardware at it (to include purchasing time on render farms).
They don't slow animation frame to frame like the OP is seeing, because you have to already load them all into memory to render the first frame. It doesn't take more memory on the thirtieth.
They don't slow animation frame to frame like the OP is seeing, because you have to already load them all into memory to render the first frame. It doesn't take more memory on the thirtieth.
Theoreticly if indeed Iray Loaded all of the textures onto his card
then his render time per frame should not deviate far from the first frame.
According to Kendal sears Iray does not care about Hi res meshes so that
is not the issue it seems
If somehow it is dumping the task onto the CPU( via some system error)that would cause a dramatic drop in performance.
But we are all just guessing in the dark
as the OP has not described his scene contents.
FYI: Decimator for DAZ Studio is on sale right now. Just picked up it. Perhaps that can aid in reducing the OP's animation times; I know it will now allow me to do some animation projects now.
Why would an animation dump the same exact geometry and texture content to CPU if it didn't on the first frame?
EDIT: @AliPop, does your log file say you are dropping to CPU, or is it using the GPU throughout?