Animation Image Render Size
csteell_c2893e4ab6
Posts: 484
Hi Everyone. What size do most of the DAZ Studio users make their image sizes for rendering an animation.I had 300 images rendered at Full HD 1080 16.9, 1920 X 1080 and it took five days to render. Along time to have my computer tied up! Is this to big? Also is it possible to render in batches and stop and resume? Cheers
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Hi! I can only speak for myself, I just use HD, but of course I'm a hobbyist, doing it for fun. Depends on your goal, but it seems most people watch stuff on their smartphones these days so IMO your size is overkill;) And if you want to do it inside DS, consider using 3DL instead of Iray. You can get down to like 60 sec/frame and still retain a pretty nice level of realism (if that's your goal). Or seriously look over your rendersettings
Oh, batchrendering... not supported for animation with the products available from the DAZ store, unfortunately.
For an average render, Iray spends part of the time just loading textures and geometry into the GPU. Then, once the render starts, a lot of the processing power is spent on calculating light, reflections, transparency, etc, and then finally, rendering the image. So changing the image size won't have a huge impact on render time. If you cut your image size in half (960x540) even though the number of pixels is cut down to 1/4th of what it was, your render time won't reduce to 1/4th because of all that other stuff that's going on. Likewise, if you go to 3840x2160, that's 4 times as many pixels, but the render won't take 4 times as long. Basically what I'm saying is go with whatever resolution you feel like you need.
One trick that others use here on the forums (I'm not an animator) is to render a single frame of your animation. It doesn't matter what resolution it's at or how long it renders. Once it actually starts to show an image, you can stop it, but leave the render window open. That way, the textures and geometry stay loaded on your card. Now you can render your animation and Iray won't have to go through that load and setup for every single frame. It can save you a lot of time over the long run.
As long as you save your scene, you should be able to render frames now, stop, shutdown or whatever, and come back later and load that scene and continue rendering. You'll have to keep track of what frame you stopped on, which shouldn't be a problem since they're all numbered. Of course save your scene before you start rendering, just in case DS crashes or Windows locks up. Happy rendering!
This "trick" takes the same total amount of time as simply hitting Ctrl+R from anywhere once your scene is set up. You still have to wait for it to load the textures and shaders and get Iray up and running, it's just you're staring at a preview window instead of a checkerboard window.
As for rendering animations, yes, it takes a long time, especially if you're rendering each frame in Iray on a single GPU. A 6-second animation of a single figure wearing nothing but hair and without SSS and using the default environment and tone mapping settings and only 250 iterations per frame took 14 hours. The VRAM was not overloaded, but the 980 doesn't have a lot of cores to work with, as compared to a Titan X (pascal) and 1080ti (which could have done it faster, but was busy doing other things).
In concise answers to your questions.
Is this too big?
No.
Is it possible to render in batches?
Yes.
Expanded answer.
When you start in animation the render times are going to seem massive.
Until you break it down.
Your series took 2.5hrs per frame, not too shabby, depending on what your scene setup was, what render, camera, light and shader settings you were using, as well as what hardware.
Even with my rack mounts and teslas i still have single frames that take days to render out.
On batch rendering, just change the Render Setting>Render Range to something other than the default, which is the full range of frames.
Determine how long you want to tie up your computer based on single frame render time.
Render out frame 0 to get an idea what your render time is going to look like. Then set the start and end frames, for how long you're willing to tie up the computer.
The math: Single frame render time* the number of frames.
In the case of your example, 2.5hrs per frame, times 300 frames, or 120 hrs(5days).
Be aware this is just an estimate, and some frames may take longer or shorter to render out.
Once you have the first set rendered out, change the render range to the next set and push the button.
wash, rinse, repeat.
If you need to cancel at any point just hit the cancel button and reset the range to the last frame it was rendering.
An alternative is to use Batch render(https://www.daz3d.com/batch-render-for-daz-studio-4-and-rib).
This script allows you to set up a series of scene files to render.
For animation, just set the frame range, and save. Label each scene with the frame range to render i.e Scene FR0-15, scene FR16-30. then when you can tie up the computer with multiple frame sets, hit the batch render script and add the number of scene sets you want to render out.
If you need to stop at any point, hit cancel and it'll stop. reset the frame range to compensate for the difference from completed to the frame stopped on.
One key thing is to turn off "monitor render" other wise each frame will result in a new popout.
set your iterations to less too, don't try and use the default 5K or whatever it is
100 at most will do and 50 if no emissive surfaces
Many thanks again everyone.You have been most imformative.Cheers
From the batch render product page: PLEASE NOTE: The Batch Render does not do Animation or image series. It was written to do single frame renders.
The DAZ Studio guy that made the how-to on how to do animations in DAZ Studio recommends:
a) Make your render resolution 33% - 50% or more larger than your final animation frame size so a FHD would be 1920x1080 but you'd render at 2560x1440 or even 3840x2160 but only to about 50% converged and then down size to 1920x1080.
b) You render individual frames not an already collated animation..
c) You combines those frames in Blender or another program to create the animation and scale it to FHD. You'll probably have better scaling quality if you scale the frames in GIMP or Photoshop individually 1st before collating them into an animation in Blender and then scaling the animation I'm pretty sure.
d) Add sound & FX & titles in Blender. Those can be looked up on YouTube.
e) Another trick to save render time but not always possible (easily) is to render the environment only once and then each character individually for all of their frames though and then composite them together in Blender. It will only be possible though if the camera doesn't move and so keeps the environmental view static.
Seriously, guys! Lot of good advice here, no doubt, and I'm sure someone finds it reasonable to render a 6 sec animation for 5 days or a week with Iray, but if you want to do something serious like say a music video... well do the math
Please atleast consider using another renderer
Here's a 6 sec animation done in 3DL, total rendertime 30 min
https://vimeo.com/284563929