When is a render an animation render?

george_7648d0cf

I have an animate2 animation of a gen8 male figure walking from stage rear to stage front. I need an MP4 of that action, with a traqnsparent background.

I rendered it, but got a PNG of timeline zero. Obviously a PNG is not going to show animation. I saw no options to end up with an MP4.

How do I get the animation in a video format [preferably MP4]?

WendyLuvsCatz

cannot do mp4 

can do avi (and I think mov) and image series

and you need to set the option to render an image series or movie in the render pane found under window panes if it's not already open

where it says still image click the little arrow in the right for a drop down

png is your best option for an alpha series, AFAIK D|S doesn't do avi with alpha

mavante

You can end up with a mp4, with transparency, if you render your animation as an image series using PNG.

When you change the option in Render Settings/General from "Still Image" to rendering an animation as an image series, make sure you select PNG as the output format so the background will be clear (if you have nothing else in the scene and dome image turned off). DS then will render one PNG image for each frame in your animation.

The field for "Image Name" in Render Settings/General will change to something that allows you to give a base name for every image. I always put a hypen at the end, such as "My Image Series-" because DS will automatically number each frame's image at the end of the base filename, such as My Image Series-00, My Image Series-01, My Image Series-02, etc. The hyphen makes it easy for me visually.

There are many programs available that will convert an image series to an mp4 animation, some of them free, at least on a Mac. I'm sure there are for Windows, too.

 

george_7648d0cf

Thank you for the comments.

I followed Wendys' instructions [did so before Mavante posted]. the rendering has now been going on for over 4 hours! I've looked everywhere, and there is no in-process file anywhere.

Does rendering take this long [for a simple scene, just the male figure and no props, background, anything]? Shouldn't therre be some indication of how far along this is? 4 hours, and nothing except it tells me that it is at frame 72, but no indication how many frames there are.

WendyLuvsCatz

you can look where the scrubber is on the timeline

and yes depending on your settings it could take weeks!!!

for animation you need to lower your expectations and settings

a lot

use no more than 100 iterations (Exterior dome and scene 20- 30 often fine) and set denoiser to kick in your last frame if less than 100 my usual rule

I never render to movie only image series as can do more with it in post as well as stop if taking too long

mavante

I keep the window open of the directory that the PNGs are being saved in, and spot check them every now and then as new ones get added by Daz.

As far as the render times for each frame, you can control that to a very large degree in Render Settings/Progressive Rendering. There you can set the maximum number of Iray Samples you want Iray to take for each frame, and the maximum number of seconds you want each frame to render for. DS will call the render "finished" when it gets to whichever of those it gets to first.

Do some test still-image renders of a frame and watch the clock to see when the render reaches your "good enough" standard. Then you can set the total number of seconds for each frame to render according to your findings, change back to image sequence, set the series of frames you want it to render, and it will rock'n'roll.

In my DS 4.11, there is a little window that drops down as the render starts and shows the progress for the rendering, monitoring the samples and the time for each frame. Do you not have that appearing?