Animation rendering

marktourigny

I just tried to render my first animation and am quite confused.  I setup a 20 second clip of a camera panning through a city street.  30 fps so 600 frames.  Set my render to full HD, switched from image to movie and decided to run a test render to make sure it looked good before adding characters.  Frame 0 took 20 minutes to render and frame 1 only slightly less.  With 598 to go I'm on track for an 8 day render I believe.  I'm obviously doing something wrong though I can't determine what based on the tutorial I watched to learn how to do this.  I'm rendering with a 2080ti and it doesn't seem to have dropped to the CPU when I look at openharwaremonitor and the DS log file.

benniewoodell

What environment are you using? There's some I use that I can get times down to like 2 mintues a frame, and some take 20 minutes or more. Are you using the lighting set up within the environment? Like their lamps and such? If so, turn all that off and light it yourself with emissive planes and spheres in place of where those lights are and that'll shave off a ton of time. Also, turn normal maps down to 0 if they're not up close to the camera. Another option that I do all the time, is render in layers. You'd be amazed at how quickly you can render the scene if you do the back wall by itself, the furniture by itself, the side wall by itself and then comp all of that together in an editing program. But you have to do it as a png image sequence for the alpha channel. Also, if you have a 2080ti, you should be able to use the post denoiser and set it to 60-70% completion and there'll be no difference than at 95%. What I do sometimes is I'll render one frame and see how many iterations it takes to get to a point where I don't see any changes being made, and then I set that as the stopping point. I know this is a lot of stuff being thrown your way, but these are all things I do, and it just depends on the scene as I switch things up depending on what works best at the time. 

KA1

Testing individual frames to get an idea of your render time is excellent advice, as are the optimization suggestions. I limit myself to allow a maximum of 7minutes for a frame when animating in iRay. The other suggestion I would make is to render out to an image sequence rather than movie and put it together in something like Hitfilm. The benefits of this are in the event if any crash/hiccup or other event, you can always resume from the frame you need forward rather than have to start the whole movie render again, also good if you need to make subtle changes to just a few frames somewhere in the animation as you can just re render the required frames.

WendyLuvsCatz

I could not handle those times

anything over a minute is too long

DAZ studio I render png backgrounds first figures with alpha png next, forgrounds last and layer them in Hitfilm Express

the figures one at a time too, I can barely fit two genesis 8 on my PC before I run out of RAM just in the viewport, just RAM not VRAM

set a light overhead or use a HDRI with a light overhead so the shadow on the ground is under the figure for easy composition

my videos all take place at midday or under a light!!!!

KA1

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I could not handle those times

anything over a minute is too long

DAZ studio I render png backgrounds first figures with alpha png next, forgrounds last and layer them in Hitfilm Express

the figures one at a time too, I can barely fit two genesis 8 on my PC before I run out of RAM just in the viewport, just RAM not VRAM

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I could not handle those times

anything over a minute is too long

DAZ studio I render png backgrounds first figures with alpha png next, forgrounds last and layer them in Hitfilm Express

the figures one at a time too, I can barely fit two genesis 8 on my PC before I run out of RAM just in the viewport, just RAM not VRAM

Ooo a fellow Hitfilm user!!!

WendyLuvsCatz

KA1 said:

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I could not handle those times

anything over a minute is too long

DAZ studio I render png backgrounds first figures with alpha png next, forgrounds last and layer them in Hitfilm Express

the figures one at a time too, I can barely fit two genesis 8 on my PC before I run out of RAM just in the viewport, just RAM not VRAM

 

WendyLuvsCatz said:

I could not handle those times

anything over a minute is too long

DAZ studio I render png backgrounds first figures with alpha png next, forgrounds last and layer them in Hitfilm Express

the figures one at a time too, I can barely fit two genesis 8 on my PC before I run out of RAM just in the viewport, just RAM not VRAM

 

Ooo a fellow Hitfilm user!!!

free, I use anything free 

Express that is, would love pro but bigger needs for other things

KA1

WendyLuvsCatz said:

KA1 said:

 

free, I use anything free 

Express that is, would love pro but bigger needs for other things

I used Hitfilm express for a long time, kept buying the odd "add on" for it and realised grabbing Pro (of version 4) on sale was more cost effective, emailed them and they sorted it so I could change the modules I'd bought to credit towards Pro upgrade (I guess it was within 30days I decided to do that as well) - TBH though, I'd have probably been fine sticking with Express though the particles come in handy sometimes.

wolf359

"Galactus Rising" had a frame budget of seven minutes per frame But it was rendered on an Ancient mac computer, raytraced in an Ancient version of Maxon Cinema4D.

With my new Blender/EEVEE pipeline I might be talked into as much as 5 seconds per frame (if the shot required it)


I am also finding Davinci's free Fusion compositor an excellent replacement for my Old mac based Adobe after effect CS as it even has lens flares similar to the ones from Video co-pilot

Ivy

If you remove all the normal maps from the scenes textures it will greatly speed up your rendering time & lesson your scene load i promise. I just completed a 35 scene 3 minute animations in less than a week in iray with 2 1080ti's

I use Adobe premiere for my film editor though . it came as part of the CS6 suite when it came a a standalone software. if i had to buy film editor i would properly use hitfilm as well or buy Adobe premiere elements for around $60 bucks i think.

this is the animation i just did i was getting rendering 12 - 14 seconds a frames in 1080 HD  This video was completed rendered and animated in daz studio 4.12

clickt to play best viewed in 1080HD enjoy

marktourigny

benniewoodell said:

What environment are you using? There's some I use that I can get times down to like 2 mintues a frame, and some take 20 minutes or more. Are you using the lighting set up within the environment? Like their lamps and such? If so, turn all that off and light it yourself with emissive planes and spheres in place of where those lights are and that'll shave off a ton of time. Also, turn normal maps down to 0 if they're not up close to the camera. Another option that I do all the time, is render in layers. You'd be amazed at how quickly you can render the scene if you do the back wall by itself, the furniture by itself, the side wall by itself and then comp all of that together in an editing program. But you have to do it as a png image sequence for the alpha channel. Also, if you have a 2080ti, you should be able to use the post denoiser and set it to 60-70% completion and there'll be no difference than at 95%. What I do sometimes is I'll render one frame and see how many iterations it takes to get to a point where I don't see any changes being made, and then I set that as the stopping point. I know this is a lot of stuff being thrown your way, but these are all things I do, and it just depends on the scene as I switch things up depending on what works best at the time. 

The environment is lit mostly by emissive rectangles up the sides of buildings.  It is called Urban Future 7.  I'm not sure how to turn these lights off as they don't show up separately in the environment.

Sorry I'm still very new to this so how do I turn maps down to 0 if they are not near the camera?

I located the post denoiser and enabled but it only seems to have an option to change the start iteration and I'm not sure how to change it to 60-70% completion as you recommeded.

Much like the other suggestions of hitfilm I'd rather not render in layers and stitch together elsewhere as I don't think I can realistically learn another program now.  I'm currently trying to learn three programs.

Thanks very much for your suggestions.

Sevrin

If I were you, I would consider rendering an HDRI of your UF7 scene, and then only worry about your characters and objects they interact with directly.  You're going to have a hard time at 1080p otherwise.  Also, you might want to consider rendering at 720p and upscaling.

In this runthrough clip, the club is a Daz set I made into an HDRI.  The volumetric spots and character are all that are in the scene.  This was rendered in 720p with a cutoff of 25 seconds a frame.