Animation Rendering Best Practice
Athansor
Posts: 9
in The Commons
Hello!
I'm trying to build some good workflow habits. Per some other discussions I've determined that I'll be doing my rendering 4k, with "render quality" set to 2, and "converged ratio" set to 99% to get good visuals.
This does take a very long time to do though, so if i want to test my animations what do people generally do to get quick renders that still show motion/surface reactions well?
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Comments
Go to engine in render settings and switch it to viewport and you can playblast the animation without having to render it.
Do what you want and what feels best for you, but I would highly advise you to render out a sequence at your stated render settings, and then render out that same shot at 88% convergence with render quality set to 1. You won't tell the difference and you will save sooooooo much time.
Okay, I'll do that. Thanks for the quick reply!
The play blast I find it hard to get a good idea of the quality of the animation because it skips frames. I assume this is because my hardware can't keep up with the scene so figured a lower quality render might be the best way to check.
Oh absolutely. I always render out the viewport and watch it before rendering this way you know before you spend eight hours rendering a shot that it's all going to come out good. I have two very suped up machines for animation and the only way I can get things to play in real-time is if I have one character on base mesh with no clothes or hair. It's just the way it goes, the more you have in the viewport the more your computer is going to be like nope, I can't do this lol. Good luck with your project!
Thats one of the major failings of DS: it tries to play everything in real time, dropping as many frames as needed to do so, rather than playing every frame at whatever speed it can manage.
Sorry, just to be clear - when you say you "render out the viewport" you mean that you render out the Viewport OpenGL to image files and then run those through a video editor, right? My wish is that there was some way to watch the animation play out in the viewport but playing the timeline in the viewport is just hopelessly poor.
Just render to movie using viewport(OpenGL basic) for a very quick motion test.
Have you first tried at lower settings?
If one does animation at 30fps, that is 30 rendered images for one second of animation, if it takes 15-20 minutes to render one image, it would take from 7.5 hours to 10 hours to render just one second of animation
A single image in an animation doesn't need to resemble a perfect static render as one sees an individual image for only 0.03 seconds (at 30fps) when watching the animation.
I have rendered animation at 800x600px, 30fps, max 500 samples per image and one image renders in about 30 seconds on my 3060
You are correct, I couldn't think of the OpenGL term. Yeah, I export all the frames out as an image sequence and put it together in after effects. Honestly though, no 3D program is going to be real-time unless you have a computer that has maybe 4 3090's. I've been taking animation classes through animation mentor, have been animating in Maya a lot, and the characters AM gives you are in classes 1-3 are not in the slightest resource heavy. I have a 3090 and my machine barely plays the animation at real-time, it says usually 22.6FPS is my speed. I still render out the viewport constantly. The teachers say when they're animating in the film or game world, they're playblasting the viewport anytime they want to see how something looks because you'll never know how it really looks and feels otherwise. So not being able to play in real-time is one of the very, very few animation complaints we shouldn't have about Daz as you can't really do it in any other software lol.
Your expectations aren't realistic. Game assets are very different from DAZ assets, and the engines that render in realtime are very different from Iray.
This includes everything from the geometry, to the materials, to the lighting, etc. In game engines, optimizations are made and shortcuts taken (both the engine and the assets) in order to increase performance. For the most part, this isn't the case DS, Iray, or most DAZ assets.
Don't forget things like JCMs and the smoothing modifier which limit render speed regardless of how fast the GPU is able to trace rays.
- Greg
I just wanted to clarify that this is not a knock against DS. It's a creation tool, not a playback system.
- Greg
Realtime raytrace playback is possible in unreal engine with a top end RTX card.