Question regarding rendering animations

wizardhaxcom

I've been trying to make animations in daz for a while now but i've never really been able to. i can get the scenes all setup and ready but rendering the animations is a killer. Is there any way to speed up the time it takes to render without a huge loss in quality? rendering a short animation with like 200 some frames will take hours while rendering in 1080p, its acting as if i'm doing a single render in 8k. which takes me around 9 or so hours. a 4k render will take me about 15 minutes, but rendering a single animation frame in 1080p takes upwards of 30 minutes.. Why? 30 minutes per frame.. there being 200+ frames.. that's a long time to wait for a short animation.. If there is anything to do to improve speed please let me know! Thanks.

I have post denoiser on as well. My PC's specs are:
i9-11900k
32gb
RTX 3060 12gb

Willy2

You can set a limit for rendering images.
For an animated movie, images of too high quality are absolutely useless, because the eye doesn't have time to see the details when there are 24 frames per second.

If you have a 5 minutes movie for example, this represents 5x60 seconds and 5x60x24 = 7200 images in total. If you want to make the video at night, while you are in bed, you can set the total rendering time to around 8 hours. That's 8x60x60 = 28800 seconds. Therefore, each frame must be rendered in 28800/7200 = 4 seconds. With this rendering time, Iray is out of the running. That's why you have to use Octane Render or export your scene in Maya, Blender or Cinema 4D to make good quality images in 4 seconds.

Personally, for my videos I export the Daz scenes in Cinema 4D and make the render with Corona or Arnold. But the new version of Blender, released in December 2021, also allows you to make very good quality videos in reasonable time. 

tfis

No one knows how your scene looks like. Quite difficult to help here.
 

wizardhaxcom

Willy2 said:

You can set a limit for rendering images.
For an animated movie, images of too high quality are absolutely useless, because the eye doesn't have time to see the details when there are 24 frames per second.

If you have a 5 minutes movie for example, this represents 5x60 seconds and 5x60x24 = 7200 images in total. If you want to make the video at night, while you are in bed, you can set the total rendering time to around 8 hours. That's 8x60x60 = 28800 seconds. Therefore, each frame must be rendered in 28800/7200 = 4 seconds. With this rendering time, Iray is out of the running. That's why you have to use Octane Render or export your scene in Maya, Blender or Cinema 4D to make good quality images in 4 seconds.

Personally, for my videos I export the Daz scenes in Cinema 4D and make the render with Corona or Arnold. But the new version of Blender, released in December 2021, also allows you to make very good quality videos in reasonable time. 

I will try this, Thank you! How difficult is it to export into cinema 4D?

wizardhaxcom

tfis said:

No one knows how your scene looks like. Quite difficult to help here.
 

My scene is very plain, it's a white backdrop with two lights and the character

(i attached an image of the scene, just imagine it with a short animation.)

WendyLuvsCatz

check out this thread

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/358051/the-animators-assemble-thread-for-daz-animation-wips-clips-and-tips#latest

among my many shortcuts is rendering separate backgrounds and often foregrounds too in png series with alpha for compositing

(usually in Hitfilm Express)

setting path length to 8,

30 iterations with post denoiser at 29 for scenes without emissive surfaces

(you might be able to get away with 100 iterations and post denoiser at 99 if not too much emission)

 

Using Unreal Engine and it's movie sequencer if I want to do Epic quality renders

tfis

I would check:
Do I need a high subdivision? Sometimes you don't see any difference between 1 and 3 iterations.
Do I need the full output resolution?

With this settings I have render times about 1 minute/frame. (I7 6700k/64GB/ 3080 10GB)
1 G8 and 3 lights. It's always a compromise between quality and speed. The output size is half my screen resolution.

 

Gordig

wizardhaxcom said:

Willy2 said:

You can set a limit for rendering images.
For an animated movie, images of too high quality are absolutely useless, because the eye doesn't have time to see the details when there are 24 frames per second.

If you have a 5 minutes movie for example, this represents 5x60 seconds and 5x60x24 = 7200 images in total. If you want to make the video at night, while you are in bed, you can set the total rendering time to around 8 hours. That's 8x60x60 = 28800 seconds. Therefore, each frame must be rendered in 28800/7200 = 4 seconds. With this rendering time, Iray is out of the running. That's why you have to use Octane Render or export your scene in Maya, Blender or Cinema 4D to make good quality images in 4 seconds.

Personally, for my videos I export the Daz scenes in Cinema 4D and make the render with Corona or Arnold. But the new version of Blender, released in December 2021, also allows you to make very good quality videos in reasonable time. 

How difficult is it to export into cinema 4D?

Depends on the scene. For a simple scene like that, you could just use the bridge or export your figure as FBX.

benniewoodell

Unless you want to render in a real-time system like UnReal or Eevee with Blender, rendering is going to take time. You can do some tricks to speed it up, like mentioned above regarding rendering in separate layers and other stuff that's probably in the animators assemble thread, but if you want to have the high quality look you'll get with iray, it's just going to take time. I render every single day for personal animations as well as for my day job, you click the render button, walk away, and it takes as long as it's going to take. Sure, sometimes if I'm animating in Blender, I'll use a render farm for long renders, like recently I had a 700 frame shot that the lowest I could get was 72 straight hours of rendering due to what was in the frame, which with the deadline we were on I couldn't lose three days. The render farm took 40 minutes but it was like 400 bucks. But for the most part, it just takes time. 

But I'd legitimately love to know how to get a good quality render in Maya in 4 seconds.. For me in Daz or Blender Cycles, I'm happy if I get a male rendered in thirty seconds and a female in a minute because hair always takes longer to render, but when I try to render in Arnold, it takes much longer to get a clean image. I'm trying to learn how to render in Arnold though, so any tips would be appreciated.