Rendering Pause

kwannie

Is there any trick to minimize the long pause that occurs prior to each frame of an animation being rendered if there are more than three or more characters. I have tried the obvious measures such as ensuring all materials are Iray, limiting light sources, and I have used scene optimizer to reduce all materials ( I have a 4090 so I have plenty of VRAM and 64gb of system ram). I render a still pic and leave it open so materials stay in memory. Even so each pauses about 15 seconds then renders about 300 iterations in 3 seconds. Is there a swap file or something that I can increase so there is not redundant work going on before each frame?

FirstBastion

Yes.  Render a single frame as a jpg or png prior to starting your animation render, and stop it after the first few interations. Don't save,  but simply minimize it so it remains open in the background. All the data for the scene will remain in ram. 

Now render your animation.  You will see a dramatic drop in rendering each frame.

richardandtracy

Interesting. Does that image need to be rendered to completion or just a few iterations completed? And if it has to be completed, is there a minimum size that works (eg 91px square thumbnail)? It strikes me that is a remarkably simple optimization for DAZ to implement in DS itself. Regards, Richard.

Matt_Castle

FirstBastion said:

Yes.  Render a single frame as a jpg or png prior to starting your animation render, and stop it after the first few interations. Don't save,  but simply minimize it so it remains open in the background. All the data for the scene will remain in ram.

I believe animations are already optimized to keep texture resources in RAM. (Or at least they are in current versions of DS).

~~~~~

As far as speeding up initiation on each frame, turn down subdvision and smoothing modifiers as low as you're willing to put up with. (Also, remove any followers that are not in use). Calculating the geometry is a major part of the initiation.

Saving your frames to an uncompressed format (such as .TIF) will also speed up the saving over a compressed PNG. (And if you're not rendering to an image series and combining it later in a video editor, you should be. It's way less susceptible to getting corrupted if something goes wrong).

FirstBastion

It does speed up animation frame renders in DS4.16 and older.  I have 4.21 installed for testing purposes,  but I have not animated with it. The comment was a workaround in older DS version.