video settings and renderfarm

[radioVOY]

I am in the architectural visualization for some time, but recently i improve my quality on renderings (stills) and my list of clients grow up. but always my weakness was the animation, I want to change that so i'm gonna improve my skills on this issue.

 

the first thing that i need to improve is my equipment, i know what kind of systems do i need, (1u form factor, xeon 3.2HT, 1gig ram, 80gigs HD, cd-rom and 128 mb videocard), but how many to make a in house renderfarm to get a fast and good quality animation??????.

 

in the other hand, i really apreciate some tips to render frames quickly, as far i know: a low polycount, low size maps, but in the lighting for animation i lost, for stills i use Brazil R/S and some times Mental Ray. at this point my renders for video took about 10-20min (almost a month to render for a 2 min animation).

 

i know that a renderfarm will decrease my rendering time, but:

how many machines do i need (to a decent renderfarm)

how much will be drecreased

what are the standard settings for animation.

 

thanks a lot for reading and posting some replies.

[mbr]

10-20mins for a GI animation is quite fast. Do some tests, but remember stills don't require the GI solutions that animations need (to avoid the flickering), so count on adding a lot more time per frame.

 

It's always: buy as many as you can afford. More is faster, so do what you can. I'd get at least 2 gigs or you'll run into a lot problems. GI eats tons of ram. Forget video cards for a render farm, it's just a waste of money.

 

 

Low polys are the big thing, but in my experience it's how you setup the lighting that matters most. You can lessen the rendering times by 50% or more with a good lighting solution (or double it if it's an ineffecient solution). Materials play a big role too. I'd never use blurry reflections/refractions in an animation, for example, as you'll never notice it and it will increase the render times exponentially.

 

Mostly, it's practice. It will take a long time, so plan on that always being the case. It's a lot more difficutl, especially with GI, than just animating the camera in a still scene you already have setup and waiting.

[radioVOY]

thanks a lot for the replies help a lot!!