landrvr1 Posted February 3, 2007 Share Posted February 3, 2007 Okay, I'm taking the plunge into VRay animationLand! LOL. I've got a scene in which the rendertime is around 60min per frame. 30fps @ 3min = 5400 frames. Yikes! Has anyone outsourced their VRay animation to a 3rd party renderfarm? Or know of some? If you've used a 3rd party Farm, what was the experience like? I've found 3 so far: Rendercore & ResPower. Their quotes were INSANE. $24,000+ for 5400 frames. That can't be right. Perhaps I filled out the quotes incorrectly. Renderfarm.net has an estimation of about $1000 for 1500 to 3000 frames. Now THAT sounds more like it. Any advice or tips would be appreciated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
manta Posted February 4, 2007 Share Posted February 4, 2007 I don't know, that could be right, $24,000 seems like alot, but it would take you like 220 days to render yourself, so it would be worth it if you needed it in less time than that...hehe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted February 4, 2007 Share Posted February 4, 2007 What exactly is taking 1 hour a frame... and at what resolution. It sounds to me like a few optimization techniques could help you. Very little should take that much time unless you are using some serious AA, MB, Glossies, etc... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mtutaj Posted February 4, 2007 Share Posted February 4, 2007 yep, those prices sound correct also. its all based on ghz/hour usage, and the time could still fluxuate once they start rendering. best bet is to contact the companies and ask them for a trial, most of them will give you a few hours to try them out. upload the files and see what you get on a few frames and then figure out a range where you would be.. also optimizing your scenes also helps get that figure down as well. Hope that helps. Mike Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 4, 2007 Author Share Posted February 4, 2007 Jeesh, so those prices sound legit? I gather that these outsource renderfarms are really for the movie and television industries - where budgets are enormous? $24,000 for 3min? $24,000 is well within the entire Viz budget for most multi-million dollar highrise tower projects. At SOM, animations rarely went over the $20,000 mark; usually well below that. Serious pro Viz shops are going to have their own farm. I had imagined that the online Farms were there to perhaps help out the individual, but I'm not so sure that's the case. If you're spending $20,000 on render farm time, what in the heck are you charging in order to make any kind of profit?!?! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 4, 2007 Author Share Posted February 4, 2007 What exactly is taking 1 hour a frame... and at what resolution. It sounds to me like a few optimization techniques could help you. Very little should take that much time unless you are using some serious AA, MB, Glossies, etc... Hi Christopher, yes that 1 hour a frame is just killing me. Any advice, tips, scolding, yelling, or smacks upside the head that you could give me to reduce those times would be most appreciated! This is a scene with office furniture product. There's quite a bit of glass, and no doubt that's contributing to the long rendertime. There were two shots, and each took around 60min. Image Size 1024x683 Polygon Count We're at 526,000+ The office front product and Aeron task chairs are very poly intensive. I've already optimized the mesh. Anymore optimization and things just fall apart. Please let me know if there's any other info you need. Any help you or the gang here can give me would be great. Thanks much. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lecameleon Posted February 4, 2007 Share Posted February 4, 2007 And why should this take 1 hour?? I am a bit confused.. or maybe the experts will know better. Just answering here coz I thought it was strange that this render takes so much time.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted February 4, 2007 Share Posted February 4, 2007 It sounds to me like you are not baking in any of the GI... is there a reason for that? Is anything in your scene moving or changing besides your camera? What version of Vray/Max are you using? Hardware? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 4, 2007 Author Share Posted February 4, 2007 It sounds to me like you are not baking in any of the GI... is there a reason for that? Is anything in your scene moving or changing besides your camera? What version of Vray/Max are you using? Hardware? Let me clarify: I've not made or tried to create the animation yet - the scene you see in the screenshots will be the first product to be included in the movie. If we can get that 60min reduced for just the still shot, that's certainly a start in the right direction for me. I'm running a test right now in which I'm using the saved Light and Irradiance Cache files now. The rendertime looks like it's going to take nearly as long - merely eliminating the several minutes at the start for those calcs. Hardware: (2) dual core Xeon Woodcrest 5160s VRay version 1.5 I've uploaded the archive zip to my ftp in case you'd like to take a closer look. I'm really just getting into VRay, so using cache files and 'baking' are all pretty new to me. I'm certain the 60min rendertime for this scene is no doubt due to my hamfisted VRay technique! http://www.802studio.com/misc/VRayTest.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 Ok... I will take a look at it... why not... I usually don't do that, but what the hey. In the mean time... try turning on the glossy rays setting in the light cache. That can help you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 5, 2007 Author Share Posted February 5, 2007 Ok... I will take a look at it... why not... I usually don't do that, but what the hey. In the mean time... try turning on the glossy rays setting in the light cache. That can help you. Thank you, Christopher. It's very much appreciated. I'm trying the glossy rays setting now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 OK... a few things can help you... this is what I have so far: Use a LWF... what that means is that you are actually overlighting your scene because you are not viewing it through a proper LUT. If you use the Vray VFB you will see what happens when you hit the sRGB button.... you scene will look very bright... What this means is that you have to adjust two things. The first thing is the actual lighting intensity... and more important is the shaders... You need to cut most of the diffuse values in half. You will be suprised that this actually speeds up your render times. That is mainly because of the way Vray is adaptive. So by doing a lot of tweaking I was able to cut the render times in half. But it is not ideal, and you may not be ready for LWF. However, the easier thing was switching on the "Use light cache for glossy rays" That cut the render times in half again. So with either one of those you can cut your render time to 30 min, with both, you could go down to 15 mins. Next question is why that res of 1k vistavision? It seems like an odd choice. What will your output be? By getting down to Video res of 720 you could get your render times down to 8 mins (using LWF and the glossy rays). So from 60 mins to 8 mins could be a big difference. One last thing... most of what you have done (besides not working in LWF) is very good. I have seen some funky things that people do (both newbies and people with experience) and you kpt things on target. You don't use a proper fresnel falloff on your reflections, but that is not that big. Hope this helps.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Smith Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 Use Respower...they have the metered service which is what gives you the insane prices, but they also have unlimited rendering for single days at $300 per day. As long as the frames render in less than 2 hrs, you could literally send 100 jobs within 24 hours, each as long as your animation and it will still cost only $300. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 5, 2007 Author Share Posted February 5, 2007 OK... a few things can help you... this is what I have so far: Use a LWF... what that means is that you are actually overlighting your scene because you are not viewing it through a proper LUT. If you use the Vray VFB you will see what happens when you hit the sRGB button.... you scene will look very bright... What this means is that you have to adjust two things. The first thing is the actual lighting intensity... and more important is the shaders... You need to cut most of the diffuse values in half. You will be suprised that this actually speeds up your render times. That is mainly because of the way Vray is adaptive. So by doing a lot of tweaking I was able to cut the render times in half. But it is not ideal, and you may not be ready for LWF. However, the easier thing was switching on the "Use light cache for glossy rays" That cut the render times in half again. So with either one of those you can cut your render time to 30 min, with both, you could go down to 15 mins. Next question is why that res of 1k vistavision? It seems like an odd choice. What will your output be? By getting down to Video res of 720 you could get your render times down to 8 mins (using LWF and the glossy rays). So from 60 mins to 8 mins could be a big difference. One last thing... most of what you have done (besides not working in LWF) is very good. I have seen some funky things that people do (both newbies and people with experience) and you kpt things on target. You don't use a proper fresnel falloff on your reflections, but that is not that big. Hope this helps.... Whoa. WHOA. Your advice to select 'Use Light Cache for Glossy Rays' worked like a charm. It went from 60min to 14min. FOURTEEN! That's incredible! LWF LOL, I just ran across this post: LWF in vray for an idiot! That's definitely a thread for me! I've been reading up on LWF, and it's certainly a lot to get my head around! Output Haha, the 1024x683 is odd for an animation. That was only my output for the stills. The target output for the animation will be 864x480 (for widescreen 16:9). I do all of my current scanline animations in that format, plop them into Premiere/After Effects, burn to DVD, and it works great. Other Settings Thanks for the kind words. I've constantly searched this forum over the past several weeks, reading all I could about settings. What I've been using is just a reflection of the great advice and tips that I've gleamed here. I'm only now getting a basic understanding of what all those settings actually do. The fresnel is definitely something I need to keep tweaking and playing with... Chris, thanks again for checking this out and providing the tip on light cache for glossy. You've saved me an enormous amount of time and just made my days a helluva lot more productive. I'd like to return the favor in some way. Did I read that you produce tutorial DVDs? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
landrvr1 Posted February 5, 2007 Author Share Posted February 5, 2007 Use Respower...they have the metered service which is what gives you the insane prices, but they also have unlimited rendering for single days at $300 per day. As long as the frames render in less than 2 hrs, you could literally send 100 jobs within 24 hours, each as long as your animation and it will still cost only $300. Thanks Brian. Let me see if I understand: If I have an animation that's 5400 frames, and it takes 3 days to render, that would be a $900 fee? [Edit] Nothing like getting off my duff and checking it out for myself. Your part about the frame time threw me, but the answer seems to be that as long as the animation file(s) were submitted in one day, it's just $300 - regardless of how many frames and how long it takes to render. That's excellent. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Christopher Nichols Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 Yeap... I have two DVDs that I wrote that are produced by Gnomon. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Brian Smith Posted February 5, 2007 Share Posted February 5, 2007 Thanks Brian. Let me see if I understand: If I have an animation that's 5400 frames, and it takes 3 days to render, that would be a $900 fee? [Edit] Nothing like getting off my duff and checking it out for myself. Your part about the frame time threw me, but the answer seems to be that as long as the animation file(s) were submitted in one day, it's just $300 - regardless of how many frames and how long it takes to render. That's excellent. It's $300 even if it takes 100 days to render tens of thousands of frames. I sent a 2400 frame (45 min per frame) animation to Respower and had it done in 8 or 9 hours because i had 350 machines working on it simultaneously. That's a bit unusual and it's usually 75 to 125 frames at the same time. They have 750 machines and if there are 10 jobs being worked on, each job gets 75 machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Geoffc Posted May 21, 2007 Share Posted May 21, 2007 Yeap... I have two DVDs that I wrote that are produced by Gnomon. old thread here, just found it. Chris, have you ever considered (or do you already) consulting for individuals that need lighting and file optimization? Being an architect primarily, father of 2 little ones, and doing a huge amount of side work, there are simply not enough hours in the day for me to learn and experiment with all the finer settings of vray. I'm one of those that is willing to pay for higher end preset materials and models in the interest of efficiency. I'd probably also be willing to pay for file optimization and hints a few times too. Just a thought. I'm guessing you already are as booked as I am too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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