1 minute per frame animation??

[baroim]

Hello guys

 

I am about to render a walkthrough for project pitching at work. I have followed the manual from spot3d on how to render walkthrough. I have pre calculated the LC and IR and set the final render as shown on the manual. When i did a test render, i was always ended up taking between 7 to 8 minutes for a crappy result which i reckon non acceptable. Total frames would be arround 5000 and all sequences need to be ready by Tuesday next week. We have a small farm at work consisting of 2x Quad core, and might be able to pull some 4 other colleagues pc (Dual core each) with the cost of fish and chips to stop them moaning. I need therefore to pull down the render time as quick as 1 minute per frame. Is this achievable? I am also planning to convert all texture paths to local root i.e C: and make mirror of the c folders to all nodes rather than through the network.

Also, my model is relatively massive (1:1 scale), will the scene complexity affect the render time at all..? i am assuming, Vray would only render/calculate models that viwable from camera (or not?), so i.e: if i have high poly model of cars "parked" outside the building, (which therefore not viewable from the moving camera) would that makes any different at all in term of render time each frame..?

 

Thanks all.

[BillyElNino]

As far as my experience goes with VRay the amount of mesh in your scene is relevant to render time as VRay exports the mesh at the beginning of each frame render, more mesh = more render time, it does not matter if it is in front of the camera or behind it. You also need to consider the amount of textures in the texture directory. Mesh you are not rendering will also have textures in the texture directory, slowing it all down.

 

I'm not sure what you mean by 1:1 scale? Units are irrelevant, its polys and objects that count.

 

One minute a frame is possible as is 10 seconds its all dependent on the complexity of your scene with specific reference to lighting, mesh and materials. Glossy, diffuse, reflective etc will all increase the render time. Its impossible to say that one minute is achievable or not, its entirely dependent on your scene.

[Tommy L]

Post a render, its easier to discuss time saving options.

[baroim]

Thanks Billy

 

I forgot to mentioned that for some reason one of the quads refused to receive the job as shown on vray message: host 1 (quad1) not responding. And if this happened, the missing Quad will stay missing and wont be used to work on the next frame. This can only be solved by stoping the render and start again.... I have tried to ping the missing quad to test connetion, but couldnt see any problem at all connection wise.. any idea..?

[baroim]

Tommy

 

Here we go

[Macer]

I was in a similar situation last week (but with Mental Ray). The only workable solution I found was to send it to an external renderfarm. I used Rendernation. UK based with a very speedy turn around which meant no having to chop settings - no loss in quality. The longest part about it was the download time, and if thats your biggest worry then your laughing!

[baroim]

Macer

 

I had a quick look on that farm you on about and it does looks tempting. 5000 frames for only 14 hours...(:eek:)..Problem is, the bos wouldnt like the idea of paying almost a grand when we already have those 2 quads.

[Matt McDonald]

I'll start off by saying that I'm not a v-Ray user so I might be off base.

 

Have you let it render a few frames sequentially? We've done animations before where (for example) a single frame tells you it took 20 minutes but then by the time you are on frame 5 its taking 5 minutes a frame.

 

It sounds like you need to hit the render button soon but testing this out might save you a lot of cash.

 

Otherwise, point out to your boss that in addition to your quad cores you will need your the machines that your co-workers are using. The loss in their productivity might help to even out the cost of farm time.

 

Good luck!

[baroim]

Designmule

 

I did actually, and you are right, it will takes quicker to render second frame and so forth. But the issue will never go as in 5 to 6 minutes average,...i wish there are some free renderfarm out there..

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Looks like you have a fair amount of glossiness in those reflections. You probably won't see times much faster than what you have unless you change those. You probably need zero glossy reflection, only crisp reflections, if any at all.

[baroim]

Crazy Homeless Guy,..crisp reflections? what is it..?

 

btw, anyone knows any Maxscript which could convert texture path at all..? i am doing it manually a.t.m (well not literally now), im on max 8,..

Edited April 22, 2009 by baroim

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Crazy Homeless Guy,..crisp reflections? what is it..?

 

btw, anyone knows any Maxscript which could convert texture path at all..? i am doing it manually a.t.m (well not literally now), im on max 8,..

 

I wanted to say Ray Traced, but didn't want to throw you off. I just meant reflections with no blur or glossiness to them. It is probably fine to use this for highlight, but not true blurry/glossy reflections.

[Tommy L]

Yes, I think you will have to lose the glossy reflections. reduce your reflections to 1. Precalculate your GI using Irradience map. Have no second bounce. Set any vray light material objects to not generate GI. That lot might get you down to a minute. Wont look that great tho!

Good luck. Post your settings if you like.

[baroim]

I am now looking at the possibility to do the project with the good old scanline render + radiosity, if that could work just fine, i shall bid VRay farewell, i am using Maxwell atm for still, and for me (and all clients obviously) it is far more superior than VRay (with tweaking numbers and setting...)

[Rob D]

Hi All. My first post here.

 

A few suggestions which might help. I don't use Vray so I'm not sure whether these will affect you:

 

- The stringers and balustrading all have a metal material applied. This might be killing it. Can you make this a diffused grey in any areas not close to the camera path? Or even have a glossy white stringer (more usual in UK).

 

- How have you made the horizontal bars in the balustrade? Lots of polygons? Use a basic material on these and if you have time you can also try remodelling with less detail.

 

- The curtain walling at the top of the stair core: Can you set up a single spot-light to simulate sun, then add a sky image billboard behind it?

 

Kind regards

Rob

[baroim]

Rob D, just did the glossines/reflection reduction, thanks for your suggestion. Still need to tweak the the antialiasing setting tho, which; from what i have read somewhere in this forum; is the mother-of-all-time-killing-rendering-culprit as far as vray concern..

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Scanline will get you there, but if you are using scanline, you are going to give up glossy reflections anyway, so why not try killing them in Vray first, where you still have the benefit of a GI engine.

 

As for radiosity. Good luck with that. If you can't get there in Vray, you are not going to ge there with radiosity.

[baroim]

Mr Tramp sir, thanks dor your advice,..i have tried to render with only primary bounch and surprisingly enough i can live with it,..some of the frames took between 2 to 3 minutes,..still tho, not quick enough. I must admit i still have several reflective texture i.e floor. Just dont want to have fully rendered 500 frames but look like the old Wolfenstein game really. But i will give it a go,..deadline for messing about would be tomorrow, or never....

 

Now i have new problem, couldnt find any solution yet, one if not all of the slave drop with message "host unknown...not responding",..

 

Im so very pissed of why things always go tits up everytime we work under pressure..damn...:mad::mad:

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Mr Tramp sir, thanks dor your advice,..i have tried to render with only primary bounch and surprisingly enough i can live with it,..some of the frames took between 2 to 3 minutes,..still tho, not quick enough. I must admit i still have several reflective texture i.e floor. Just dont want to have fully rendered 500 frames but look like the old Wolfenstein game really. But i will give it a go,..deadline for messing about would be tomorrow, or never....

 

Now i have new problem, couldn't find any solution yet, one if not all of the slave drop with message "host unknown...not responding",..

 

Im so very pissed of why things always go tits up every time we work under pressure..damn...:mad::mad:

 

You are basically asking something that is not possible on any computer. I don't see you getting your frame times below what they are now, and improving the quality. It doesn't add up, and the faster you except this, the faster you can complete the project.

 

You now only have a few options....

 

1) Go with what you have.

2) Pay for a render farm.

3) Extend the deadline.

4) Pay for someone who has done this type of work to complete it.

[Tommy L]

You are basically asking something that is not possible on any computer. I don't see you getting your frame times below what they are now, and improving the quality. It doesn't add up, and the faster you except this, the faster you can complete the project.

 

You now only have a few options....

 

1) Go with what you have.

2) Pay for a render farm.

3) Extend the deadline.

4) Pay for someone who has done this type of work to complete it.

 

Quoted for agreement. You are swimming against the tide for several reasons, the main ones being lack of experience with vray and not enough horsepower. The two in combination are going to get you your 'Wolfenstein' look for sure.

That said, working on projects like these under deadlines like these are pretty much what garners the experience part. Didnt you say originally that this is a piece of company self-promotion? Why would you have such a tight deadline for a 3 minute self-promo movie? Who would want to sit through a 5000 frame badly made animation anyway?

 

Instead of shortening frame time, why not shorten the movie? Do some decent camera work and you can probably get all the infomation into about 600 frames, which will give you about 10 mins a frame. Much more reasonable.

[BrianKitts]

Not sure how big your scene is, but one more option would be to bake your lighting into your textures with vray, then turn around and render it with scanline using the textures in a 100% self illuminated material. You'll get the render quality you want, frame times around a minute, and one really big headache if your boss decides to change anything after you bake your textures.

[Wreck]

Rendering animation can be quite a lengthy process. You at least have to render at 1280x720 to get a great full screen result during a presentation.

 

I'm currently rendering an animation project (nor-arch) related with scenes that aren't as heavy as my arch jobs and with the light complexity and detail in the scenes, I'm rendering anywhere from 15 minutes to 1 hour per frame at 1280x720.

 

I wish you luck! If you're scene is heavy, and duo cores are what are at your disposal, and you need to render 5000 frames, you really may have a couple weeks of rendering in front of you.

 

Also, make sure you render in individual tif's or jpegs and compile them in final cut or premiere. You can't aford to be rendering in AVI format and have the machines error on you overnight 5 days in and you lose your AVI file.

 

My boss recently came to me on a large massive scale project that was over 4 million square feet, included 8 large residential buildings, convention center, hotel, etc. He asked if I chugged, how long would it take me to model the site. I had a 2.5 week deadline to provide them 16 renders finalized and entrouraged. Well, I told him I could definately model all the buildings, run 5 machines on rendering the images and alpha's, and it'd be late nights and weekends on the entourage, but it was doable for the job, he then said "What about a fly through too?"

 

I promptly said "Give me 2 months and you may a fairly decent one pass fly through, but that's over and above what you're asking for in the renders.

 

You gotta know when to say no to a large animation and a bad deadline. It doesn't sound like you've done it before?

Edited April 23, 2009 by Wreck

[Devin Johnston]

What resolution are you rendering it at, you might want to try rendering at a smaller resolution and then scaling it up in post. You'll loose a lot of detail but it will render in half the time and could still deliver what you need.

 

As for Maxwell being superior to Vray it all depends on who's using the program and you can't really render out animations in Maxwell. Believe me I gave Maxwell a good shot for about 2 years and wound up dropping it because it was just too slow.

[Wreck]

You are basically asking something that is not possible on any computer. I don't see you getting your frame times below what they are now, and improving the quality. It doesn't add up, and the faster you except this, the faster you can complete the project.

 

You now only have a few options....

 

1) Go with what you have.

2) Pay for a render farm.

3) Extend the deadline.

4) Pay for someone who has done this type of work to complete it.

 

And agreed. Extend the deadline. Those clients and your bosses rarely tell you the truth of when they need these projects finished anyway. You may be butchering your quality and your brain when they really don't "have to have this" for another 3 weeks.

[baroim]

Gentlemen, appreciate for all suggestions. The movie is not very big, i am on 740x486 (or something like that). What i ended up doing now is: 4000 frames instead of 5000, using only primary bounce, and after talked to one of the main men, i am using other staff's pc, dualx8...on top of the quads that already throwing frames away. Quality wise, they are okay on average 2-3 minutes per frame, (some of them were even 1.5), so hopefully, by Tuesday morning, i should have fully completed sequences and ready to be stitched on AE. I know its not a healthy option, but the message from above was, deadline remain the same....

 

Hopefully, there will be no powercut...

:p