Render times

[ABK]

Hi all,

 

I wanted to ask a general question regarding render time. I recognise render times will always depend on the scene you're rendering but wanted some opinion on general times.

 

Up until recently I have mostly produced renders of 1200 x 900 pixels in size with render times of half an hour to an hour.

 

New projects are requiring us to render at A3 and A2. This is pushing final render times upto 1-2 days.

 

From peoples experience working in studios is this normal or reasonable? Or should I be looking to cut my render times down significantly?

 

 

Cheers,

Antony

[Scott Schroeder]

When you increase your render size, you can decrease many of your sampling and GI settings. You rarely, if ever, want to use the same render settings for your 1200x900 render as you would for your A2/A3 renders. Decreasing your settings correctly will give you no visible loss of quality, if you are using the same settings you are actually over killing your sampling on the large renders, and give you some speed gains. A lot depends on your rendering machines, you may still have to wait a good chunk of time for the larger renders. You can also look into distributed rendering or strip rendering and break up your large render across multiple boxes.

 

Yes/No on the 1-2 day render times being normal for those one-off projects or if you have a larger farm that can just crunch away at scenes. A general rule for the studio I worked at was, 8-10 hours for our larger renders which were 4000x3000 pixels on our slower farm boxes. For the most part, anything longer than overnight is generally avoided due to the amount of fixes and re-renders that these renders sometimes incur.

 

The real questions is, do you really need renders that big? Is the client actually using them at that size? Many times when a large render is requested, the person doing the requesting doesn't have much of a clue how big of a render they actually need. They request a bed sheet size render and use it for a postage stamp.

 

What pixel dimensions are you rendering for A2/3?

[andras2]

I must say render time is highly depend on your configuration and render engine, and render settings (sometimes biased could be longer than unbiased by a wrong settings). But I think the most important is render engine. Recently I tried many of popular engine I think you know which are). but nowadays I use only Thea. I experienced that much faster than other competitors. Create metallic materials very fast, at glass relatively fast. Last time I rendered in 4000*3000 takes 8hrs at laptop core 2 1.8ghz 2GB ram with pool water reflection and glossy tiling around. That is not bad If I compare 1200*900 with 6hrs almost the same configuration. But to estimate render time is very difficult. Try about 5 engine you can make decision. Cheers.

[padre.ayuso]

As said earlier, it all depends on what it is for, but if I had a render that would take 1 to 2 days to render, forget it, I couldn't afford it. 12 hours is already a bit too long for my pipeline and I do 3000x1688. The suggestion above sounds good and should implement it to cut down your rendering time. If it is too much of a quality loss for your work, then look at getting better settings in your computer/s and perhaps look into getting a couple of computers to create somewhat of a farm.

[Umesh Raut]

Its true that (generally ignorant) clients do not know the right size they would eventually settle with, so its always better to have a smaller render for quality checks, other glitches and last minute changes etc. And then, in many cases, you get away with using good plug-ins like blow up for photoshop that give out 2x2 or 3x3 blow ups (4 and 9 times respectively) looking like original renders

[padre.ayuso]

Its true that (generally ignorant) clients do not know the right size they would eventually settle with, so its always better to have a smaller render for quality checks, other glitches and last minute changes etc. And then, in many cases, you get away with using good plug-ins like blow up for photoshop that give out 2x2 or 3x3 blow ups (4 and 9 times respectively) looking like original renders

 

Now, I like that!!! What plug in can I find around that would do that?

[Ismael]

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2011/01/24/photozoom-pro-perfect-image-resizing/

http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/suite/perfect-resize/?ind&gclid=CKb6z_W-l68CFcqA7QodiGvjDA

http://www.benvista.com/photozoompro

http://www.alienskin.com/blowup/index.aspx

[Umesh Raut]

Alien skin blow up, didn't know about the others till today

Thanks Ismael !

Edited April 3, 2012 by umeshraut

[stevenkirby]

My computer is like something from the dark ages so an hour would be heaven!

[angiliaduan1]

Cutting render time is sometimes a big challenge,especially for large projects.Why not use a render farm?