Exterior Animation render - Hi render times Need Help

[gputhige]

Hi Guys

need some urgent help on this. I have this exterior scene with lots of trees and bushes and also forest pack pro presets (like garden area etc). All the trees are proxies and I have an animation of about 1500 frames to be completed urgently.

 

I have taken out the maps for IR and LC and have used these maps to render the animation. However each frame is taking about 1 hr and 10 mins (appx) at a 960x540 resolution. This is despite having rendered the IR and LC maps.

 

Any suggestions to reduce the time drastically? I have a i7 4 core system with 8gb ram. Even if I use all my 4 systems, I will not be able to complete this in a month. My customer needs this pronto.

 

A test render is enclosed. However, there are lots more trees in the background not visible to camera (in this frame)

 

 

Any suggestions welcome.

 

3DS Max 2010/vray 2.0/plugins

 

Gputhige

[Chris MacDonald]

Disable all filtering on your opacity maps, that will speed things up a lot.

 

960x540 is a bit of an odd resolution. Could you not do it at 640x720 with a pixel aspect ratio of 2? You'll end up with squashed looking frames, but you stretch it in post to double the width and hey-presto you have a 1280x720 animation, with half the render cost. Naturally though this will affect the (horizontal) quality of the animation too.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Macker

[gputhige]

Hi Chris

thanks for the revert. I have not used any opacity maps though I guess there might be some in the EM Trees used. Which filter should I look for?

 

The resolution is actually 960x720 (not 540 as mentioned) which is the customer requirement.

 

Regards,

Gputhige

[Chris MacDonald]

The leaves will all be opacity mapped. This is what you want to be looking for;

Edited August 12, 2013 by Macker

[Scott Schroeder]

Please post all of your render settings. You can't just post an image and expect us to overly troubleshoot it when the render settings is more than likely where the issue is at. What is your dynamic memory set to? Is it near the 8 gigs of your system or is it at the stock 400mb? That makes a rather large difference in rendering time when dealing with many proxies.

 

Also, we have a Vray forum. Might I suggest posting Vray questions in the Vray forum? You might just get a few more responses.

[Darawork]

Itoo forest software used to have the ability to turn off / hide the tree population when not visible to the camera. As long as there is no material in the scene that needs to reflect trees behind the camera, that might be something to check out too.

[gputhige]

Thanks Chris for the immediate revert. I will check on this and get back.

 

Scott, my mistake ! should have posted the setting details. However, the dynamic has been set to about 7gb (installed ram is about 8gb) and I see that the system is taking the full ram. Will be posting these soon.

 

Also will re-post this in the vray section.

 

 

Dara, good suggestion. I am sure I have ignored this in the settings. The complete backdrop is covered for a good 1000 frames or so and this should definitely help.

[gputhige]

Here are the render settings. Both IR and LC calculations are coming from the maps rendered earlier.

 

Rgds

GP

 

[Stephen Hughes]

When you render a still frame is it taking around 1h10mins as well??

Have you tried test renders hiding certain layers (ie trees / stonework on the bridge \ grass etc)

Does your yellow-brick-road have displacement on it?

Do the render buckets 'hang' in certain areas, indicating some geometry which might be slowing the renders down?

 

There are many factors that could be slowing the render down like a certain materials, but looking at your test render especially at that resolution, 1h10mins is quite excessive.

 

I can be quite obsessive about getting render times down to an optimal time in my own scenes as i work with renderfarms a lot and every extra minute on the render = more expense for me. So unless you wanted to archive your scene and put it on a private dropbox link or something where i (or someone else) could actually open and explore the scene to see where the slow-down is being caused. I'd be happy to try and help using this method but can obviously understand anyone being reluctant to give out their own scenes. Other than that there are so many variables its really hard to tell from the test render.

 

Good luck anyway.

 

Stephen.

[Chris MacDonald]

You definitely want to stop using adaptive subdivision for your anti-aliasing and start using adaptive DMC, it's far better.

[gputhige]

Hi Stephen

Yes it was taking an hour+ even for still frames. However,once I had the displacement off, now it moved down to 45 mins. I am now testing the scene with layers hidden to drill down to the actual issue. However, I noticed that the render buckets slow down when encountering forest pack presets used for landscape (alongwith a vray proxy).

 

I have not used any displacement map though I have used a Normal map for the darker road.

 

Frankly, I do not have any issues in archiving the file and providing a link. I will do so maybe in a couple of days time once I am through with these tests and other inputs provided by all.

 

Thanks once again to all for all the inputs provided so far.

 

Chris, I did try adaptive DMC with 0,3 settings (min/max). But I did not see much difference in that.

 

 

Regards,

 

GP

[gputhige]

Hi Guys

 

Thanks for all the tips provided and I am glad that I have now been able to isolate the issue. Its the Forest Pack Pro trees in the background which was the issue. I have now changed these from 3D Trees to 2D Trees and and am rendering as a seperate pass. With this one change, the render time dropped to 15 mins (8 mins for the render pass without the BG trees and 7 mins for the BG trees).

 

These render times are something I can defenitely live with and am now processing these on all the systems and should have the animation ready by end of this week.

 

Phew!! Major relief...

 

 

Regards,

 

GP

[cg_Butler]

Doesn't changing from 3D trees to 2D trees make it look rather different? Flat perhaps? Still. if your happy with it then it was a good idea.

[gputhige]

Yes, it does make a difference, however, as mentioned, for most of the frames, these are visible partially and also in the background. It does not make much of an impact on the overall render.

 

 

Regards

 

GP