Animation at 720 or 1080 HD?

[Terri Brown]

Hi guys,

 

Wanted to get your thoughts on this one. I'm doing my first full length feature animation...all 1min15sec of it. What a beast.I had originally quoted my client for 720p, but am now having considerable doubts as to whether it's high res enough. Obviously we would all love to be in the position to render at 1080 without flinching, but limited resources are real, and although I will be using a render farm I'm not keen to spend all my earnings on it

 

I'm eager to know what your experiences in this area are..'you' being all of you out there who are old hat in the animation field. I've always tended to stick to stills, but am really enjoying my new venture. Just don't want to render out at 720 and two years down the line kick myself for it when everything is in UltraUltraHD.

 

Cheers blokes.

[Chris Harris]

Just don't want to render out at 720 and two years down the line kick myself for it when everything is in UltraUltraHD.

 

Cheers blokes.

 

Think you kind of already answered your question here.

 

Of course it depends on the final use for it but you say “full length feature animation” and that makes me think it’s going to be for a formal presentation or even broadcasted on tv...which justifies 1080, at least for me, a viz artist with a more discerning eye. That being said, will the client know/can tell the difference?

 

While I was very opposed to my supervisor asking for full 1080 HD 5 years ago, I’m glad he did now looking back. I cringe every time I see something in 720 or downsampling to 720 while streaming. Of course this is personal preference. And to give you some reassurances, most of the animations I do now are just under 2 minutes in length, with the longest being just under 4 minutes (yikes!).

Edited September 1, 2018 by charris

[Ernest Burden III]

...I had originally quoted my client for 720p, but am now having considerable doubts as to whether it's high res enough...

 

It isn't.

 

I'm doing an animation right now, about repairing and replacing two bridges in NY City. It has grown from what was supposed to be about 8 minutes to 16 minutes. I did get a bump in my budget, but 1/3 more, not 2x. So it goes when you want to do a good job.

 

I am rendering at 1080, meaning 1920x1080 at 30fps. I have, in the past, rendered at cinema-standard 24fps, but it didn't feel right on digital displays, so extra time to render without extra pay. I don't recall which video standard ZA uses, but if it is 25fps like the UK, you could render to that and save some time/expense.

 

You should not need a render farm unless you are doing something unusual. You can show GI without the computation overhead with fake or bake. Either put in lighting to fake where you would see light bounces to approximate the look (print out a full GI frame to look at while setting up your fakery) or bake the secondary bounces to high-res maps. Either way, you will be rendering primary lighting only, it's fast and has no flickering which can happen with many GI methods.

 

Even with GI, rendering engines are fast now. My digital artist son was about to buy a new laptop so I threw in double what he had to spend so he could get a more powerful, render-ready one. In exchange, I am 'borrowing it' for a week or two to be my extra rendering machine for animation frames.

 

And you probably already know this, but render to image sequence (I use 16bit TIFF) and NOT an animation format like mp4.

 

It won't be long before we will be expected to render 4K, in fact I would bet that the bigger studios like NeoScape already are.

Edited September 1, 2018 by Ernest Burden

[Terri Brown]

 

I am rendering at 1080, meaning 1920x1080 at 30fps. I have, in the past, rendered at cinema-standard 24fps, but it didn't feel right on digital displays, so extra time to render without extra pay. I don't recall which video standard ZA uses, but if it is 25fps like the UK, you could render to that and save some time/expense.

 

You should not need a render farm unless you are doing something unusual. You can show GI without the computation overhead with fake or bake. Either put in lighting to fake where you would see light bounces to approximate the look (print out a full GI frame to look at while setting up your fakery) or bake the secondary bounces to high-res maps. Either way, you will be rendering primary lighting only, it's fast and has no flickering which can happen with many GI methods.

 

 

Hi Ernest,

 

Thanks for the advice. Think I'll def go 1080. We do 25fps here. And yes I'm rendering out separate pngs...not TIFFs...is that ok?

 

Do you mind expounding on the quote above? I have used 'fake' GI with my stills, where I render out the GI at a small pixel size and save it to file, then load it with the final 4K image. I'm assuming that's what you mean by fake GI? I use Brute Force as Primary and Light Cache as secondary.

However, after doing some initial research I stumbled across info that advised against this method if you have moving objects in your scenes. My 1min25 animation consists of 13 different shots, and in almost all of them there is moving foliage/ a sun timelapse etc.

 

To give an example of how long we are looking at for some scenes...I did a 720p test on my desktop and 73 frames are still rendering at an estimated 58 hrs. I do have a desktop and a mean laptop, so two rendering stations, but with those hours it's impossible to do 13 shots all here. I realise GI takes a large portion of that time, so I would be chuffed to have a workaround.

 

I have also cached all the GrowFX foliage animation to try save time during rendering.

 

Would appreciate you expounding on the GI issue.

 

Thanks so much

[Francisco Penaloza]

I also would recommend rendering full HD (1920x1080) larger rendering sizes also help with the antialiasing, you get less flickering or noise.

Besides most people are moving from HD to double HD or 1440 or 4K standard. 720p as for today is not optimum.

 

Regarding GI or not GI, if your scene is only exteriors and you don't have closeups I recommend to do a search on this website of a post I did time ago of a method I use to "Fake GI". It renders very quickly and for exteriors looks great.

 

For interiors faking GI gets more complex and is time-consuming, and honestly using VRay 3.x is so simple now that there is no need to pre-save and pre-cal and all that mambo jambo.

Just set your samples to 1-100 adjust the noise threshold as need it, set your light cache to 2500 or 3000 and let it rip. No need to use camera path or animation frames, nothing, just let it calculate per frame and you can have all objects movings and light changing too.

 

To save frames PNG or TGA are more video editing friendly than Tiff. Optimal would be EXR it doesn't matter if you don't save it as 32 bit float 16 bit should do just fine if you don't need extensive color adjustments.

[Ernest Burden III]

PNG should be fine, but as I recall it has 'flavors', and I don't use it so be sure you are saving lossless and at 16bit. Both are to allow room for secondary processing in video editing software. The files are big, though.

 

 

Do you mind expounding on the quote above? I have used 'fake' GI with my stills, where I render out the GI at a small pixel size and save it to file, then load it with the final 4K image. I'm assuming that's what you mean by fake GI? I use Brute Force as Primary and Light Cache as secondary.

 

Low-res GI secondary enlarged and then layered in Screen Mode is a time-saving technique, but not 'fake'. GI.

 

Fake is placing extra lights to do as primaries what would be a secondary bounce. For example, sun hits the floor through a window, so you put an area light or omni near the floor pointing towards where the bounced light would go. You can then render without a secondary--no GI, so no flickering and FAST. However, it is a fake and can be seen as such if not done well, and takes time to set up and test. And very hard if you have moving anything, but especially the primary lights/sun.

 

Bake is a process that commits the secondary bounce to a file to re-use later so they are calculated once (usually Light Cache), and (bonus) at lower resolution. Vray has a good ability to do that. So again, fast but limited with moving major lights or objects. there may be solution with moving stuff, I haven't looked into it recently.

 

Is your animation rendering without flickering or too much noise from the Brute Force?

 

Rendertimes beyond 4:00 per frame are crazy-making.

[Chris MacDonald]

When we are asked to do animations these days we always assume Full HD 1080p @ 30fps minimum; 60fps being the ideal, but it honestly depends on the project/software. With max/vray we usually aim for 20 mins per frame, give or take 5 mins. Haven't had any requests for 4K yet.

 

If you were looking at getting frame times down you could simply cheat and use a different pixel aspect ratio so you're only rendering half the number of pixels along whichever axis (for example 1920x540 or 960x1080); then correct this in after effects/premiere pro. Obviously this represents a reduction in quality, but only along one axis, not both.

Edited September 3, 2018 by Macker

[Ernest Burden III]

...60fps being the ideal...

 

Yikes! 60fps, I've never looked into that. It must be smoooooth. I'm currently trying to keep track of about 30,000 frames, double that would be double the fun. Even Peter Jackson was happy with 48fps, and he took a lot of crap for it looking artificial.

[Chris MacDonald]

It's worth noting we haven't had a project in max that we've been able to do at 60fps; this stuff is all realtime/gpu/enscape which allows us to push it. But yes, it's super smooth - so smooth that I'd be very tempted to budget for it next time we quote for an animation; which would usually be only a minute or so long.

[Scott Schroeder]

When we do animations that we know we are going to need to use an online render farm, we bill that cost out to the client. We'll frame it around they can have the animation 2 weeks early for a few extra dollars or they can wait while we render everything locally.

 

That being said, with the insane advancements in Unreal, Lumion, Enscape, we are doing more and more of our animations in those tools versus the old school render farm. It is becoming even more common for us to take the Enscape paths from Revit and just insert our high quality still images throughout the animation. Surprisingly that has had quite a bit of success with our clients. You get this architectural model walk-though and at the start and/or end of each path you have the more descriptive beauty rendering.

 

I should also note that primary our animation requests go something like this. It is Monday morning and we get a panicked call from the client, the main donor who is putting up the money to name the building is coming in on Thursday. The donor wants to see an animated walk-through, we need to make it happen. Ready, set, panic!

[Terri Brown]

[quote name=

 

Is your animation rendering without flickering or too much noise from the Brute Force?

 

Rendertimes beyond 4:00 per frame are crazy-making.[/quote]

 

How on earth do you manage render times of 4mins?

 

Personally, I think the issue here is quality. I don't mean render quality as in no noise and high def etc, but more the realism achieved through good foliage, lighting, materials, reflections etc. If I'm missing something though please do tell! I've used these guidelines to reduce render times as much as possible: https://area.autodesk.com/tutorials/vray_animation_optimisation/

 

And as for flickering, I haven't done any high sample tests to really check. The reason I like brute force is because I have lots of delicate elements (like foliage and wooden slats and fur rugs) that tend to get big issues with IM.

[Arnold Sher]

HI Terri,

 

We have an in-house rendering farm. If you get yourself in a bind we might be able to help.

[Terri Brown]

Just set your samples to 1-100 adjust the noise threshold as need it, set your light cache to 2500 or 3000 and let it rip. No need to use camera path or animation frames, nothing, just let it calculate per frame and you can have all objects movings and light changing too.

 

Hi Francisco,

 

I'm using Vray 3.x and for sure it's way more intuitive, but I have never set samples at 1-100. I'm usually 1-8 or 1-9. Is 1-100 the 'optimum' setting so that vray can use it's resources at it's best where needed?

Are those settings based on Brute Force as your primary engine?

[Terri Brown]

Anyone else here using BF and LC for GI animations? Seems that most of you are IM and LC...

[James Vella]

have been using BF LC for animations for the past few years (easier when objects are animated such as trees, people, cars etc)

 

if everything is static then IM LC is good for render times but still a pain to setup.

 

the faked GI mentioned earlier I have done for 1 TV commercial which worked really well, basically GI turned off and ambient light with a vray dirt map inside. This renders super super fast and can have as many animated objects as you like with no flickering/noise but at the cost of quality. You really need to play with the settings to look right and a fair bit of post work on top.

[Morne Erasmus]

Anyone else here using BF and LC for GI animations? Seems that most of you are IM and LC...

 

 

Been using BF since VRay 2.4 and never looked back. I'm now on Next (VRay 4) and its only getting better. I use BF for everything, interior, exterior, stills, animation, moving objects, DOF, motion blur, particles etc.

 

BF & LC all they way and in some cases BF & BF is even faster

Havent touched IM for about 4 years

[Terri Brown]

Been using BF since VRay 2.4 and never looked back. I'm now on Next (VRay 4) and its only getting better.

 

Ok, awesome. In fact I was planning on switching to Vray Next for this project, but am hesistant now as I'm halfway through...always told myself never to try anything new midway through a project. Am interested to hear your feedback on Next...is it a lot faster than 3.x?

[Morne Erasmus]

Am interested to hear your feedback on Next...is it a lot faster than 3.x?

 

 

While I was on the beta, I mostly did GPU render testing of simple interior spaces (kids play area in a retail space for example) and I did find things to be much smoother and faster.

 

 

Now that I'm on the official release, we recently did a large(ish) exterior project with CPU, and compared to 3.6 I didn't notice any difference at all with render times. The new adaptive dome light is suppose to make things up to 7X faster, but on the chaos forum it would seem people are having endless issues with it so the adaptive dome light appears not to be ready from prime time yet, although some users are getting great results with it. The UI actually says WIP next to the adaptive tick.

 

 

Overall I do like Next and it's the 1st version where I could actually do a project from start to finish using GPU.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Hi Francisco,

 

I'm using Vray 3.x and for sure it's way more intuitive, but I have never set samples at 1-100. I'm usually 1-8 or 1-9. Is 1-100 the 'optimum' setting so that vray can use it's resources at it's best where needed?

Are those settings based on Brute Force as your primary engine?

 

The Vray antialiasing, work with all GI methods but is closely related to brute force method because of the way Brute for works, just the amount of samples. The good 'ole 1-100 was is 'universal method' because it places more samples that you should need so you don't have to guess how many you really need, and you are just letting VRay do it thing, to speed up rendering you only have to concentrate on the noise threshold. Now you also have the minimum shade rate that will reroute sample toward shaders samples or antialiasing depending on your scene; in a nutshell, explanation of course.

As Morne mentioned the main goal is to make it simpler to use, this is the method I been using for a while and it just works fine. Now for sure, you need more computer power, and when I get in need of a faster turn around I just send it to a render farm.

Of course, YMWV depending on your resources and type of animation, but when things are moving other than cameras IMO is the best way to deal with it.

 

FYI V-Ray Nex has a different licensing regarding render nodes, you need to pay extra for render nodes, that's one reason we haven't upgraded yet.

[Ernest Burden III]

BF is about managing noise. IM/LC is about managing smear (blending) When done right, BF is beautiful.

 

How on earth do you manage render times of 4mins

 

I'll assume you mean as low as 4. But first I am referring to frames rendering on a single PC without DR. I am only working with a few machines, so I rarely use DR, I just split shots onto a stand-alone machine to render. If you are managing a dozen or more machines, you would be 24/7 just managing the scene files, shots and resulting frames, so DR then.

 

Going back decades, I have tried and usually managed to have frames render in under 4 minutes. Years ago that was lower render size but on slower PCs. But how to... fake, bake or good settings and compromises on visual quality. Currently, on my engineering animation, I'm at 1 - 2 mins. per which is necessary since I'm up to 16 minutes total length. (I just hit 100% rendered, but see some cars misbehaving so will have some re-renders to do). It would be faster but bridges span water, which requires slow raytracing of bump-distorted reflections.

[Terri Brown]

Of course it depends on the final use for it but you say “full length feature animation” and that makes me think it’s going to be for a formal presentation or even broadcasted on tv...which justifies 1080, at least for me, a viz artist with a more discerning eye. That being said, will the client know/can tell the difference?.

 

Hi Chris. My client requested the animation to be viewed on a laptop. It's a private villa, so nothing commercial. The problem is that even if the client won't be able to tell the difference I am positive I will...never-ending conundrum.

[Terri Brown]

The Vray antialiasing, work with all GI methods but is closely related to brute force method because of the way Brute for works, just the amount of samples. The good 'ole 1-100 was is 'universal method' because it places more samples that you should need so you don't have to guess how many you really need, and you are just letting VRay do it thing, to speed up rendering you only have to concentrate on the noise threshold. Now you also have the minimum shade rate that will reroute sample toward shaders samples or antialiasing depending on your scene; in a nutshell, explanation of course.

As Morne mentioned the main goal is to make it simpler to use, this is the method I been using for a while and it just works fine. Now for sure, you need more computer power, and when I get in need of a faster turn around I just send it to a render farm.

Of course, YMWV depending on your resources and type of animation, but when things are moving other than cameras IMO is the best way to deal with it.

 

FYI V-Ray Nex has a different licensing regarding render nodes, you need to pay extra for render nodes, that's one reason we haven't upgraded yet.

 

I did a quick test at 350px: 1-9 rendered in 2min35 (there's a Hair&Fur modifier), and 1-100 took 25mins Unless I'm missing something that's way more than I can afford.

 

Thanks for the head-up on Vray Next. That, with Morne's feedback has convinced me to wait a little longer to upgrade.

[Simon Moir]

BF + LC. I'm happy with 720p @30fps... or I was until I read this thread. I aim for about 5 or 6 minutes a frame, over 10 minutes is a no no for me.

[Francisco Penaloza]

No, you are not missing anything. Here is the thing, V-Ray and any other render engine will trade quality Vs speed, That's all.

When you use 1-100 V-Ray will try to put as many samples it can until the noise threshold tells him to stop. In your case, if you are using only a max of 9 samples, then VRay will just stop even if the noise threshold is not met, then you are forcing it to go faster that way.

 

Another way would be to use 1-100 and increase the noise threshold. You will get exactly the same result the same results than using 1-9.

The main difference here is, if you are using 1-100 and shift the minimum shade rate, in your case to a smaller number, then more samples will go to your fur and less to GI and glossiness. How much of that, you'll see the samples numbers inside V-Ray materials or if you look at Brute force settings.

 

Having said all this, if you feel comfortable with your method, just stay with it, you know your client, you know your machines.

for animation I never had frames render at 4 Min, I am happy when my frames are around 20 min or even 30 min is OK for me, but this varies depending on what type of visualization you do.

 

When I do large aerial shots I don't use GI and just use the Ambient+drit map trick, then I get a few minutes on my machines.

 

FYI when a client said,' I will just see it in my laptop' that's really not a measurement of any type, all depend on how big the screen is and the resolution. The large majority of laptop around at full HD (1920x1080) but there are a few that are 1440p and several new ones that are 4K.

Shoot if he has a fancy Mac pro, we are talking on the 4K realm. Compare a 55" TV at 720p then 4K. And I don't know in Europe or other parts of this planet but here in the USA, many people have a + 50" TV, even if they can barely pay the rent

 

So for you, you know 720p is the minimum acceptable. Will you kick yourself a few years in the future, I believe so (we thrive for quality ), when 4K is mainstream, VR is a daily usage and so on, but then think about, you did that project within budget, and in a timely manner, the client is happy, oh well.

Nobody is like George Lucas that like to remaster his movies every time a new standard is in place... or maybe you can be so proud of it, that you will do it. In the future machines will be so powerful that we all will be talking about 8K in 4 Minutes in real-time right?

 

best of luck.

[M V]

That being said, with the insane advancements in Unreal, Lumion, Enscape, we are doing more and more of our animations in those tools versus the old school render farm.

 

I wouldn't even consider an animation without using Lumion these days. 60fps 4K (not that you need to) and I can render it out 2 minutes of animation in a day on 1 local machine. It's not the V-Ray quality that most are used to (getting closer), but the trade off is time and time is money and that means a competitive quote and less stress for me.