Animation settings

dylan_borg_d673e29d8d

I am diving into animation for the first time since upgrading to Daz 4.  I have been struggling with render times, I even stripped down a scene to a 2D plane background and no lights, still the 20 second long animation at 720p took 2 days and 12 hours.  Ideally I want to use Iray for animating.

What render settings do I use ?

Fishtales

What I do is set up the scene and render one image. Watch the image in the window and stop it when it begins to clear. Check the log and see how many iterations it stopped at and then set the render to stop at these iterations. It doesn't need to be perfect as when all the images are combined into the animation they look fine. Sometimes I just set it to 100 and see how that looks and then lower or raise it as needed for each animation. It works for me but everyone probably has a different method :)

Inkubo

If you look on DAZ's YouTube channel, there's a video about how to get better render times. It doesn't provide miracles, but it does have information that will help.

mindsong

Fishtales said:

What I do is set up the scene and render one image. Watch the image in the window and stop it when it begins to clear. Check the log and see how many iterations it stopped at and then set the render to stop at these iterations. It doesn't need to be perfect as when all the images are combined into the animation they look fine. Sometimes I just set it to 100 and see how that looks and then lower or raise it as needed for each animation. It works for me but everyone probably has a different method :)

this. Assuming you aren't yet an IRAY expert either, after struggling with longer than expected renders, which after about a minute or two didn't seem to be doing much... I realized the DAZ default IRAY settings were *way* longer than I needed - e.g. 2000 iterations, IIRC, when 100-ish was plenty for my 'drafts', and maybe 300 for 'fine' (to my taste/scenes!). Look at and play with some of the IRAY render settings in the render settings tab, and you may find some obvious tweaks that work for your taste.

@Fishtales also touches on a subjective but important point: when you're dealing with animation, you are getting a lot more information to the user's eyes than a static still frame, and that can have a big effect on how grainy an animation may be that 'works', where a single frame may not suffice as a still - meaning you may find you can do a decent animation with frames that individually aren't acceptible on their own as far as grain/resolution quality. Very subjective, but ... may saev you huge amounts of time in rendering sequences.

While each scene's lights and content really determine the 'proper' settings for *that scene*, I'm curious what per-frame settings most of the animators are starting out with using both IRAY and 3DL for both basic scene realistic and NPR/toon renders. My IRAY iterations would be around 200 with the default HDR (ruins?) lighting and maybe a few fills (spots/emissive cubes), and I liked using the non-realistic checkbox until I started getting artifacts (know issues a few IRAY revisions back. I don't know if that issue has been fixed).

There's are a bunch of good IRAY settings discussions around these forums, and a good 'stickied' thread on IRAY called 'IRAY, Start here' at

   https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/56788/iray-start-here

cheers,

--ms