Render Times for Animation
GeneralDee
Posts: 131
I did some tests to see how many frames I can get per minute doing animations I tried with no shadows, deep shadows, Raytraced shadows, hair, no hair, zoomed out and close up shots and the amount of animation poses and morphs.
I found that there was not that much difference using deep shadows or Raytraced shadows though the Raytrace was a little slower. Hair or no hair didn't matter much. With minimal animation posing and morphs, I got the fastes render times at 10-13 frames per minute. As I injected more animation presets, the times grew. I will have to test that some more to get precise times. The biggest factor I observed is how much of the screen the characters took up which increases or decreases the pixel count. The slowest I got was 2 frames per minute with more close up shots with Raytrace shadows on.
I would like to know from some seasoned users what is considered to be average to acceptable render times for animation? What techniques and settings do you use?
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Comments
Acceptable render times will differ widely. Good quality renders are worth waiting for, so if I was doing a production and wanted the best out of the animation, it's not unheard of to expect render times of ten minutes or more per frame. Though usually you'd do renders on more than one computer for something like that.
Animations are always going to take a long while to render. At an average 40fps, you're looking at 216,000 frames for an hour and a half long video. Even at 2 minutes per frame you're going to take a good 300 days to finish rendering if you went non-stop.
For that reason alone it's often wiser to break things up into scenes and have multiple machines render each scene separately. This way you can get 4 frames or more per 2 minutes which brings your wait time to a far more manageable 75 days or little over 3 months. Granted this may not always be an option, but it's the price you pay for quality in your final animation.
Always, ALWAYS use draft settings for testing lighting and camera movements. It'll be a lot quicker to check details that way and will cut down on production time immensely.
If you are going to use 3Delight for animation you need to accept long render times or do lots of compositing.
By that I mean rendering png series with transparency and recompiling in a video editor.
As you said the more in a scene the longer it takes so animated backgrounds for example can be looped and added after to facial close ups etc
reusing elements such as a back view of a second person being spoken to, a figure walking looped on different backgrounds with shadowcatch etc, something like Hitfilm is good for this sort of thing, it can even import 3D, I do not have it (or rather I have the debut version I got free) as I use other software such as Carrara, iClone and Octane render for animation which render far quicker than 3Delight.
Hi Herald,
10 Minutes? How quick!
What are your settings?
If I do in good quality (shading rate 1 to .7 in the render setting) with light and ambient it'll take round 12 hours one picture. !!
And I use a fast i5.
Especially hair is terrible. But the character needs hair and it has to cast shadows of cause.
Andy
Thanks for the info.
I forgot to mention I turned progressive OFF! If you have progressive on your render times will be through the roof. I use it for stills only.
I am reading many posts about Carrara and iClone. Thea Render is not ready for certain animations so I have to reconsider that plan for now. So what is a step up from 3Delight for animation that is DAZ Studio friendly?
Acceptable render times really depend on what you are doing. I usually preview render my animations using the GPL render, where I can get 50-60 frames a minute. Although this render has no shadows, I can usually work out all the issues with the animation and make sure the movements look smooth and natural. I can use the IPL preview render on a few frames to check shadows if that is important.
Final render quality is a trade off of speed vs quality. You do not need as high a quality render settings for the individual frames to make an animation look high quality compared to rendering a still image. At least this has been my experience. For example, I usually use a shading rate of 0.2 on the advance render settings for still images. For many animations I found a shading rate of 1.0 was fine.
Things that slow down renders:
1) Hair - This is a big factor. I usually select which hair to use based on frame render time experiments. I almost always change the hair to use UberSurface shader and turn off raytracing and occlusion in the shader to speed up rendering time. This does reduce the quality slightly, but I think it is a good trade off.
2) Skin - The AoA SSS shader slows down render times, but I like the way it makes skin look. I use it a lot for main characters, but supporting characters frequently I use the DAZ Default shader that speeds up renders. I really need to try some of the other shaders to see how they compare.
3) Keep your sets simple. Avoid sets with lots of transparency.
4) Keep your lighting simple. I frequently use one distant light and the Advance Ambient light. The more lights you add, the more it will slow down your render.
I would like to keep animation rendering at 2 frames a minute, but realistically it has sometimes been less than 1 frame per minute.
Render to an image sequence rather than a movie. If the power goes out in the middle of a long render you can figure out the last frame image that is saved and restart from there. If you find something wrong with the movement, you only need to re-render the frames that are affected.
Use post processing tools to generate the AVI or MPG from you image sequence.
You have to be willing to compromise a little quality when working with animations, unless you have access to a Pixar-like render farm. There's a reason the big companies have hundreds of powerful machines working in tandem to create the movies we know and love. Anything less would simply take too long.
We are building a team now on our project and a render farm now. The renderfarm has a remote log in. Anyone interested in joing the team please contact me
~
Lighting takes practice. this Street Race Animation I did was one of tge hardest films i ever had to light for a project.. I used a combination of Iray for Inner city lights and I used 3DL for the rest of it.. So I feel your pain in rendering for animation. I had animations that have taken months to complete. Thats the the worst part of creating animation is waiting for the rendering to be done. . I Render in AVI too over Individual renders. that also speeds up process times for me.
As you practice you will learn short cuts how to make shadow panes props and ect that greatly speed up rendering in daz studio.