Best Render Setup?

Deke

I'm working on an ambitious animation project and so far have finessed shots to render them at 2-3 min a frame. To really take advantage of Iray and more subtle lighting, it will take longer to render shots with shadows  and atmosphere. This results in shots that take 10-15 min/frame to render. I've upgraded the card in my old mac pro to a 680.  And I'm thinking of installing a second 680 and powering it with a second power supply. But is there another best-practice way to set up rendering? I think there are some render cue options. What do all you animation pros do?

JD_Mortal

You can setup the time-limits, render, and test the final animation... See if minimal rendering is suitable.

You have to remember that video does not require massive details and per-frame depth. If you flip through any movie, frame by frame, you will see that 90% of the frames make horrible still-images. (Nice natural motion-blur.)

Taking that into consideration, in your final renders, you can still obtain great video quality with non-ideal still-frame quality. First, you can add "motion blur", with most video-editing software. Just don't use crazy blurry values. You only want to slightly blur all the "micro-dots" noise. (Those are the first-pass shade values and first-pass sub-lighting values. The noisy parts.)

Then, after you have saved it, uncompressed, you want to "compress it", to taste, which will also do some mild "blurring", per-frame and in tween-frames. I use "Handbrake" and "VLC" for my final compression.

When setting-up things to be rendered, if possible, when you have a lot of static-scenery and non-moving cameras, use pre-rendered scenes as backdrops. (Render your scene without the moving model. Use that as a backdrop, same camera-angle... Same light... but remove the shadows from the backdrop object. Then render with the shadows-floor option for the animated model. That will render an alpha shadow so it looks like she/he/they are standing on the floor in the backdrop scene.)

Beyond that, you can attempt to setup "special models", reducing some of the image-detail by creating substitute low-detail versions of the same images. (Things like the eyes, nails, skins, on distant models that are never close-up. Just don't compress the original images.)

Also, some models have lower detail settings in the "Parameters-window".

jwhytephotography

I'm running a i7 5930K, 32 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 memory, SSD's and a GTX980 OC - with 4K complicated still frames - single images as a TIFF, I'm rendering 13 minutes tops. When I overclock the processor at 25% over this drops down to 7 minutes per frame as their is more voltage per processing core. But tempertaures are holding steady at 75C with a liquid block cooler and fans running on max. The graphics card is feeling the load too! 

On video -- I'm having a heck of a time! It's painful. Maya in comparison takes 1/4 the time for animation rendering.... 

My biggest issue with DAZ3D is that their is NO ability to save animation as a RAW video output. The rendering is being compressed into a quicktime timeline which causes a major slowdown on the system. Take for example Cinema 4DXL - my rendering times are 75% less when I render to a CinemaDNG or uncompressed video output. It makes little sense for DAZ3D not to have this video compression - or lack their of - option.

fixmypcmike

I would suggest rendering to an image series and then converting to your desired video format -- faster, and if you need to make modifications you only need to re-render the frames that need changes.