how do you do animations with Iray?

Toobis

Is there something extra you need to purchase? I just use Iray a lot and heard you can do Iray renders with Daz animate2 but I have no idea how to convert finished animations from animate2 into Iray. Any help appreciated here thanks.

DraagonStorm

You don't need to convert any thing. Iray is just a different render engine. The thing you would want to do is adjust how much time you allow the Iray render engine to render each frame.

Here's Daz's Iray Users Guide: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/start

 

Oso3D

Very slowly!

 

Knittingmommy

You want to figure out what the best resolution is for the size frame you are shooting and just have Iray render to that setting.  Under Render Settings>General>Render Type choose Image Series instead of Still which is the default.  DAZ had a quick little video tutorial on optimizing Iray to speed up your renders:

grinch2901

I don't do animation but from the forum these are a couple of tips I've gleaned.

1. If you don't have an Nvidia GPU, don't bother. People don't live long enough to get through a full Iray animation using CPU only. Well, except perhaps in remote villages in China where they keep finding people who are like 120 years old.
2. Assuming you made it past the GPU check in step 1, under render settings, go ahead and select Iray as your renderer.
3. Iray wants to render each frame until it hits some high level of purity which can take a loooong time. To speed it up, make it stop after a specific number of iterations (sacraficing some quality). In render settings, turn Render Quality Enable to "off" and decide how many samples you want via trial and error with a still render. Then leave it there, each frame will render to that level and move on to the next frame.
4. In your aux viewport, enable Iray render mode. It loads the GPU with all the textures and converts all the shaders. If you don't do this, your real animation render will have to do all that loading / converting with every single frame. That can be a minute or more per frame, just loading stuff. With the aux viewport set to Iray render mode,  it never has to do that.

Then, hit the render button and as Will says, be prepared for a long wait unless your hardware is really good.

hphoenix

Just remember to render in short segments.  Unless you have NEED (cinematographically) for a long slow panning shot or such, keep segments down to under 10 seconds.

Doing a 30-second animation means 900 frames (@ 30 fps)  If Iray takes just 60 seconds to render a frame, that's still 15 hours of solid rendering time.  So doing that 22 minute TV episode as an Iray animation?  44 TIMES that.  That's about 88 days where your computer renders the whole time you are sleeping.  So about 3 months to do, not counting all the time setting up the scenes, tweaking paths, adjusting lighting and surfaces, fixing shaping and poke-throughs, and more.

Animation is for the very patient.....unless you have access to a free renderfarm.....

 

 

Oso3D

Oh, and tooting my own horn (toot!), look for every texture map you don't need and get rid of them. Do everything in your power to keep the RAM required as low as possible, including stuff like procedural textures (toot!)

It might not look quite as good under some circumstances, but you're also not going to have year-long renders.

 

grinch2901

One other thing, render to an image series, not a video file. If it crashes at, say, frame 140, with an image series you can start at frame 140 and continue from there. With a video, not so much.

But you need video editing software to import the individual images and make a movie out of them.

Kendall Sears

Something to keep in mind with any PBR and animation: it takes extra work to make the animation look right.  PBRs tend to create stark, hard, and clean edges for every frame.  This is a problem with trying to make a smooth animation because it makes any movement look jerky due to the motion of the edges being visible.  There is a similar problem with video on the 4K UHD televisions as well, the resolution is too good and the motion of items in the frame seem to "jerk" or "snap" into place on their screen pixels.

In order to make motion that doesn't look "wrong" requires that edges around certain angles relative to the camera need to be ever-so-slightly blurred (a type of anti-aliasing) so that they don't just "jump" from one pixel to the next.  The angles that need to be worked out are left as an exercise for the reader.  Unfortunately, "motion-blur" won't work for these situations since the absolute distance of movement in the scene is so small that the motion-blur filters are disabled for the necessary areas.

Kendall

Oso3D

I was inspired to try some Iray animations:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/WTP2 Old Man Animated.avi

(This shows nicely why my procedural shaders won't work for animations unless you are doing something weird)

Tried the same with a more conventional texture map.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/803826/WTP2 Old Man Mapped Animated.avi

 

grinch2901

Did you notice how long it took to run the two animations, Will?  I see what you mean about your procedurals having some odd effects in animation but curious what, if any, affect the lack of textures had on the actual render. 

Oso3D

Nothing hugely noticeable. I ran the second with shorter time limits, so... yeah.

The procedurals run a little slower than texture maps, I think... but they prevent you from overflowing memory. So it's kind of a weirdly uneven payoff.

 

Toobis

K this is nice guys but what do you actually select to render with Iray??????????? that was all I wanted to know. Please just give me a basic screen shot I have to select is all.

nicstt

grinch2901 said:

One other thing, render to an image series, not a video file. If it crashes at, say, frame 140, with an image series you can start at frame 140 and continue from there. With a video, not so much.

But you need video editing software to import the individual images and make a movie out of them.

Blender can combine the images.

Mythmaker

Toobis said:

Is there something extra you need to purchase? I just use Iray a lot and heard you can do Iray renders with Daz animate2 but I have no idea how to convert finished animations from animate2 into Iray. Any help appreciated here thanks.

K this is nice guys but what do you actually select to render with Iray??????????? that was all I wanted to know. Please just give me a basic screen shot I have to select is all.

 

Going from animate2 to iray? Not 100% sure about your question. I think you meant, from default viewport preview render to iray render?

If so...

Render Setting tab, choose your preferred render engine, choose Nvidia iRay from the drop down...

 

wolf359

"Something to keep in mind with any PBR and animation: it takes extra work to make the animation look right.  PBRs tend to create stark, hard, and clean edges for every frame.  This is a problem with trying to make a smooth animation because it makes any movement look jerky due to the motion of the edges being visible.  There is a similar problem with video on the 4K UHD televisions as well, the resolution is too good and the motion of items in the frame seem to "jerk" or "snap" into place on their screen pixels."

This is the reason why so much of the content seen on 4K televisions just looks"wrong".

I happened to catch one the the recent "Transformers" movies playing on a 4K TV at an Electronics store and the visual experience was jarring, somehow it managed to undo the realistic blending of the CG Autobots from the live shot footage
making the CG characters look quite Fake. 

Also I am not an I ray user so doe anyone know if Iray has a built  in "frame averaging" algorithum Like Vray From Chaos group? 

This is a vital feature to avoid the ugly flickering that we see in many GI animations in general as the lighting values are calulated slightly differently for each frame.

Toobis

Thanks all.