Rendering an animation... needs a NASA computer?
KlaudM
Posts: 76
Hi guys,
The title reflects what I'm thinking after the last image rendered...
At this time I have 2xGTX1080, sw used DAZ 4.1 Pro with Iray.
The last image took 1h for the rendering, max 5000 iterations (after 1h was at 3100) and 4K resolution 3840x2160), the scene is nothing complex, 3 characters in standing pose, a wall in background and marble on the floor, as light I used a preset of iRadiance HDRI Studio, the view isn't particulary near, just enough to cover the half screen with the characters.
So, if I would to make 5 mins of animation, do I really need to render for 9.000 hrs???!!! 
(375 days!!!!)
- 1h for 1 frames, 30hrs for 1 second (30fps), 5 mins are 300 seconds... 300 x 30.
I'm really wondering what type of gpu (or cpu, at this time I don't know what thinking) for example have at Marvel Studio or similar to animate their 3d models... and then they must also add FX!
Also I'd like to know how much a VCA server could reduce the time, from 9.000hrs to...?
Ok maybe 4K is too much, at 1080p the same image takes 32mins, so we pass from 9.000hrs to 4.800hrs... only seven months 
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Comments
I'm guessing they outsmart the renderer
Instead of the "brute force" method I think they break their scenes into parts. And for example if the background doesn't change, they render just the background once, and use that as an image. That takes away a lot of the render time since it doesn't have to calculate the background again and again for every frame. And then you just render the characters and later on you merge the two together.
Movie studios use several render farms around the world for their movies. Check the end credits and count how many studios and people are involve in the VFX/CG. Each company employs several hundred employees working with several thousand CPU cores/nodes. That's beyond the budget of your DAZ Studio hobbyist.
As for your long render times, do you really need 5000 iterations?
Right, but from what I've seen, they also, in virtually every film ever made, use the compositing/post production process I described. And I think to answer the OP's question, a consideration of how you can practically take advantage of stuff in your scene you can isolate and not have to render over and over again if it doesn't change might be one way to reduce overall render times. Cuz I doubt the OP wants to hire render farms if he can tweak his scene for free.
You have to change your way of thinking (and, by the way, that's DAZ 4.10 Pro, it counts up full numbers)...
First of all, an animation render dosn't need to be "perfect". Make a test render where you check out after how many iterations the quality is acceptable. Then, limit each render of the squence to that number.
Yes, typically a full bank of servers running flat out is the norm. You have to decide how few iterations you can get away with with animation, as it's moving so the eye will 'automatically' correct stuff and it won't be noticeable. Are you sure you need it at 4K resolution?
Game computers are NOT rendering computers, although they don't do that bad a job considering their limitations.
There is no such thing as too much power for rendering; as has already been explained, commercial outfits attribute vast resources.
Compositing is definitely beneficial, render the foreground and background separately, assemble them in your video editor. you can reuse the rendered bg in a couple thousand frames, there are all sorts of technics to cut down on render times. It does require pre planning.
Uhm I can say no, around 3100 it was ok, a bit noisy but absolutely good. (4K version)
@ebergerly That's a nice trick but I think that depends on the situation, for example if there's some glossy surface or a mirror you must renderize all togheter, or not?
But also if you just wanna move the camera, I guess you can't use a flat background if you wanna reach a good result.
I'm thinking that movie studios don't use a 3D sw to realize the background if it's not really necessary, I guess they make it with After Effects or similar during postwork.
adding blur and motion blur in composition hides any noise.
I might also add I rarely see the need for displacement and HD details in a video so interactive render using daylight with a backdrop or alpha to add one later suffices too.
Each time for each scene? In this way seems better and pratically usable, I have to test :)
Another trick to test, thanks!
Can you show me some of your animations? I made some test with 50 or 100 iterations and the result was terribly noisy and undetailed.
Totally agree but at this time I have only those gpus.
If you were thinking of an upgrade of 2xGtx1080, what would you recommend?
I've read many benchmark for Iray and seems that GTX1080Ti, also if is "made for gaming" is one of the best gpu for rendering.
3DL could be a lot faster;)
Yes, a single frame in a Pixar film can take hours on a single computer to render. A render farm with thousands of cpu cores makes things manageable, besides working smart like rendering in layers (reflections, shadows, lighting, alpha layers, etc..) The main barrier to a Daz animator is iRay itself. It's slow and lacks control. Try Octane instead. And as everyone has already suggested, you probably don't need so many iterations. 4K resolution? Are you a masochist?
I'm still not sure that comparing renderer performance is apples-to-apples. Or that Iray or any other renderer is "slow". I think it depends on a lot of stuff.
On the other hand, DAZ's Iray is somewhat lacking, IMO, in the render layer/canvases department. While I'm impressed that they did go to the trouble to implement canvases, it clearly needs some improvement if anyone is seriously considering doing render layers and compositing. Aside from the annoyance of the expressions being typed in backwards (AAARRRGGGGHHH!!!), there are significant improvements needed in simplifying the interface so you don't have to type regex expressions, and adding new types of passes which aren't presently available.
DS isn't meant to be a cheap production solution. It's meant for hobbyists to spit out simple scenes or stills. It has animation capabilities just so it can be a little closer to its source: Poser.
If you're doing quality animations, you are expected to pay for a quality piece of software that can do quality animation. DS is good for storyboarding before you turn the power on to the Big Machine that costs more money to run, so you can go into it with a clearer picture of what you want to do while you're paying for the electricity to run your production system, and paying for a Union contingent that does all the labor required to turn your idea into a reality.
Sadly, there's still no simple, affordable solution for animation artists to turn their dreams into a quality, sellable product like there is for those who only think in 2D (posters, prints, smartphone wallpaper, comix, etc).
for that reason, I gave up on doing animations. I am not willing to lower render quality for that. a good render takes me at least 1 hour render time, means 24 houres for 1 second of a movie, 1 month rendering for 30 seconds movie. No wy, so no. Not for me. I just have one computer.
Another point: the only reason to render at 4k is to reduce it afterwards to mask flaws in the render, like grain. A 4K 3D CGI cinematic that came off a single home gaming system using the freeware algorithms like Microsoft, Intel YUV, or h.264 is not going to run smoothly on anything as an mpeg or avi. You would have to transfer it to digital tape or film as an uncompressed image series.
This ^ ..dumb brute force pathtracer.... not useable for animation of any length.
I'm still amazed that people are talking about 1 hour + renders. My only guess is you're doing effects (blur, fog, etc.) that probably can be done MUCH faster and better in some post-production software, and/or re-rendering stuff in each frame that doesn't need to be re-rendered. Or maybe not optimizing your scene render settings. Or maybe trying to make sure every single thing in the scene is in perfect clear view, rather than focusing on the important stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, but I have a real tough time to get anything more than a 10-15 minute render.
And I'm still not sure how anyone compares render times across different renderers. How do you ensure that renderer X is using the same materials and shading system as renderer Y? And how do you ensure you're getting the exact same result? And even more importantly, how do you ensure your render settings (lights, samples, etc.) are identical? Or even comparable? Of course different renderers will take different shortcuts, so yeah renderer Y might be faster if it takes shortcuts that X doesn't take, and gives different results.
this is me but I mostly use Octane in Carrara or iClone
https://www.youtube.com/user/wendyvainity
as I find iray too slow too
and DAZ studio in general not as easy to animate in, it can be done and well, I have seen awesome DAZ studio animations I just prefer the easy paths.
you get noise if you use any emitter or emission shaders so thats why I said sunlight
there is a sun dial tool thats handy, omit the HDRi dome too for speed
Use Blender or Octane in Unity and if you are going to render in 4K render only 500 iterations per frame and that will be of sufficient quality to look good. So then if your story is good people will like it. Don't forget most people will only be seeing it at about 640x480 on a YouTube page in their browser so 500 iterations at 4K is going to look pretty decent for most scenes.
The reason "dumb brute force pathtracers" are more popular now is because GPU rendering has made the render times tolerable. But most animated films today (and definitely CGI in "regular" films) rely heavily on path tracing and PBR materials. As others have noted, the large studios either have, or "rent" (or both) render farms where multiple cpu's/machines are used to render out the frames for the film. But, due to the increasing demand/need for better realism, it's not uncommon for frame render times to hit the 12-24 hour time frame (or more). So if you want to get the same high quality output, you will need to either throw more hardware at rendering, reduce your expectations on image quality, or use a different render engine.
Many of the animated films are using some serious cheats to reduce render times (similar to what ebergerly noted). Most have also cut back on render time expensive shaders like SSS, and have severely reduced the detail of the backgrounds to improve render speeds and profit (not true for CGI augmentation/FX for movies with real actors though). However, this is not true for all studios. Since Pixar has been mentioned, I'll use them as an example. If you want to really be amazed at the complete detail in an animated film, any of their last few films are excellent, with Coco probably being the most intricate. In the scenes where the full land/world of the dead are shown, everything in the scene is rendered geometry (not layered). IIRC it's hundreds of thousands of structures (maybe over a million), and over 7 million light sources. There are no background "cheats", everything is real geometry. All the marigold petals on the bridge to the land of the dead are real geometry, both in the close ups and the long shots (millions? of petals). Keep in mind that Pixar's Renderman has a lot more things to adjust and optimize than we have available in Iray, but it still takes a long time per frame, According to this article, Monsters University took and average of 29 hours per frame to render (that would be the time it took per frame using the allotted per frame CPU's on the render farm, it's doubtful that they use the whole render farm for each frame, because there are diminishing returns with increasing numbers of threads/cpu's being used to render a frame).
If you want to use DS for animating and rendering, to reduce your render times you only have a few easy options: Here are a few possibilities.
IIray - Reduce the quality of the image a bit (maybe reducing the complexity of your shaders, the new bi-lobed shaders with most Genesis 8 figures take about 2x-3x longer than the older shaders). anything with SSS will take longer. Using the Interactive renderer in place of the photorealistic will also reduce render times (at the cost of image quality). Of course adding another GPU or 2 (maybe 2 1080ti's?) could help a bit.
Use 3Delight with the new IBL Master product, learn to use scripting with 3Delight (having a dual cpu machine with 6 or more core per multi-threaded CPU would be a huge plus here).
Purchase/Use Octane Render - it's a bit faster (especially with additional GPU's), and you have more direct control over your shaders and render settings, and canvases.
But, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that quality realistic 3D takes time to render, and the more stuff you have in your scene, and the more complex (realistic) your shaders, the longer it will take.
What??? 29 hours per frame?? Wow, I never thought they'd put up with that
Amazing. I mean when you think about a 90 minute (?) movie or whatever, 29 hours per frame seems an eternity. That's something like 2.5 million hours of rendering for 1 hour of movie. Double wow. That's like 300 years or something. I assumed they'd do a bunch of post production-type stuff to cut that down to something reasonable.
I suppose if you have 300 computers working full time they could get it done in 1 year, but geez, that seems crazy.
By the way, I just did an Iray render that, at least IMO seems reasonably photorealistic, of a semi-dark indoor scene with 4-G3's, a bunch of emissives, and a big mirror with reflections and stuff, and total render time was just around 18 minutes. I can't imagine what it would take to get that to 29 hours. Maybe they crank up the resolution for the big screen?
4K would boost render time way up. Maybe their digital originals are 8K or 16K even.
Yeah, I'm sure you're right. I'm re-rendering my 1920x1080 (actually smaller than that) scene that rendered in 18 minutes in 4k now...we'll see how much difference.
Was that rendered at 4K?
IIRC Pixars scenes also are in the 48-128 GB range now
The image below took a little over 1 hour on a GTX 970M at 2000X2000.
Could you possibly post your image for refernce???
I'm sure they have well over 1,000 multicore (18 or more cores??) CPU's available. Of course they need to also render out sample scenes, and they typically have about 4 films in production, and about 4 years per film production rate. So I'm sure their render farm doesn't get any breaks.
Both render engines have their propose , Iray is nice for photorealistic still renders , not really all that practical at this time for animations.
I have made more than a few animations using both Iray and 3delight, By far I get faster render times, able to build much larger scenes & get better results with 3delight. Iray is fine for animations that have little too no back grounds or props, &using one character. the problem I have with iray is with iray the larger your ram load the longer the render times. where as it seems with 3delight. the more lights using shadow maps have the longer the render times
I could never render some of the scenes I have made with iray just because of the memory size. with 3dl I can build huge resource intensive scenes and render them fairly quickly
Iray Animation.
3Delight animation
Do you know if they use CPU's or GPU's for rendering? Because my Ryzen is an 8 core/16 thread, and to render the scene that took 18 minutes on my GTX 1070 + GTX 1080ti would take about a month on the Ryzen. So even 1,000 multicore CPU's doesnt' seem like a lot compared to 1,000 GPU's.
Anyway, so far it looks like the 1200x800 scene that took 18 minutes on my two GPU's is going to take maybe an hour at 4k (3840x2160). So maybe 3 times as long. Still, nothing close to 29 hours, but now I understand those who render in 4k and take an hour to render.
Again, why is it not practical for animations? Are you rendering in 4k? Based on what I render, I rarely get over 15 minutes or so per frame, so rendering an animation doesn't seem too painful. That's 4 frames per hour, or 6 hours for 1 second of animation, or 4 seconds per day. Yeah, painful, but that's not considering doing any scene optimizing or post production stuff to cut that down considerably.