Animation rendering time

Dkgoose

I just bought Animate so I could do animations but curious what render times people get, I tried a test render with lime 129 frames but I canceled it because after about 2 hours it was only on about frame 50.  There were no lights in the scene just the character

hphoenix

Was this using 3Delight or Iray?  And if it was Iray, was it using a HDRI IBL (it has one by default if it is set to Dome+Scene) ?

 

Dkgoose

It was iray, I didn't use any lights just wanted a quick trial

hphoenix

dkgoose said:

It was iray, I didn't use any lights just wanted a quick trial

Then you would have gotten nothing but black screens.  Iray LIKES having lots of light.  If the images came out at all, it was using the default IBL and possibly the camera headlamp.  Also, with nothing else in the scene, the light can't 'bounce' off to light anything.

Iray isn't like 3Delight.  You NEED lighting and unless you are using a decent IBL HDRI, it will tend to look washed out and flat.  Renders will tend to remain grainy if you don't have enough light.  And they take longer to reach convergence (and thus finish.)

2 hours for 50 frames is a little over 2 minutes per frame.  That's not bad at all.  Animations take a long time to render.  This isn't a game engine.....The last animation I rendered was only about 30 seconds (900 frames or so) and it took the better part of a week to render all the frames.

 

mtl1

Neat trick I learned from Cath/Mec4D's Youtube channel: Set your viewport to render in IRAY and it'll preload the scene into memory. That way, it doesn't have to reload for each frame, saving you hours in your render :)

hphoenix

Another trick if you don't need all the full bells and whistles of full Iray photorealism is to set your renderer to Iray and set it to render using Interactive instead of photoreal.  Then run your render sequence.  Interactive renders a LOT faster, but loses a lot of specialty features like SSS, translucency, and such.  If you don't need those, interactive will work fine, and will only take a few seconds per render, depending on your GPU.

 

Dkgoose

So not sure exactly how long my render took but I'm guessing almost a day, it was finished when I got home but the time was still going because it needed to be saved and studio crashed while trying saving it but luckily it saving the renders in the temp folder so I combined them and made a video and a gif image,it's nothing fancy just a trial.. Gif images must not work on the forums...

KA1

One thing I have found with my current animation project is that rendering an image sequence is better than video. The compression leaves a lot to be desired and image sequences let you adjust which frames you wish to render so if you've only adjusted frames 35 to 75 for example you only need to re render those frames.