Animating in IRAY - Lookng for ways to save time
iwonderwherethatfishdidgo
Posts: 0
Hi all.
I'm new to 3D animation andI was hoping I may be able to get some advice.
I've downloaded Daz3D and bought a few starter kits. I am looking to make a few short clips using the software. Nothing special, just a few seconds of animation (so around 150 frames for 5 seconds at 30 fps). The trouble is, I'm pushing 40 years old, so will likely have died of old age by the time my computer finishes rendering in IRAY!
I've had the idea that since I'm using a static camera and background, I could just animate the characters (which seems to be MUCH faster), then superimpose them onto a still image for the background. Does anyone know the best programme to do this? I know it's probably a simple question but any help would be appreciated!
Any other ways to cut down on rendering time for animations would also be appreciated!
Thank you!
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Comments
You might need an Nvidia graphics card with about 12 GB of vram.
One thing to consider... When rendering animation, one doesn't need to have large frame size or 'perfect' quality, the 30 times a second changing images will hide the small imperfections, just freeze frame a movie and look at the image quality and compare it to a static image that has been made to be a one frame image.
The animations I have made, have been 800x600px at 24fps and my RTX 3060 12GB has rendered them in 35-50 seconds per frame in Iray.
You can superimpose your animations onto a static background in After Effects if you have adobe, which is what I do every day, or if you need something free, use DaVinci Resolve. And you can animate at 24FPS as that's what movies are done in. It might not seem like a lot, but saving those six frames adds up real quick timewise.
But yeah, if you're planning on rendering the characters by themselves, you will save loads of time, but I find that I have to render longer if the resolution is lower. I use Daz like every day for work and they're like just render out at the output size which is super small, and at times I've had to jack the render quality up to like 25 to get the fireflies out and have it go through thousands of iterations. Whereas if I set it to 4K, set render quality to 1, 88% convergence and I can knock out frames in like 300-500 iterations. You can even do 1920x1080 and it'll take like 800 iterations sometimes in the same timeframe as 4K. But you render at 4K, even if there's a little bit of noise, when you downsize it to the smaller size you want, you lose a lot of those noise and imperfections. I do have a 3090 graphics card, so if you have a smaller card those times will vary, but render larger and downscale will be your friend. Good luck!
I think you run your iterations a bit higher than I do. I try to start at around 30 iterations and then increase little at a time until I get the desired render clarity effect I usually have a goal to render 1920x1080p getting around 15 seconds a frame at 30kfps. I like to try to stayin the 30 key-frame pre second range, it just makes for a smoother running animation IMO. I also render in Image sequence rather than in movie or avi. and just put everything together in the movie editor
Something recently I learned. & I do not know why rendering animation on daz 4.12 renders about 10x faster than 4.21 on the same PC's & RTX 2060 weird huh.
Traditional animation was mostly done "on twos", meaning that it was only 12 FPS. Give that a try and cut your render time in half. Into the Spiderverse used frame rates in a very clever way: when Miles was starting out, he was rendered on twos while Peter, the more experienced Spider-Man, was on ones. As the movie went on and Miles became more experienced and confident, his animation went to ones as well.
You are 100% correct in that traditional 2D animation and Into the Spider-Verse were done on 2's, but that's not how 3D films are made otherwise, they're 99% of the time done in 24fps.
So that's why stuff is rendering longer than I remember from awhile ago! Good to know it wasn't just me noticing that lol.
I was blaming the long renders on w10.
But I installed my older copies of daz 4.10 and daz 4.12 lately so I could use some older plugins like walkit.and I happen to notice the major diffrences.
But with daz 4.10 or 4.12 you can't use VDB volume content either & deforce works like crap in daz 4.12 so there those draw backs.
You don't say what your computer config is. It would be useful to know. The low hanging fruit here may be your graphics device. When I first used Daz I had an AMD card and yes, it took all evening to render one character. I've used it with a GTX 970 which are super cheap second-hand. People here use anything from that up to multiple 4090's (baller).
After that you can use a decent denoiser (iRay has one in-built, or you can do it as a post-process step using a free one like Intel's). The pixels you don't render render the fastest, right? Another thing you can do is halve your framerate then use an AI framerate upscaler like Flowframes to get it back to 30. Like the pixels, the frames you don't render render the fastest - though here some AI upscalers struggle with objects in scenes that are occluded for a short period of time.
Good day, HitFilm Express is the free version of HitFIlm and will do a great job for just overlaying your character animations on a static background. It also does a whole lot more.
As mentioned above, fewer frames per second can help. Fewer iterations per frame can help. Also, make sure your lighting is good ... low or bad lighting can add significantly to render times.
Check your materials (reflexion is time consuming), scene (is there stuff you don't need to see?), use iray section nodes, your render settings (quality, resolution). Avoid (dark) interior scenes or too many lights (use some meshlight softboxes, for example)....
keep it simple.
I recently got Topaz gigapixel AI upscaler
(for AI art)
https://youtube.com/shorts/YXnKK8tyM9g?feature=share
It can batch procees frames
so I may run some tests with 4x upscaling of Iray renders from 480x270 to 1920 x1080.