Rendering animation effectively
leo8851
Posts: 0
I am new to 3D animation and would like to ask forum members for tips about the most effective way to render animation. I have an ambitious animation project in mind and realize that rendering takes time( a lot of it ) and RAM ( at least 8 GB) .
That being said I am open to any suggestions members may have to reduce rendering time. What I am working with is Windows 7 64 bit , Nvidia GeForce GTX 660, and 8 GB RAM.
The soft ware I can use is DAZ Studio 4.6, Poser 10, iClone 5, Bryce 7.1. I also have another computer running on Windows XP.
I plan to do the animation rendering in 1 minute blocks at most.Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated
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Comments
you have iClone 5 - its about as fast as you can get .
water - glass take the most time to render .
then how you light your scene is next .
Thanks that's good to know bigh. I also understand if I utilize a lot of layers that will reduce rendering time. Is that true?
it can .
depends on what you want to do .
I use the same level of hardware, but running Carrara 8.1 Pro and Vue Complete (I have used Poser and Bryce in the past). The biggest factors to me for render time are anti-aliasing level and lighting. For the former, Carrara offers none, fast, good and best. I will typically use fast for animations and best for stills (to be used in animation, some bigger than frame size to allow moving/zooming in the video editor). For lighting, Carrara has two types of Global Illumination, skylight and indirect light. These will require more render time, but can give impressive results (more realistic lighting i.e. reflected light from surfaces), so I use them mostly for the (sometimes oversize) stills.
Lot of lights/shadows, reflections (e.g. water) and transparency can also require more render time.
Vue has similar parameters, and I recall Poser and Bryce do also (its been a while).
iClone is fast, Carrara is very good. DAZ Studio is not for the faint of heart. Of all listed it will have the longest render times depending on the output quality and frame size. Both of which the user has full control of. A Daz user can also learn tricks like using The Uber surface shader on transmapped hair to stop raytracing, long renders those without Uber, and keeping lighting to a minimum and Standard types.
I would know as I'm a Not Faint of Heart and use DAZ Studio to animate. At this time nothing I have posted to Youtube has been more than a test as I learn to use my tools. I do all my work in 300 to 400 frame clips as I find it works best to keep the frame count down for long render times. Running a PC at 100% core use for long periods of time is not something I take lightly, to off set that my system is liquid cooled.
Thanks for your feedback BIGH,STEVE K and JADERAIL. All of your suggestions are appreciated adding little pieces to the overall puzzle.
As I do more research into this subject it seems more daunting as there are a lot of software programs out there clamoring for attention and ultimately one's money. I have no problem purchasing something if it is helpful . I just don't like getting TAKEN. That's why I posted this topic in the forum. My project as I imagine it so far would use at least 6 set scenes.Within each scene I would be using anything from background motion,lighting,character movement,special effects,audio and music. JADERAIL , your suggestion of using 400 frame clips for rendering seems wise . I certainly don't want SMOKE drifting out of my computer!
Let me give an example from my research so far. DAZ has a product called Alembic Exporter that puts the data into a different format for faster rendering. Then I come across Octane Renderer which makes many claims to faster rendering. There is also Reality 2 and soon Reality 3 for DAZ. My head is starting to spin!
Also it seems to me that a given software is best suited for specific aspects of animation. Bryce 7.1 (landscapes), Poser ( content manipulation) , DAZ Studio ( character and morph creation, lighting and limited animation with keymate and graphmate) and iclone 5 ( character movement , character voicing ,rendering ) .Please correct if me if my understanding is wrong. The capability of exporting and importing among the different software programs also seems important. Then is it a matter of using layering technique to isolate special effects , character movement etc. OR . . . . . am I making this waaaaay too complicated ?
First let me tell you that Reality any version uses Lux Render which is SO not a fast option for rendering. High Quality sure but fast no.
From reading your post It sounds like you have a very good grasp on the basics now. Working in layers and many programs for the final output will work fine. The one thing that really matters is your Post Production Editor. A Good video editor program that does many things such as layering sound, green screen composting and maybe even effects will be your most useful tool beyond the programs used to get your work files. There are very many to pick from ranging from very limited Free ones to very high end expensive ones. I strongly advise you to get the best you can afford and work with it until you understand all its tools.
Octane runs fairly quickly and is one of the fastest for quality vs. render speed because of its reliance on the GPU. The NVidia 660 you have is no slouch - I'm running a 680 card myself. My renders at 1280 x 720 can be 90 seconds per frame, all the way up to 20 minutes per frame if you crank up the quality and are relying on the Pathtracing kernel. I use the Daz Octane plugin, so it actually renders right within Daz itself.
I would also suggest Adobe After Effects and Premiere for post-production work. Blender has a compositor built-in that can be used for compositing, and Blender also has the Cycles GPU-based renderer.
No, it just *is* complicated. Over many years I have been through many of the programs mentioned, finally finding the tools I feel comfortable with. They are not the tools I started with, so there are no "one size fits all" answers.
I just finished a 48 Hour Film contest, just getting back from the dropoff event. As a reminder, this involved a 5 minute +/- animation done in two days, give a starting point of a randomly drawn genre (we got "Romance"), a line of dialogue, a prop and a character (name and occupation). It went pretty well for us, mostly because I feel comfortable with both the 3D elements I've collected and the tools I use.
The 3D elements are mostly Poser type elements (characters, props, scenes, motions, poses, hair, expressions, mat surfaces, hand poses, etc.) The advantage of Poser type elements is the standard sizing (figures fit into scenes), and the excellent integration of Gen4 characters into Carrara Pro 8.1 (load directly from its browser, no "import").
The tools are Carrara Pro 8.1, Magix Movie Edit Pro Premium, and Photoshop. Yes, I have After Effects, Premiere, Vue Complete, Lightwave, and more. But for a time sensitive project like a two day contest, I need it to be instinctive. The first three I mentioned are that for me, even though the first two are hardly mainstream apps. But I don't have to wonder how to do things, I've done most things many times. With the others I list (all spectacularly great apps), I have to stop and think, where is that feature?
So, just find the programs that your brain can handle intuitively. No problem. Har. But you're getting good input from the people here, so you'll get there.
I give the last post a plus 1 so +1.
You really need to be comfortable with the tools you pick. At this current time I am still spending more time learning my tools which are new to me than doing full final output. Once I have the how it is done down then it becomes time to see just what I can and can not do. Most of the time the I can not's turn out to be I could if I really knew the software just a bit better. That I find come's from trying things that seemed less important my first few tries than it really turned out to be once I tried and grasped what a feature was really doing.
Hi Leo8851,
You've gotten a lot of good advice so far, I'll jump in with my workflow just for the heck of it anyways.
My main 2 programs are Daz Studio and Adobe After Effects.
I do all my 3d animation in Daz.
Render times can get crazy, but with some careful planning, it works out to be more than doable.
After I set up a shot, light it, and get the camera moves squared away, I render everything out in layers.
Let's say for example I have a scene of Michael and Victoria standing in an office, talking to each other.
I want an over the shoulder shot on Victoria.
Michaels shoulder is in the foreground. A wall and a bookcase are in the background. Victoria is in the center of the shot.
Using this example, Victoria is the main focus of the shot.
So what I would do is crank my render settings to the max and hide everything in the shot, except for Victoria.
I would than render her out as an image sequence.
After that I would hide her, and bring back only Michael.
Here comes the real time saver - Render high quality still images.
The foreground, Michaels shoulder, and the background, which is the wall and the book case, don't have any animation, so I can render out 2 high quality images instead of image sequences.
I will now have 3 layers of the same shot: an image sequence of Victoria, a Still Image of the Foreground, and a Still Image of the Background.
I would import these 3 layers into After Effects and assemble them in the correct order.
Once I get to this point, I fake a nice Depth of Field using the Camera Lens blur effect.
Since Victoria is on her own layer, I can quickly and easily apply a blur to the foreground and background layers.
I can also make all 3 layers 3D layers inside of After Effects, create a new camera, and animate a dolly move to have the camera push in on Victoria while she is speaking to Michael.
Using this workflow, there are lots of color grading possibilities as well.
The only time this gets tricky is when shadows come in to play, but there are work arounds for that too.
I'm pretty happy with the results I've gotten from this.
A lot of it really does come down to what programs you're comfortable with.
Oh man, Sorry for the long post!
I Hope there's something you find useful in there!
Just a comment about After Effects. A great program with some of the best learning resources out there, e.g. this:
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Motion-Graphics-After-Effects/dp/0240814150/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400524267&sr=1-4&keywords=After+Effects
The down side, of course, is the price. (I'm not sure about the price for the current "Creative cloud" version, but I'm not a fan of that approach anyway.) What I've seen happening is the video editing programs, like my (very affordable) Magix Movie Edit Pro, are adding After Effects-like features, so that in most cases I can get the result I need in the video editor. (It saves time also in my two day caffeine fueled contests.) So if you can explore your video editor before you take the expensive dive into After Effects, you might save some money.
Something nice I came across is Hitfilm 2 Ultimate https://hitfilm.com/ Editor + VFX, for about 1/3 of the price of AE. It also does particles, etc...so that's also something time consuming to render that you could do afterwards.
Here is their trailer, looks pretty nice to me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOLYEZ-9O-E
Peter.
Actually, HitFilm 3 just came out with some useful updated features. I use that for compositing.
I model in Hexagon and then texture in Blender.
I animate in Daz. If I need any bullet physics done, I do that in Blender and then export from Blender to Daz.
I render in Reality/Luxrender. The render time is slower than 3Delight or Octane, but I like the quality of the images enough that I'm willing to make the trade off. I've also found ways to cut down the render time/sample count to get a good image. Usually, I render each frame for between 5-15 minutes depending on how much stuff is in the frame.
Dinopt has the right idea with rendering in layers with alpha channel enabled. It's the best way to get a balance on render time and quality, with the added bonus of being able to adjust each layer independently which is useful when adding in VFX.
You can check out my reel to see some of the stuff I've been animating in this pipeline:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q4MuUTJeF0
Ooh WotS I love the kitty♥♥♥