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Is there any tips to render out an animation? Like less light sources? or using an hdr or anything? I usually use modo and know the tricks to speed up animation renders but I can't figure out how to get my animation times down. I am rendering at 1920 by 1080 and frames are still taking over an hour. And that is with environment turned off. It is a larger room full of the clients furniture.

I have looked up all of the render optimization tips and have done them all for the most part.

Thanks for any tips,

Cody

I would seriously consider an online render farm service for an interior animation.

1) Use MXS References.
2) Disable MXI output
3) Render two separate jobs:
- Furniture job, hidden floor/walls
- Floor/walls job. Have low-poly versions of all the furniture "hidden to camera" in this job.
4) Make sure there isn't a massive difference in intensity between your brightest and your dimmest emitters
5) Better/more computers

Thanks guys. Yeah we are looking into a renderfarm for this or just retexturing it for Modo.

I will try some of these suggestions though and try to get times down.

Thanks

I nearly put this down as option 6 for you Cody

CodyKallas wrote: Yeah we are looking into a renderfarm for this or just retexturing it for Modo.

The only other thing that springs to mind was rendering in maxwell at either 720p or 900p (1600x900) and upscaling in post .You might be surprised how well those sizes look in motion.

Why not render first a 360 of the interior using the new spherical lens? Then you replace your entire interior with this map, and just put the furniture on a plane to act as a floor and make the floor a shadow catcher so you can composite in some shadows in post. Lighting with an hdr map will be tons faster than rendering the interior for every frame.

Can you show a screen shot of the scene maybe and a frame?

So would that mean he would render the animation once for the room empty of furniture (as in where the camera goes in the animation sequence not the backplate hdri) , then render again the sequence as you have suggested Mihai to comp on top. Would that really save a lot of time ? your rendering the sequence twice albeit using simplified versions of the final ( thats an honest question as I've never tried that method).

I could understand your method Mihai , if the camera was static with an animated object with in it. Like how this is done for example http://vimeo.com/86295452 where all the backplates are static.

Must admit my temptation would be 900p upscaled as an all in one render.That would knock roughly 25 percent off his render times instantly and shouldn't be that noticeable in motion.

photomg1 wrote: I could understand your method Mihai , if the camera was static with an animated object with in it. Like how this is done for example http://vimeo.com/86295452 where all the backplates are static.

Sure, I assumed this was the case (maybe furniture being assembled, kind of animation). But it could still work with some movement of the camera, if it was mostly moving in an arch around a center point, and there isn't too much zooming in out, as that would not give you any parallax and would start to look fake pretty quickly.

It could save a tremendous amount of time though, compared to rendering an interior in each frame with lots of indirect lighting. I could easily see it being at least 10x faster to reach the same amount of noise.

I think people still don't really get how much more difficult it is to render a closed interior, compared to a semi open or open one. If you plan a bit more carefully you could easily have at least twice or 5 times faster render times if you for example have only one or two real walls etc. in the scene, and the rest is lit with an HDR map. Sort of like a real TV studio set.

Thanks Mihai,

to be honest I hear what you are saying re as in a tv set , where I've run into issues (as in I'm not sure how to tackle it). Is for example sun is coming through some windows that can be seen on one side of an image lit by a hdri . You can see the windows part of one wall and another wall in the scene , so theoretically I could remove the other 2 walls that are out of shot . Where it breaks down for me would be on reflective objects just reflecting the hdri not those removed interior walls and keeping the brightness down on the interior.

Also the colour of the light would be from the hdri , not the bounced colour of the interior walls .

In an ideal world you could map to that hdri some images of walls it just doesn't seem very easy to do and line up in an accurate manner or is it? can't say I have seen it done or any tutorials on how to set it up. I could map image maps to luminous planes that exactly fit , but would that give the speed up? or make those walls just purely visible to reflections (doesn't that incur a render speed penalty? and bring issues of the bounced colour just being from the hdri ).

It would be great if there is some information available to share on this. (how to's etc)

Sorry to take this slightly of topic Cody , clarity on this I'm sure could help in your situation as well.

thanks

I think what Mihai means (correct me if I'm wrong for sure) is to render a single frame with the walls and everything else except the furniture in there using the spherical camera. That rendering then becomes your HDRI. That way the walls you were talking about that block exterior light but don't show up in camera are baked into this new HDRI and you don't have to worry about hiding objects, etc.

Here's an example I did the other day using this technique. 3 images rendered, 2 different scenes:
HDRI rendered using spherical camera (tone mapped for this example so you can see outside) using the full room scene


Then I rendered a clean back plate of the same scene, without the chair. This was in the same room scene as the hdri was rendered in.

Last is the chair by itself which was in a new scene with just the chair, plus the hdri rendered in the first step as illumination, reflections, etc.
Final comp:


Finally comp it all together and it works great - at least for a static camera.

I don't know is whether you'll see any speedups when animating the camera with this method though. In your case I guess you'd render out 1 hdri (kind of slow, but only need one frame), then all your frames with just the room (slow, probably), then the furniture by itself (fast).

It also works best if the target object that you are going to render by itself (the chair in my case) is not too big. You have to render the hdri from the object's point of view for the reflections and illumination to look right, so if you have 10 chairs scattered across a big room, the reflections would start to get wacky.

Hi egmehi,
I get what you are doing if I just wanted to animate the chair , or swap it out for different versions(is that why you went down this route rather just a straight render ?) . What I was trying to get info from Mihai on is that he is implying that you could light an interior as you would if it was on a studio set , there are pitfalls to this when you remove walls out of shot and light with a hdri . I'm trying to find out if there are solutions to those pitfalls I'm missing.

Sorry if there are crossed wires on this , why did you go down the route you had with the interior you have shown egmehi rather than a straight render.(lovely render btw : ))

best

You're right, I was rendering about 10 different chairs in that scene which is why I went to the extra trouble.

I think I see now what you mean - not sure exactly what Mihai had in mind, but you could model a big sphere that covers the whole scene plus some, assign the hdri as an emitter and turn off environment lighting. Kind of a hacked together spherical environment map that you can then delete polys from on the sides where your walls are missing. I'm not sure how the render time would compare to using a regular environment light.

maybe?

Wow, I think this is very nice and realistic! Except the room has no door.

egmehl wrote:
I think I see now what you mean - not sure exactly what Mihai had in mind, but you could model a big sphere that covers the whole scene plus some, assign the hdri as an emitter and turn off environment lighting. Kind of a hacked together spherical environment map that you can then delete polys from on the sides where your walls are missing. I'm not sure how the render time would compare to using a regular environment light.

maybe?

maybe , but now I'm thinking he meant something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fv3o2h5iDBo , the fact that he mentioned a HDR map might have confused the issue.

hopefully Mihai will elaborate unless

"Elvis has left the building"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis_has_ ... e_building

Yeah that's what I ment....I thought it was pretty clear It's something that can work in many cases to speed up renders, not all the time...

I'm not sure I understand the problems you think you would have doing something like this?

In Erics case for example, I think what I would have done (and maybe that IS what he did, and I'm confused), is instead of rendering 10 different interior renders with only the chair changing in each of them, I would:

- render the interior once with no chair, from the final point of view
- render one 360 view of the room, placing the camera where the chair(s) would be placed
- in another scene, create a plane to act as a shadow catcher, place the chair on the plane, and use the 360 as an IBL map. Repeat 10 renders like this changing the chair in each one. These renders would be super fast, compared to doing a render of each chair in the full interior scene, 10 times.
- composite each chair render into the first interior render, using the shadow channel to have realistic shadows.

So approximate time saved:
1x interior render to SL 18 = 5 hours
1x 360 HDR of that interior to SL 15 (I'm guessing you can denoise it a lot and slightly blur it, since it will only be used as an IBL map) = 2 hours, probably less.
10x chair renders to SL 16 = 20 min each (yes it would be that fast, perhaps even faster compared to a closed interior render) = 3.3 hours
TOTAL = 10.3 hours

compared to:

10x interior renders of each chair to SL 18 = 50 hours