Rendering

L

Laikix

0
Rendering

For an upcoming school project, I am planning to use Cheetah to create a five-ten minute animation. My experience with Cheetah's rendering system is not that... great. For a ten second animation it took Cheetah and my computer just under twenty three hours. After doing a few more test animation renders, I have calculated that the minimum, a five minute animation, would take twenty three days that I don't have the luxury to use. I've tried using Blender, but a lot of objects like the camera and lighting is removed when exporting to it. I've done some research on cloud computing for rendering, but I don't have $2000 to spend on a school project. In the same manner, I don't have any money to spend on buying a new computer with a larger RAM. I know there are ways to cut down on render time by using shortcuts and changing the camera settings, losing quality that I don't want to get rid of. Is there a way to use an external hard-drive for rendering by running Cheetah off of there? Or are there any simpler ways that can bring more speed to my rendering time?
 
Just if your project has 25fps you´re going to render 7500 frames - and just in the case you can reduce the time for one frame to 1 min it still needs more than 5 days in this case; you can´t trick that simple maths. Does this sound better? Then you have to try everything you can think of to reduce the rendering to that 1 min. :mrgreen:

Cheers
Frank
 
Making a five-minute short movie is non-trivial, even if you shoot live action (unless you don't care about quality), so expecting it to be easy with computer animation is unrealistic. E.g. I have quite a bit of experience in video production, and I once made a "quick" 10 minute live action video for the company I worked for — no script, simple concept. It took two days working 16h a day with professional gear and software and quite a bit of help from other people.

First of all, as Frank says, you know how long your movie is going to be, figure out the frame rate (Disney's original movies were made at 24fps, but the only thing that actually was animated at 24fps were major characters in action scenes and special effects — everything else was animated on "twos" (i.e. only one frame update every two frames) or "threes". The math is brutal — 10 minutes x 60 seconds x 24 frames = 14,400. Even if Cheetah renders a frame in a second that's 240 minutes of rendering, and that's assuming you've got the entire movie done in once scene that renders perfectly the first time. Which it won't. And the movie will be incredibly boring to watch.

Here's how a real animated movie gets made:

1) Script. This renders in zero time.

2) Storyboard (usually very rough pencil sketches). This renders in zero time.

3) Initial "animatic" (the storyboard captured to screen and matched to expected timing with rough sound track). Also no rendering involved.

4) Later animatics (pieces of the above replaced with rough animations rendered at very low quality, e.g. rough models, flat lighting, no textures). You could probably render this in near real time in Cheetah 3D.

...

x) Final movie (everything replaced with final animations).

For a school project, I suspect anything between (2) and (x) would be acceptable, if the actual idea for the movie doesn't suck, especially if it includes SOME final or near-final rendering quality.

For an example of what a partially-finished animated movie looks like, I cannot recommend Beauty and the Beast, Special Edition highly enough. It includes "a work in progress" — a partially completed cut of the movie with near-final soundtrack released for a film festival in New York when the movie was in production. (It got a standing ovation from jaded hipster movie buffs.)

BTW: I am an "art school dropout" — my "major work" was a computer animated film that I spent 18 months working on before abandoning it. I wish someone had laid the process to me at the time (but it was 1991; even Pixar only barely figured out how to make CGI short movies at that point).

But that's just me.
 
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Laikix said:
Is there a way to use an external hard-drive for rendering by running Cheetah off of there? Or are there any simpler ways that can bring more speed to my rendering time?
Click to expand...

To answer your last two questions directly. No, an external hard drive will not create any advantage or improvement on render time. Yes, there are some simpler ways to improve render times, and there is always a compromise.

Pod points out some great things to consider. There are a number of ways to create "a shot" with an economy of frames. You could also research how some of the classic Anime was done. Early anime was as slow as 15 frames per second at times. Sometime a 2-3 second shot is a still frame with a slow zoom - or just clouds moving or something looping a few times. It becomes just as much about composition and planning as it is about hardware.

The simple magnitude of your project is simply going to cost you ... TIME. The math Frank and Pod point out is unavoidable. 7500-14000 frames is quite a workload for any computer, So the goal is to plan your project BEFORE you compose it - AND - to get your render time per frame to be as efficient as possible. Every second per frame you save is 2-4 hours of rendering saved over the entire project.

Some Render tips that won't compromise quality (that much):
  • Minimize the use of complex procedural materials. These can gobble up processor time - the more objects with complex shaders - the more seconds PER frame - Solution: if you need texture, try to use an IMAGE based shader where possible. If all you need is color - a basic material with a diffuse color and some specular will save even more time per frame.
  • Avoid blurred reflection and blurred transparency in your materials if possible
  • Avoid Caustics and Depth of Field
  • Don't use the Skylight - it can look great for renders, but increases your render time. If you need that kind of lighting here's a more efficient work around: Create a DISTANT Light, set the rotation for your primary light direction and set intensity to 0.6 - Now create an AREA light, set the height about 7-10 units above your highest object. Make the height & width of your Area Light about 30x30. Set the Attenuation to NONE. Set the Color to a CyanBlue (if you wish) and intensity to 1.0. Set the samples to 7. This alone can reduce your render time by 75% (In my experiment, my render went from 21 seconds to 5 seconds).
  • If you have a scene with a moving camera around objects that are NOT moving, you can try Baking your shadows on ALL the objects in that scene and then render with only an Ambient light. This does require some set up and a little elbow grease and know how - but can save gobs of render time. This only works in scenes where the camera moves and the objects remain still.
  • Trying reducing your frame rate
  • Try reducing your frame size to 960x 540 - and then resize the entire video to 1280x720 when you're finished. There will be a slight compromise here. Do some experiments to see if you like it. But if the results are satisfactory your overall render time will be almost cut in half because there are 44% fewer pixels to render.
Planning your project is key - and you will get a lot of great experience doing it -- Good Luck
 
Thanks for the tips! I will be sure not to use the skylight, despite the look it gives to the scene, and I already lowered the frame per seconds to twenty three, instead of the default thirty. Later I will be able to post a render of what I have done so far model-wise. This will allow me to lower my render times for the future!
 
Don´t forget the Skylight-object has 32 samples per default - try just 1 with the radiosity-tag and feel the difference - for instance. :mrgreen:

Cheers
Frank
 
Okay, I see what you are trying to say. I will have to try that out. Here's the render though:
I realize that there are still some rough sport to go over, but I am not really worried about for this project and there is little time to do so. For future projects I will be planning the time for rendering.
 

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Looks like this is rendered with HDRI. How long does it take if this is saying anything in rough about your project? (Cute looking BTW :icon_thumbup: )

Cheers
Frank
 
Thanks for the compliments. ;) It took 509.95 seconds according to the render time, so I'd say around eight minutes or so? As for the roughness I forgot to increase the sections, and I didn't realize it until I had already had the mesh rigged and rendered in this image. Dealing with speed I bought more RAM for my computer and it should arrive in a day or two. It might not help too much, but I currently have only 2GB so my render times should decrease a bit. Is there anything else that might be helpful towards the animating or rendering?
 
I might be wrong but this looks like it might have been rendered in my product render studio. If it was, it does get you good results but was never really intended for animation - or perhaps I should say not tested for animation. It's not the quickest in the world and I would be looking to use an HDRI that gives a similar effect to speed up your render if you're short on time.
 
No, you would not be mistaken! I am using both an HRDI and the softboxes, one for the gold material and the other for lighting. I removed the backdrop and planned to use the infinite floor effect, using the shadowmat material, from your tutorial. Since that did not work out well because I was not able to have the white point low enough to create a shadow and not have the edges of the disc shadowed. In the end I used a white material with low spectral for the floor and a white camera background, which simulated the same effect I was going for. The first camera angle is rendering now at 1280 by 720 and is at an eighty-second-per-frame rendering, which is still pretty good for now.

(Thanks Dave for the multiple implementations of your hard work ;))
 
I am sure if posted a ZIP of your .jas file we could assist more - 500 and 80 seconds sounds high for the kind of scene you are rendering. You could even post the file without animation and without your characters (leave the scene and shadowmat if you are using one), we could then see your lighting and scene setup as well as your camera settings. Our advice would be more specific to your needs/project as opposed to general tips. Cheers. (Your characters look great BTW)
 
Using the file I attached as is, it took 147.54 seconds (Please note I have two other scenes rendering) on my 2007 iMac. With it is the HDRI I used because I don't remember if it saves with the file. Also, the new RAM I ordered for my computer has arrived today so I will be able to install it later tonight and do another test to see if there is any improvement in the render time.


P.S. Frank, I think I like your robots better than mine.
 

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You might have to wait for an answer to that, sadly. I am currently rendering three things and in order to do proper testing they need to finish. So probably in about an hour or so. Thanks for investing your time in this.
 
Technically, as long as the scaling and angles are right any setup can be used. Whether or not they are the best is different story though. ;)
 
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