Rendering Takes Too Long!

[240 Animation]

It takes us a half an hour to render one frame, and we have over 1000 frames. What's going on?
:deadhorse: :deadhorse: :deadhorse:

[Eagleeyedan]

You could have one or a combination of these

1: Too many verticies
2: Lots of shiny or transperant textures
3: Extensive lighting
4: Slow computer
5: Render set-up is really high quaility

That's what usually slows my rendering down.

[240 Animation]

I know it has to be 1080x720, so that's not really fixable... I guess we will simplify our shapes. Thanks!

[DaveC]

ummm.... the Autodesk spec is 1280 x 720, not 1080 x 720

[240 Animation]

...I hope I only typed that incorrectly here, and not in the render setup.

[Eagleeyedan]

I know it has to be 1080x720, so that's not really fixable... I guess we will simplify our shapes. Thanks!

Don't know if you already know this but thought i'd bring it up anyway in case others don't.

It's not just the screen size you render to that makes it HD. When you render, there is a box underneath the current rendered frame with lots of sliders. Those can be used to adjust the quality of the render. I.E. how realistic your shadows, reflections, glossiness etc. are. If you are just doing a quick test render, I'd suggest bringing those down for faster render time. For final, I just leave those on default so the file size is kept low enough.

[240 Animation]

Don't know if you already know this but thought i'd bring it up anyway in case others don't.

It's not just the screen size you render to that makes it HD. When you render, there is a box underneath the current rendered frame with lots of sliders. Those can be used to adjust the quality of the render. I.E. how realistic your shadows, reflections, glossiness etc. are. If you are just doing a quick test render, I'd suggest bringing those down for faster render time. For final, I just leave those on default so the file size is kept low enough.

I think we messed with those a bit at first, but I believe they're back on default now. We will definitely have to double check. Thank you!

[scottydoh]

Just outta curiosity, what are the specs of your rendering rig?

[240 Animation]

Just outta curiosity, what are the specs of your rendering rig?

Well... I don't remember. It was whatever the requirement was in the rules, though.

[scottydoh]

Well... I don't remember. It was whatever the requirement was in the rules, though.

No no, I meant whats in your computer?

[240 Animation]

No no, I meant whats in your computer?

No idea. Where would I find this? I can't access it until Monday, though.

[scottydoh]

No idea. Where would I find this? I can't access it until Monday, though.

If you're on a Windows machine, Right click "My Computer" > "Properties" Should list your RAM and CPU

[240 Animation]

If you're on a Windows machine, Right click "My Computer" > "Properties" Should list your RAM and CPU

And somewhere the "specs" will be listed? I'm not good with the inner workings of computers.

[rzoeller]

http://h.images.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/14477783.jpg

[240 Animation]

http://h.images.memegenerator.net/instances/500x/14477783.jpg

I LOVE THIS *insert puking rainbows meme here*

[scottydoh]

And somewhere the "specs" will be listed? I'm not good with the inner workings of computers.

Yup, it should be fairly obvious once you do it. Should look something like this;

http://i.imgur.com/qJIyd.jpg

[240 Animation]

Yup, it should be fairly obvious once you do it. Should look something like this;

We have:
Intel Core I5
4gb DDR3 RAM

We use Windows XP Pro 32-bit, SP3

[waialua359]

I'm not surprised. Ours took HOURS and we have a high end 12g RAM, 3.07GHZ, Intel XEON processor workstation.
I'd plan on starting it at the end of your day and let it run all night, and the next morning, if necessary.....:)

[240 Animation]

Unfortunately, that is not an option for us. Right now, we've got it down to one frame every thirty minutes (2 min improvement) by simplifying our objects. We just don't know what else to do to speed it up.

[playbass06]

Well, what renderer are you using? I'd assume mentalray?

If you can, switch over to Arch&Design shaders, and try to use "Glossy Reflections" on as many areas as you can for reflective surfaces. They save time. Depth of Field and motion blur effects are also things to be avoided, they'll easily make render times 10x what they were (depending on the # of samples).

I've spent a good amount of time optimizing our scenes with these materials, and it's usually around 2:45 (min:sec) per frame at 720p (but our setup is a 3.2 GHz i7 and 8GB DDR3 RAM). But if you're spending half an hour on one frame... you've got a lot of stuff in there. How many faces are in your scene? Ours is just over 250,000. If yours is significantly above that (>1mil) you may want to do some serious poly reduction. Do you have any other machines/licenses of 3ds Max? Use Backburner to do some network rendering.

And, just out of curiosity, why are you doing over 1000 frames? The video is limited to 30 seconds, which at 24 frames/second, would amount to 720 frames maximum.

Good luck, hope you get the render times down.

[240 Animation]

We are using scanline instead of mentalray because mentalray kept crashing our program.

Our other scenes, actually, take less than four minutes. We also edited our objects to be more simple.

We added our intro, slate, and credit so it bumped up the frame count.

Thank your for your help.

[playbass06]

We added our intro, slate, and credit so it bumped up the frame count.

Ah, okay. Thought it might be that, but thought I'd just double-check.

[240 Animation]

I think we are going to take out the credits and add them in Movie Maker (or something like that). That should definitely speed things up, right?

[Eagleeyedan]

I think we are going to take out the credits and add them in Movie Maker (or something like that). That should definitely speed things up, right?

Yes, that would be faster. You can do cool stuff in 3DS MAX though. Our prototype credits explode for instance (not sure if we are going to use them though)

[240 Animation]

Thank you, everyone, for your help. We are now rendering at approximately twelve seconds per frame. Hooray!

[SCRktkt]

Welcome to rendering. Here are some things to try:

1. Plan on adding depth of field blur in post. This will allow you to use a cheaper anti-aliasing, such as Box instead of Gauss or Mitchell.

2. Experiment with composite renders for shorter times. For many scenes, you can hide the characters, and run the final gather once at a high accuracy. Then freeze the final gather, and render the camera moving in the environment. In a separate render, using the mental ray matte/shadow material on the environment, render just the characters. The images can be composited and adjusted easily in post.

3. For your Arch & Design materials, dial down the reflection interpolation for everything you can.

If you need more help, post here and I'll see what I can suggest; images of your work will help.

[rastermon]

We were rendering in Mental ray with lights set with low res shadow maps (512) of course, they looked bad, so we switched to ray traced shadows. That took too long. But then we changed to advanced mentalray shadow maps at 2048 and it looked good AND rendered faster. I was surprised that in some cases, MR renders faster than scanline.

[240 Animation]

We have finished rendering our animation, but this advice will certainly come in handy next year =)