Just an idea that I got off of Salik Syed's post in the New year New ideas thread.
Just a couple of tips that I have:
1. Keep the verticy and polygon count to a minimum: a lot of times you can get a away with low poly figures and to the eye of a non-animator, they look just the same or there is little difference.
2. Hide things and render parts: Render segments of your animation than put it together, by doing this, you can hide things that you don't see in those 100 frames (or however many frames it is) that you are rendering. This made my rendering go from 4 days, to about 8 hours.
3. Don't be so precise. This does kinda go with the #1 thing, however it is a bit different. The main thing is, that there is no need to have a 10000 polygon object in your animation that you are not going to focus on at all. Instead, something a simple as a .jpg can look just the same when it is not focused on.
4. Know how you are going to render: I render separate images, than compile them on premiere. Some people render straight off of 3ds. max, but try out different methods, and see which one works for you and which one looks the best vs. the time it takes to render.
I guess my main point is to keep it simple, this is what Ted told me at least when he viewed my animation. To a "normal" person (cause we animators are weird
) they will not be able to tell the difference or care about mundane details.
Please feel free to post on here if you have any other rendering tips.
- Tyler