Rendering Tips

[Tyler Olds]

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

[Ryan Dognaux]

Remember that rendering is included in the time limit given Give yourself at least a day or two to render / make any last minute changes.

[Brian Yip]

yeah, leaving time for rendering is always wise. for the 2003 year animation, we took total of 54 hours of rendering. 16 hours just for the 10 sec rocket blast.

Also, when you guys start planning out the schedule for the working season, always keep "music, and sound" in your head. Don't think that rendering is the last step. When I was working on the 2003 animation, I always have this illusion cos I never did sound before. Just remember, someone in your team must do that. Last year, we did not really have the time to work on sound (took us 3 days on sound for 2002 animation, err 5 hours for last year). Sound quality affects the entire animation. Imagine watching Warcraft III cinematics without sound effects, the animation is horrible!! (can't deliver the message to the spectators.)

I believe you guys should plan out a schedule and leave a week for rendering. Leaving a week so you can correct mistakes, do lots of quality inspection, blah blah blah that will improve your animation n times more.

Enjoy the pre-season,
Brian

[Ryan Dognaux]

Heh yea but that rocket blast was definately worth it Very realistic.. but I forget something happened that made it flawed and I can't remember it.. something about it not actually firing like a space shuttle. But hey, it looked really really good and I give you guys big cudos for that

[Brian Yip]

oh man, that's a pain in the neck for us to make it. I do believe there are flaws, and that's what you need to keep in mind. During the last week of that project, we were so obsessed in trying to get everything perfect. We literally tried our best, spent a lot of our time in perfecting everything. (cos we won the nation champ in 2002, we don't want to lose the quality) That thinking killed us. First, there's nothing perfect. No matter how good we did, we still have flaws in there. Second, we did not spend the time wisely. We used the time trying to get the best quality, but neglecting other important elements like sound effects and outstanding titles.

When you guys work on the animation, please expect to have flaws, not one, but a lot!! Just make sure those are not obvious. You certainly have to correct and make those important objects standout as good as possible, but don't spend them on something unnecessary. Lightings for example is very important. If you have a chance to see our 2003 animation (http://www.la.mvla.net/XtraCur/Clubs..._large_mac.mov), look at the lightings in the playing field (2nd scene). We used the lights to emphasize the robot and the crates out, making you guys focus on the object. Keep it simple is the key, save your time rendering and save your time checking.

BTW, in the last part(entering Mars) of the animation, there's a flaw in it. It's quite hilarious if you think about it. pause the animation once you see the whole shuttle and look at the it carefully, you can see two top wings missing. I discovered that 6 hours after it started rendering and we decided to leave it along + laugh at our silly copying skills for 2 minutes. sigh, this is something really unexpected...

Good luck and remember (getting the perfect animation is good, obsess with it though... will screw you over)

Brian

[Brian Yip]

oh by the way, I'll be happy if you find a flaw in the rocket scene. Cos I don't know what it is. It will be cool if you find it.

[Soukup]

1 more tip that I hope my former team really takes to heart.

Get 1 scene done, and render!!!! If you can half of your scenes rendered by 5th week it can be really nice, and you'll get 20x the maount of work done when you overnight, instead of having to delegate time and computers for just rendering. This is easier to do now because the animations are not solely about the robot, so your progress is not based on the outlook of the robot. I recomend having at least 2 scenes rendered by the 4th week, and at least 60% by the 5th week. That way when you overnight, it will ber solid progress, instead of working for 54 hrs straight (yes straight) to finish our animation. (vishnu and nowak and shaler i loved u guys) Allthough working that long on animation .... is fun. I would try to avoid it.

It toook us about 49 hrs to render....and that doesn't include the scnes that we screwed up on.

happy rendering people

[Sunny Thaper]

Probably the best thing that helped me and my former team was during the offseason we concentrated on learning other things inside of 3D Max, such as After Effects and Premiere. You won't believe how useful those two tools can be, in fact I would say 5 sec out of our 30 sec was completely After Effects, which only took maybe an hour to accomplish, but if we had done it with Max I think I would have still been working on it to today

The second tip I can offer is if you are in a big group of animators, or even a not so big one, experiment with Xref, it can really save you some time and effort when it comes to bringing everything together in the end.

[Ryan Dognaux]

What's Xref??

[Brian Yip]

x-refs = external references = import a max file into your scene without copying the objects = save disk space.

If you need to transfer a file with x-ref models to another computer, you also have to transfer the file of the x-ref-ed object to another computer.

I believe x-refs save your time in loading the file and your disk space. But it will not save your rendering time.

hint: if you use x-refs, you need to label all your parts and all your files so you can definitely recognize them just by looking at them.

[Brian Yip]

oh, one thing forgot to mention about x-ref.

Make sure the models you are going to x-ref are in the final stage (ready to be rendered and no changes will be made). It could be a pain for you to rearrange the scene settings if you have to go back and forth changing things.

I highly suggest using x-refs, it gives you a better grib in organizing your files.

Brian

[Salik Syed]

DONT BE SO PRECISE : YES YES YES totally agree... i hate it when people are are bragging: we modeled the threads on the bolts.... even the number on the head is booleaned out .... yeah thats good but once it was scrunched down to about 4 square pixels did it really matter???

[djcapelis]

Another thing...

If anyone plans on making people that aren't a central part of the animation... or a crowd of them... I'd suggest just throwing a bunch together using MakeHuman instead of modelling them all individually.

If you need something to go to the focus of your animation though, well... you can probably get away with using MakeHuman then tweak from there.

That way you don't have to spend 2-5 weeks modelling a human but can create a rough model in approximately 5 minutes. (I'm serious, it takes that long)

[...............]

spend a few weeks tweaking the rendering settings to find the best detail/speed ratio.
It also provides a break when you are getting tired of modelling/animating

[djcapelis]

spend a few weeks tweaking the rendering settings to find the best detail/speed ratio.
It also provides a break when you are getting tired of modelling/animating

Seems like an ineffecient use of time... I don't wait more than 7 and 1/2 sec/ frame (with full 16-bit anti-aliasing at 800x600). I find this to be reasonable and wasting two weeks to tweak this seems to be a bit lacking in common sense.

I hasn't even approached a slow time with my last animation project:

added frame 265 (frame 264 in avi): Time: 00:01.46
added frame 266 (frame 265 in avi): Time: 00:01.52
added frame 267 (frame 266 in avi): Time: 00:01.44
added frame 268 (frame 267 in avi): Time: 00:01.46
added frame 269 (frame 268 in avi): Time: 00:01.43
added frame 270 (frame 269 in avi): Time: 00:01.44
added frame 271 (frame 270 in avi): Time: 00:01.47

I love renderer's that don't suck... This is one of the reasons I dislike 3DS max so much.

Oh, and I'm also browsing the web while rendering that... my instant-messaging program is up and communicating accross 5-7 different IM services... so I'm hardly stripping the computer down to render fast. (In case anyone is wondering on the numbers for a benchmark type thing, I'm running a 2.53ghz P4, most rendering machines are dual or tri...)