Bewdy

Hi, I'm currently looking for a solution for GI based animation rendering. My current render times for scanline come in at about 5-20 seconds usually depending on the amount of glass or reflective surfaces in the model.

However with 3 computers (p4 2.4, X2 4400, and AMD 3700+) now at my dsiposal I am keen to get them all beavering away on renders so I feel like I have a bit of a spare overhead for rendering power, and so i was wondering what kind of render times people are getting per frame for GI solutions and what software seems to be the most time friendly.

I've read a lot about vray and it's irradiance mapping, but still not sure whether i can dedicate the time on a frame by frame basis, but I really would like the quality.

Any comments are appreciated.

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Matt Sugden
Business http://www.virtual-living.co.uk
Pleasure http://www.icompositions.com/artists/OnIt

ShaunDon

A lot of houses still cheat on GI, especially for exteriors. I use VRay and the irradiance map, and depending on the length of the animation we try to keep the frame times between 5 and 10 minutes. That's loading a pre-calculated irradiance map. I'm working on an animation right now that is anywhere from 12-25 minutes a frame depending on which node it renders.

VRay will also let you do raytraced reflections and such a lot quicker, making it actually feasible to use them in animations. Though bear in mind that even with a saved irradiance map, it adds time to your rendering as it has to process that data as part of the render. Also if you have a sophisticated scene and/or a long shot, the saved map may be 50-100mb or more. That eats up RAM on your render machines, often causing additional issues.

In any case, you're in for a LOT of headaches. It takes some finesse and experience to get it to work right, but it's very much worth the effort and render time.

Shaun

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Shaun Donnelly
TANGRAM 3DS

crazy homeless guy

with vray, irradiance maps, ect.. it is not uncommon for me to get anywhere from 8 to 25 minutes a frame depending on the scene complexity. i would be really surprised if you got anywhere near the times using a GI based solution that you are with scanline.

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travis schmiesing

Bewdy

I'm expecting the jump to be pretty massive, but what I'm concerned with is what kind of hit it actually going to be. At the moment my scan line times are fine.

I can render a 1400 frame anim in about 2.5 hours on one machine, that's with raytracing all my reflections too. I experimanted with light tracer in max, dropping the number of rays right down to about 10, and increasing the filter size to about 10 also, and this seemed to produce some reasonable/ish results in not to crippling times. The idea of doing the complex math once, or at least a few times during the render rather than every frame does appeal to me however.

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Matt Sugden
Business http://www.virtual-living.co.uk
Pleasure http://www.icompositions.com/artists/OnIt

crazy homeless guy

irradiance maps save you on the light calculations, and that is about it.

what will kill your rendering times in Vray is the level of antialiasing you use, the subdivisions used on your reflections, and lowering the reflective glossiness (adding blur) on your reflections.

...at least this is my experience.

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travis schmiesing

joseph alexander

We’ve had animations done for us with GI.... we get a bill for using a render farm in addition to the normal invoice. It's not unreasonable… it also made us more conscious about giving our consultant a complete solution. Ie changes after the animation required several thousand in re-rendering.
What was nice is that we could have an animation rendered for us in a day…

-joe

ecastillor

i simply gave up using vray for animations at the moment...
I use viz radiosity with photometric lights and raytraced reflections and usually i get not such a bad result and great rendering times (30 secs to 2 min tops per frame)

I just finished a 6 min. animation including interiors and exteriors and did it in less than the two week deadline I had to model , render and post work in premier...
Not even in my wildest dreams could i render in vray a 9000 frame animation in less then a month (pure rendering time)....

Bewdy

yeah, I'm confused. I using the max lightracer for some tests and getting about 4 mins to 20 mins average, which actually seems alright for the results.

I've also tried the vray free software, and although I can't say I'm an expect with the limited settings, the render time did seem considerably more for similar quality. Am I missing something? As everyone says it's faster?

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Matt Sugden
Business http://www.virtual-living.co.uk
Pleasure http://www.icompositions.com/artists/OnIt

Aaron2004

ecastillor (or anybody for that matter)

I am needing to do nice looking animations (mainly exterior)...are there any good sites/tutorials that you used when learning how to animate with Viz radiosity?

Thanks!

Aaron

del82

Lightscape Rocks!!!

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Beeeee!