Quick render solutions for animation testing

Bagboy

Hello!

I'd always thought there'd be a way to render a quick(er) test version of an animation in Carrara. But the "draft" setting seems to take longer to render than a full blown photorealistic render!

Am missing something? Or is there some tips on pulling this off other than with the Draft render setting?

Thanks in advance!

BrianP21361

I think Iuremeber reading once that the draft renderer doesn't use more than one core. That could be your issue. I'd try shutting off shadows, reducing anti-aliasing, light thrpough transparency... and renering in a smaller size for quick renders. 

Bagboy

That's correct. Only one core is operating in Draft Render.

I didn't see any check boxes to turn off light through transparency or shadows or anti-aliasing, but I knocked down the size. It's still way slower than photorealistic rendering.

I don't get it!

But thanks for the suggestions!

Bagboy

With photorealistic rendering, a frame is completed roughly every 6.5 minutes.

After 30 minutes, the Draft rendering hasn't even completed a quarter of a frame.

Headwax

BrianP21361 said:

I think Iuremeber reading once that the draft renderer doesn't use more than one core. That could be your issue. I'd try shutting off shadows, reducing anti-aliasing, light thrpough transparency... and renering in a smaller size for quick renders. 

seconded

maybe delete all your lights and oomph up the ambient to 100 percent - dont render with bump as well

 

WendyLuvsCatz

transparency the biggest hog

I used to pull my corneas etc into my heads surprisingly unsimulated carrara hair renders faster than transmapped hair too 

also I created multiple lights without shadows that only light things like the hair I exclude from other lights if the hair is not going to cast an obvious shadow anyway

and used reflection instead of alpha and transparency on water

Bagboy

It took me a few minutes to figure out the suggestions were refering to settings in the photorealistic rendering options. 

Yeah! These settings help out a lot!

Thanks everybody!

BrianP21361

Glad we could help.

3drendero

Intel just released a 28core CPU for 3000$ dollars, but it will only be sold in systems for >10k due to custom mobos. The AMD 32core CPU at 2k gives almost the same render power at half the system cost. ;)

Dartanbeck

Bagboy said:

I didn't see any check boxes to turn off light through transparency or shadows or anti-aliasing,

First page of the render room, top of the settings parameters ;)

Soft Shadows - I used to not use soft shadows at all just to keep my animation render times down. I've spent long hours setting up lighting/shaders in such a way that it didn't look bad to me - especially when in motion. Since then, after building a much faster computer, I switched to isolating soft shadows from transmapped hair, but still using them on the rest of the figure, even though some of the clothing, etc., had some transmapping. Still nice and fast, but not as fast as without soft shadows entirely. But to do that, I'd set my character lighting with soft shadows. Then set the lights to Only work on: then I'd select the figure and the clothing group (I select all clothing and group them), then I'd duplicate the lights and have them Only affect the hair, and turn off soft shadows on those.

Also, in the render room, I'd set Object to 2 (default) and shadows to 4 (default). Also render to the 1280 x 720 instead of 1920 x 1080 (makes a HUGE difference). For testing animations, I'd then even lower that to 640 x 360. Much faster.

Reflections - Many (Many) things in a scene really don't need reflections. Truly. Some things just need to be shiny. I set Reflections on these things to "None" and crank up the highlight and set tio shininess to something like 25 to 33 for shiny. 

Also in the render room, first page, scroll all the way to the bottom and I turn my bucket size (can't recall what it's called in Carrara right now) to its lowest setting of 16, so that no single core will get stuck on an area that might take longer to render. Smaller bucket size will allow more cores to potentially help out.

Reducing the number of shadow-casting lights is also a big help.

I haven't really noticed a render-time difference because I've been doing this so long, but I also have a habit of setting all unused channels of all shaders to "None" instead of black or 0 (zero). My thinking is that "none" allows the render engine to ignore the channel entirely instead of checking it to see that it has a value of black or zero. Some shaders that have not been edited from importing content will be multiplied by white or 100. In such cases I remove the multiplication, since white or 100 = render other source as is. It's just another thing for the engine to calculate, even though the result in the end is identical.

Consolidate Duplicate Shaders - sometimes, while this does a great job, we're still left with shaders that use the same maps, but have some other differences. In these cases, I ask myself if I need those differences, or if I could get by with using one shader for all of the areas that use the same maps. If I can, I copy my favorite of them to the rest, and consolidate again. 

Hope some of this helps

Bagboy

Thanks Dart!

I hadn't thought of the shader channels and the "none" choice.  I'll definitely look out for this going forward.  Whether it saves time or not, it makes sense to mark it to none. It's neater, if nothing else!

Lots of other things to think about here too! Like removing unused and consolidating shaders. I'd forgotten about that!

What prompted my original post was the "Draft" setting as a Renderer.  I seemed to remember using that, or something like it, way back when, and the Gourard option of that, to zip through a test animation. But, I must be mis-remembering. Or else it was removed or broken.

 

Dartanbeck

The Draft render, while slow, can still make for some really cool-looking renders. Too bad it only uses one thread. Perhaps we should open a ticket with DAZ 3D about that.

In my tests, I have had a fully clothed V4 running around in six second long animations, with four separate hair figures (to make it really thick and long) and a lot of transparency on the clothing, and I was still hitting under 30 seconds per frame, but that took intense practice. 

I use This Character Template (click to download) Carrara scene file to light my character individually. But this one doesn't have the lights separated for the Hair yet. Here's how I use it:

• Place the .car file from the zip into My Documents > DAZ 3D > Carrara 8.5 > My Presets > My Objects
• The file "Character Template will now show in the top level of your "My Objects" tab in Carrara
• Open the Character Template scene file first
• Load in the figure you wish
• Drag the figure into the Character group, just under the Face Target
• Do all of your character shaping, etc.,
• Move the Face Target between the eyes of the character. Change the size and color to taste in the Effects tab
• Rename everything in the scene that's currently called "Character" with the name you want your character to be
• The above step helps to keep things straight when we bring more than one of these saved characters into the same scene
• If I use Figure hair, I fit it to the main figure without parenting it (with nothing selected in Carrara, drag the hair into the scene, not onto the figure)
• Select all of the lights in the Face Target and duplicate (Ctrl + D) them, and write " Hair" after the current name (ex. Key Light, Key Light Hair)
• Now select the first of each light (not Hair) and activate the radio dial above "Only" and then choose the main figure and all clothing
• Select the Hair version of the same light, activate "Only" and choose just the hair 
• with that same Hair light selected, go to the Effects tab and turn of soft shadows
• Repeat this for all lights
• Be sure to consolidate shaders, remove unused objects and shaders and save the character in your browser. 

You should now have a fairly speedy render setup. Take note of the render settings, the light settings, etc., I make use of Grouping a lot as it helps to keep the instances tray organized as well as being easier to link lights (the process of activating "Only" as above is Light Linking)

Go through and optimize your shaders with a decent compromise between speed and quality, and save again - repeat. If you like, I can go through how I do this as well, but my Setting up Basic Materials for Genesis Figures article is a pretty standard methoid that I start with. But I also get a lot more advanced than that as I work - using MultiLayer or MultiChannel mixer to do animated changes in textures and so on.

I prefer to save my main 'Star' characters without compression.

I'll try and fix this post with some scene shots and such when I can

Dartanbeck

I forgot to add that this Character Template scene results in dark renders on its own. This is intentional.

I use this as a means to save my characters to the browser.

Since I started doing this, I don't spend any time focussing on how characters will be lit when I create "scenes" to be saved to my browser. I just light the scene focussing on speed, using as few lights as I need - even though that might still be a lot of lights, depending upon the scene. 

So then, with scenes saved and characters saved - all to my browser - I can simply open a scene and drag in the necessary characters, animate them and tweak the lighting to suit. Since I'm always using consistent character "highlight lights" (Character Template lights), after a few times adjusting lights to suit, I quickly notice patterns in what must be done, and that helps me to light my scenes quicker in the end.

I good example of this is indoor scenes. Since I know I don't need to make sure I cast enough light for characters, I can light a room how I want it to look. Sometimes I'll even use lights that "Only" affect the room and its content, meaning that it'll never light the character. Of course this will mean that I'll need to boost the character lighting. Hard to explain. When I get a computer built, I'll show some practical examples.