For what seems like a fairly simple 1:30 long animation, I'm already looking at like a week straight on my machine to render at 720p, 24fps. 1080p will be ridiculous, and I won't even think about 4k. Do you guys have like beasts for cpus? Is there some awesome service you use? Just accepted super long render times? How do you deal with this?
I just don't render animations. :P
Yeah, my CPU is a Ryzen 5 2600. No well-equipped for animation. But then again, going back in time, really no one is. Not even on their top of the line computers of the day. Always much slower than a lot of options out there. But that's to be expected when you're procedurally generating a world at runtime.
But yeah, people that want to do large animations, either just accept the wait, or use a render farm like Pixel Plow: https://planetside.co.uk/news/pixel-plow-is-the-official-render-farm-of-planetside-software/
Pixel Plow works pretty well, but costs can add up quickly depending on the scene you're trying to render. Another approach people have been taking lately is to render at lower resolutions and then use one of the new AI photo/video upscalers out there to boost the resolution. Results can vary.
Quote from: aknight0 on March 14, 2022, 10:02:43 AMPixel Plow works pretty well, but costs can add up quickly depending on the scene you're trying to render.
Agreed, I rendered a 38 sec animation a while ago and it cost $270 (average frame time 50 mins) with Pixel Plow, not horrendous, but you're looking at double that for your project length.
Check out what you can do to get your render times down if you want to go that route,
Are you using Path tracing? If so, check if you really need it.
Render a GI cache at home and upload with your scene to save some time at PP
If you have a big node graph to create your terrain, that can add some overhead to your render time, you could export it as a vector displacement map to 'bake' it out and use that instead
Upscaling does really work well for a lot of scenes. Sometimes not so much but meh. I've even used gigapixel and just upscaled the sequence as opposed to a video upscaling, and that works fine too.
Quote from: digitalguru on March 14, 2022, 01:54:14 PMI rendered a 38 sec animation a while ago and it cost $270
So, instead of 1 hour animation at a render farm (if you're out of luck), you can purchase a fast machine that can do it for you at home :P
Quote from: rca06d on March 12, 2022, 02:04:25 PMFor what seems like a fairly simple 1:30 long animation, I'm already looking at like a week straight on my machine to render at 720p, 24fps. 1080p will be ridiculous, and I won't even think about 4k. Do you guys have like beasts for cpus? Is there some awesome service you use? Just accepted super long render times? How do you deal with this?
I guess, you surely mean 1
minute 30
secs, right?
It all depends on what you have in your scene, and which settings you have. Sometimes you can save a lot of rendertime, when you render parts separately. For example when I rendered some of the sci fi animations, I rendered the earth and the stars in the background with the legacy renderer and the ships and objects (including their alpha maps) with the path tracer. It would have been awfully long to render this in one go completely with the path tracer. So there are lots of things to consider. However it's hard to tell, what's slowing down the rendering process without having a look at the file.
Quote from: Dune on March 15, 2022, 02:48:01 AMSo, instead of 1 hour animation at a render farm (if you're out of luck), you can purchase a fast machine that can do it for you at home :P
Tell me where you buy your computers if you can get a fast machine for $270 :)
Quote from: digitalguru on March 15, 2022, 06:37:58 AMQuote from: Dune on March 15, 2022, 02:48:01 AMSo, instead of 1 hour animation at a render farm (if you're out of luck), you can purchase a fast machine that can do it for you at home :P
Tell me where you buy your computers if you can get a fast machine for $270 :)
I ran the numbers. If 3
8 seconds cost $ 270, the price for a 1 hour animation (as Ulco said) would be $ 25579. I'm sure, you'd get a decent machine for that price. ;)
Quote from: Hannes on March 15, 2022, 07:21:22 AMQuote from: digitalguru on March 15, 2022, 06:37:58 AMQuote from: Dune on March 15, 2022, 02:48:01 AMSo, instead of 1 hour animation at a render farm (if you're out of luck), you can purchase a fast machine that can do it for you at home :P
Tell me where you buy your computers if you can get a fast machine for $270 :)
I ran the numbers. If 38 seconds cost $ 270, the price for a 1 hour animation (as Ulco said) would be $ 25579. I'm sure, you'd get a decent machine for that price. ;)
Like this? :)
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/8pack-supernova-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x-4.2ghz-ddr4-extreme-overclocked-pc-fs-001-8p.html
Yes, I think he means 1 minute 30 secs, otherwise, he's rendering a feature film :)
When I sent that render to Pixel Plow I was also rendering Maya elements to comp in which took over two weeks running 24/7, so was good to have that option, otherwise it would have taken months to finish
Quote from: digitalguru on March 15, 2022, 07:33:52 AMLike this? :)
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/8pack-supernova-amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x-4.2ghz-ddr4-extreme-overclocked-pc-fs-001-8p.html
:o :o :o :o :o
Haha yes sorry to clarify, definitely starting with just 1 minute 30 seconds. Wow at my current rate I guess a feature film length animation would take over a year straight to render. Makes me curious how VFX are rendered for big budget films. I suppose these days a render farm, but I feel like scalable compute like that hasn't been around nearly as long as VFX in film.
When you start to work it out, you realise how much time it takes for a render, I think everybody who starts in CG dreams of making a movie or a short till they realise the number of machine-hours it takes.
Weta has a massive render farm - it had about 40,000 cpus for Avatar and that was in 2009 - they've got to have more now. Given the new Avatars are supposed to be 3d (stereo frames) at 60 frames per second, they'll need it :) And each frame will be combined from multiple render layers...
Pixar also has a massive farm - but they usually render the whole frame in one go, without layering, each one of their frames can take 1-2 days to render.
If you haven't seen it - check out "Fifty Percent Grey" by Ruairí Robinson ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9-MoYrXP0o ) - who did it on his own with one or two machines. I'm sure that's why he made such a minimalist short, and it probably took forever to render that 3 mins, but the idea worked for him and he was nominated for an Oscar.
Pixel Plow are very cost-effective, but let's say you have a 1 min 30 sec animation at 24 fps that renders at 30 mins a frame on a 16 core 3.6ghz machine, that's gonna cost you $400+ and if you're planning to do this on a regular basis, that's almost throwing money away.
When I did my Terragen animation - it was a one-off and I set out to do it with a budget of $250 ( I went $20 over :) ) but if I was to do this regularly I'd do as Hannes suggested and get another machine. Just trawl around the net and find an affordable refurb machine ( get enough RAM though ) stick it in the garage and let it spit out frames 24/7
p.s Terragen is almost the worst-case scenario as you're generally rendering an entire frame of CG and layering isn't really practical in most cases. In the case of my short, I decided that as I wasn't doing anything spectacular with the sky, I didn't render clouds (I comped in a skydome) - that probably halved my render times.
Quote from: rca06d on March 15, 2022, 09:50:54 AMWow at my current rate I guess a feature film length animation would take over a year straight to render
Just remembered the quote from Framestore on "Gravity", that if they had to render the whole movie on one computer, they'd have to start rendering from Ancient Egyptian times...
Good to note too, that if you're doing stuff like reflections, frame time can vary greatly. One frame could be 30 minutes, and the next hitting glare angles taking 4 hours. Lol
I did see this post that sounds like the dev team is working on getting GPU rendering going: https://planetside.co.uk/forums/index.php/topic,28043.0.html
Any of you guys use other VFX tools that support GPU rendering? Is it vastly faster, or are you still pretty much in render farm land even with a good GPU?
NDunes. A few seconds per frame.
Quote from: WAS on March 15, 2022, 05:34:58 PMGood to note too, that if you're doing stuff like reflections, frame time can vary greatly. One frame could be 30 minutes, and the next hitting glare angles taking 4 hours. Lol
I am a new user (just a few weeks in) but so far I found reflections to be a big thing and when objects are small using non-raytraced reflections looked acceptable and took my few seconds sequence from 5 days to just 1.
I bought a machine purely for rendering recently. It was a crappy gaming system that had a mobo in it that could take a decent CPU that I purchased separately. Total outlay, just over a grand. I used some old ram and and an the onboard graphics card.
It doesn't need to be a power house to be able to quietly turn out frames while you are working on your next project.
Quote from: aaronb on March 16, 2022, 05:38:55 AMQuote from: WAS on March 15, 2022, 05:34:58 PMGood to note too, that if you're doing stuff like reflections, frame time can vary greatly. One frame could be 30 minutes, and the next hitting glare angles taking 4 hours. Lol
I am a new user (just a few weeks in) but so far I found reflections to be a big thing and when objects are small using non-raytraced reflections looked acceptable and took my few seconds sequence from 5 days to just 1.
Objects render fast to begin with. Bit different with non-baked Geo. Especially if path tracing where there are no non ray traced reflections.