I am just going to ask general question. Which kind of settings do you use for rendering animation? I am just trying to create watch animation just for personal project and to learn little bit more, but I am afraid that my machine is little bit outdated I was rendering few animations before which was really simple, for example headphones and it was pretty fast, but watches. Well, I am always using CPU rendering and also customs settings, but whats your average time for rendering one frame? And second question is, how much frames per second are you using? I always using 30FPS, but I got feeling it always looks like animation and I dont have such that feeling its right, for example noise transition and similar stuff, when I render images for preview they are clean, but when I render the whole animation like you notice something what wasnt there before and thats the micronoise in some dark areas.
Hi. I don’t think you’ll get the answers you’re looking for here. I say this because I set the render settings that are appropriate for the job. They are always different. Every scene and job requires different settings. The goal of render settings is to get the image to look natural and reduce noise. As you mentioned, a challenge is render time. Sometimes the render settings that produce a clean image will take your machine very long to complete the job.
This is a somewhat tricky thing to figure out, which is why I came up with a tool/spreadsheet to calculate render times for animations. I go through how to use it in my KeyShot Animation Masterclass. Basically, find the render settings you like for a still frame. Then, make your image small (like 400px wide) and render the whole animation. If it takes an hour, then you figure out how long it will take when you render it full-size using simple math. Figure out how many times larger the resolution of your final animation is vs. the small one you rendered.
And always use maximum samples. Not maximum time. If you use max time, you’re likely to get variation in noise frame-to-frame. And I use 30fps typically, but anything above 24 will be good. Don’t go below 24 or it won’t look smooth.
I completely understand what you talking about I am aware of that, if I am gonna use maximum time settings I will achieve different samples in every frame. For example render like this took me render in 2560X1600 resolution almost 1 hour in custom settings. I am using CPU mode, cause to be honest I think results are much more better, and all the power is in my CPU. I would like to clash the time for 15 minutes or 20 minutes per frame, this is like the maximum. I want to create complete animation of movement and everything, these renders are in progress, and they are not finished yet I want have this animation long like 30 seconds, and we cand o the math, If I am gonna use 30FPS thats like 900 frames and with current settings its 900 hours, thats like 37-38 days lol I was thinking about render farm, but this is personal project and rendering this in render farm its wild idea haha
How long are you guys rendering 1 minute long animation? whats your average time per frame?
Personally, I haven’t rendered any animation larger than 1920x1080. And for a minute-long animation, I’ve used a render farm. Usually a week with 256 cores or so is what I’ve done in the past. It’s not cheap, but these have typically been done for clients who were paying the bill. I would see if you can reduce the number of ray bounces and maybe try reducing some of your custom control settings to speed it up a bit. Maybe rely on a tiny bit of denoising?
Also, you can try rendreing it out a bit smaller, like 720p if it’s just a personal project. Then, you can try using a software to up-scale it. https://www.topazlabs.com/topaz-video-ai has some nice tools for up-resing. I don’t own it myself, but heard it’s good. And they typially run a great black friday sale, so next week, you could get it for pretty cheap.
Just a tip on resolution. If you rendered a still and think you need a 2.560p resolution for it to look good, because that’s the size of the still image. You don’t need to use the same resolution for the animation, because the watch will look way better when in motion. Just render a short section with 720p like Will suggested and compare it with the still image. It will probably look almost as good.
I am on an animation project right now and it is 56s long, 1681 frames with 30FPS.
It took almost 15-20 min to preview with 8 samples per frame with 640x360 resolution and standard setting. I used GPU for this. I have very simple materials in the scene right now. So I am thinking if I apply the materials I need and render it on my machine, it will be finished when I retire.
I think in low resolution keeping materials as simple as I can and by trial and error figure it out what settings I need. Then I try to estimate the time how long it will take as @will.gibbons mentioned and tell this my boss. Obviously, the render farm will be reasonable to him for my mental health. I hope.
It has been 4 months at the company. They asked me what kind of PC I need when they hired me and I gave them the minimum configuration. They said for beginning it is too expensive. Then they bought a laptop workstation. Now I don’t have many upgrade options. Right now I need to make 3 animations in a row one of them will be at least 3 min. and the others will be more than 1 min. so I believe we will pay almost half of the money for the PC that I suggested in the first place.
BTW Will do you have any suggestions for farm companies for these projects?
Haha, well, that’s how it goes. Your employer will soon realize the cost of not giving you the right tools for the job! And yeah, I suggest you check out KeyShot Farms. They’re the only service I know of that only caters to KeyShot useres: https://keyshotfarms.com/ Good luck!
I recently start rendering simple animation and I got problem. I just realize that KeyShot rendering time is different everytime… I am using viewport resolution which is something like 720x720 pixels and I reach 200 samples in 100 seconds with basic mode. When I try render this exact same resolution as final render, with same settings which is maximum samples 200, I got much more different time which is ridiculous, I always though the render time will be exactly same as in the viewport but this rendering is 3X slower. I don’t think I have problem like this before… I dont render this in custom settings, I am using maximum samples and settings should be used from viewport.
I try different resolution, different settings, product rendering mode and I made comparison but it looks like the viewport rendering is superfast and final rendering is like a brick for me…
When I try render animation as preview animation, no problem I am able to rendering fast, but in preview animation I can’t change resolution
Do you got similar problem? I am still using old KeyShot 9 Pro due my tutorials and compatibility with newer versions…
UPDATE
I try render single frame from animation, only thing I have made was change animation settings to still image and render it, render time of this frame 20 seconds, but when I click to render animation not still frame with same settings, it took 60 seconds to render exact same image…
I was rendering few animations before which was really simple, for example headphones and it was pretty fast, but watches. Well, I am always using CPU rendering and also customs settings, but whats your average time for rendering one frame? And second question is, how much frames per second are you using? I always using 30FPS, but I got feeling it always looks like animation and I dont have such that feeling its right, for example noise transition and similar stuff, when I render images for preview they are clean, but when I render the whole animation like you notice something what wasnt there before and thats the micronoise in some dark areas.
