Vue rendering

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Vue rendering

Postby Harvester » Sat Jun 17, 2006 10:27 pm

Hi,

I have a big problem. I am working on a smaller animation film now (plannd to be 15 minutes about) as a 3d graphican. So I design the places, and as I have the best computer in the team, my duty is to render the whole stuff too. We decided to do this in Vue because it seems to be a nice engine or what. But I have a problem with the rendering time..
So there is a scene: the camera is in an office in a skyscraper, and you can see a city around. The windows and the floor are reflective objects. The sun shines from in front of the camera, and there are some dropped shadows of course. The city has a built-in Vue texture, one of the building textures. I render it in a bit worse quality than final (it's a user defined quality, which I created in order to make things faster..) in which simple shadows and reflection is enabled, but no Antialiasing or other extras like that. However it takes 7-11 minutes to render a simple scene.
As you can see, it means that 1 second of animation takes about 2-3 hours to render, which means that the whole rendering process will take months without break.... so any ideas how to decrease the rendering time without recognisable decreasement in quality? Shadows and reflections are needed, they are on lowest quality.
I would also like to know which parts of the computer take part in the rendering, so which should be improved for faster process.
I would need help urgently...
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Postby Candle » Sat Jun 17, 2006 10:34 pm

You can see why Disney has 100 of computers rendering for them.
I know or think the more ram and proessor you have the faster it will go.
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Postby Mystery » Sat Jun 17, 2006 10:44 pm

I had the same experience with another software aswell, for rendering an animation, it needs to render countless frames even for 1-2 seconds of animation. I don't know if you can somehow diminish the number of frames that are used for the animation without loosing too much of the quality :cry:
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Postby dk627 » Sat Jun 17, 2006 11:20 pm

how "simple" are your shadows?
even shadows can really increase the render time

another option is to render them in bryce
bryce comes with a utility called "bryce lighting"
it works on windows and mac and you just install it then on the computer you are doing the renders on, enter the computers with bryce lighting ip adresses
depending on how many computers you have, it will really decrease your rendering times

good luck
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Hi

Postby BBP_BigBadPeanut » Sun Jun 18, 2006 12:44 pm

Hi Harvester these problems do cause a big slow down and apart from changing the amount of polygons or lowering the quality,getting a monster computer there is nothing you can really do. the cinematics for our game take over 13hrs to render for just about 6 seconds of animation :shock: but hope you solve this problem 8) bbp_bigbadpeanut
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Postby Imari » Sun Jun 18, 2006 4:27 pm

Hi Harvester,
Have you looked into using the Render Cow utility that comes with Vue? I've not done this yet, but a friend is going to network some older computers together for me, and that will make a mini render farm. The job is split up between the computers and then recombined by Render Cow when it's finished. You can set up your renders to run at night or while you're at work during the day. I believe that they can also be paused if you need to get to use your computer for other things.

More about Render Cow and HyperVue can be found here ---
http://www.e-onsoftware.com/products/vue/vue_5_infinite/index.php?page=12

In the Vue documentation, each of the selections on the Render and Animation windows is explained so that you can pick and choose which features are most important to you. I found this helpful. In your scene itself, some of the big render monsters are skys using global illumination, volumetric lights, and reflective or transparent surfaces. If your lights are not moving, try baking your textures before you render.

Good luck.
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Thanks

Postby Harvester » Sun Jun 18, 2006 5:02 pm

Thanks, I hope I can solve it... now I could decrease the rendering time to 4-5 minutes but the loss in quailty is not very nice... but I guess I have no other solutions. I can connect 2 computers: a 1,4 ghz 256mb ram one + the present one (2,6gh 1gb ram). i don't know if that makes things really faster... the problem is that one of them is a laptop and I really don't know if it can be turned on for long-long hours without any rest because it warms up quie quickly...
The shadows are the most simple Vue allows. I guess the reflections and the transparent surface decreases the rendering time, but that is what I will definitely not change because then the whole room is quite ugly :?

What does baking the surface and global illumination means? What are they used for and what effect tdo they have?
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Postby Imari » Mon Jun 19, 2006 1:36 am

Choosing volumetric atmospheres or adding global illumination can make your scene look richer and more realistic. With volumetric lights there are settings to show particles in the air and beams of light.

Global illumination is set on the Light tab of your Atmosphere Editor in Vue under Lighting Model. You can choose Global ambience, illumination, or radiosity.... each one increasing render time. Volumetric atmosphere can be set on the top tab of the Atmosphere Editor.

If you select User Settings in the Render Options window, you can tweak the global lighting settings by editing Advanced Effects Quality.

As for baked illumination, as best I understand it, the indirect lighting effects in a scene are read during the first render pass and are then "baked" to the texture. Each successively rendered frame just reuses that information. It cuts down on the light calculations and thus the render time. If your lights are stationary during your animation, you can use baked illumination. You can set baking during animation in Vue through this path --->
Animation > render animation > advanced animation options --- check automatic illumination baking and try smart baking at about 1+- 2+.

or if you're working with a polygon mesh, you can also set baking here ---Objects > Object Edit > Polygon Mesh Options --- illumination baking.
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Postby dk627 » Mon Jun 19, 2006 6:23 pm

if vue has a network render utility, then why dont you use more computers?
a while ago i needed alot of computers for some renders i was doing, i went to a private school in the area and they let me rent out the computer lab for a weekend
you might want to consider doing something like that
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that

Postby Harvester » Mon Jun 19, 2006 7:06 pm

That would be nice, but I don't think they would let me rent it :? I can't connect computers because as I mentioned I have only these two, and I don't think that 1,4ghz and 256mb ram plus would make such a big difference that I want to get... it is a 10-15 minutes video... I guess I will use 15 fps and then it is less time to render...
However I think I will need to find a place where there are many computers to rent for cheap price :? Anybody could tell me if it would work with programs which let me connect two computers through the web with a DSL connection and makes them considered as a Local Area Network?
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Postby dk627 » Mon Jun 19, 2006 7:30 pm

If a place you rent computers from has a server, you can set up a VPN
then when you enter the ip adress, it will search on the remote network and not on yours

I have 6 computers and a server so I might be able to help you out, however, i dont have Vue so you might need to provide the network utitlity if i can infact help you
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Postby Mike_Sharp » Mon Jun 19, 2006 8:48 pm

One way i found to reduce my animation rendering time was to do the following:

1) Limit my FPS (Frams per Seconds so how many images it renders for a second of video) to 10 FPS for Transational scenes and 15 FPS for everything else.

2) Rendered at 320x240 for the Test Render if it lloked like it would take to long stop it and see if there was any clutter i could remove that may increase render time. Like a light here or there or a reflection or so on but not so much that it would drastically alter the scene. Also set the Antialiasing to the lowest setting i.e in Bryce I have mine set to Normal

3) Finally if worst came to worst then the only option is a network Render.

I hope you can resolve your problem

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I hope so

Postby Harvester » Tue Jun 20, 2006 11:09 am

I hope so... I don't know yet which way I will do the whole stuff, however i have time until August because I guess the stuff will be finished around that time. I think I will need to have a network rendering, but I still hope I don't need that...
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