How do I achieve this quality?

I want to model and animate a fly-over animation of a medieval castle, with the same degree of quality rendering and detail, as you see in the PC game “For Honor”.

Problem is, I know that with far less polygons, with far less materials, rendering on my Titan GPU takes AGES in Blender.
Even if I bake my models and materials.

Any ideas on how to achieve this degree of quality for rendering an animation in Cycles, in little to no time, would be greatly appreciated before I even start modelling.

What should I take into consideration before I start my project?

Why do you think that it is even possible to render similar quality in Cycles with little to no time? Game cinematics are not rendered in little to no time for a reason. Average frame time can be more than an hour there.

If you want super fast rendering, use a game engine and live with the limitations that come with rendering on opengl or directx.

Yes obviously I could use a game engine to render my animations… but I want to use Cycles. What I don’t understand is the need to calculate BVH for every single frame. Or the need to “Updating materials” as it says in my render, for each and every single frame.

Why can’t a ray tracer implement a real time rendering? Why the need to say “Updating materials” for every frame, taking several minutes sometimes?

I understand that the rendering itself (denoising the image by rendering the samples) can take its time. But “Updating Materials” and “Caching BVH” seems like unneccessary waste of time.

I think you have a lot of other problems than just rendering time,
it took a team of 32+ amazing(it links to a portfolio of a former ubi artist) artists to make that scene

But you asked for a realtime render engine,
So I’ll give you an RT render engine, despite my doubts

you have the choice of either waiting for the 2.8 pbr project to finish
or
using cinebox

Expecting a pathtrace renderer to render a scene in “little to no time” is unrealistic
Don’t care if you have a titan or a Radeon HD 6310

Also polycount doesn’t necesarily affect render time, something is wrong with your scene if it takes longer than a day to render a still in a titan

The trailer was made with Arnold render with a render farm

If you want “little to no time” in rendering, you need to use a real time engine, Unity or Unreal. It will look close enough, but not the same.

But, if you want to achieve the same level of quality of the example posted, you’ll have to understand that those type of cinematics take time to render and probably were rendered using renderfarms. That’s not something to render on your personal computer overnight.
And it doesn’t matter if you choose to use another render engine, there are of course some renderers faster than Cycles, but you’d be facing renders of 30min per frame at least anyway.

@jul

I guess Unreal works too.

Because materials and BVH can change between every frame, and there’s not really a good way to check for this that isn’t just as slow as rebuilding.

As for why a raytracer can’t implement real-time rendering… well… it sounds like you don’t really understand raytracing compared to rasterization.

Other responses in this thread are really lowballing their render estimates. You’re looking at hours per frame on any kind of CPU you’d have access to as a consumer. There are frames of Pixar’s upcoming Finding Dory that took 6000 CPU hours to render.

There is no such thing as getting Hollywood quality renders without a time commitment. You either spend time on man hours (more expensive) or CPU hours (less expensive) and the different methods of rendering fall into these two categories. With real-time rendering you will need a lot more artist input to get pretty results. With offline rendering like path tracing, scenes are easier to set up but require more render time. Choose your poison, and don’t be unrealistic about your expectations for either.

Also, turn of BVH cache. You’re wasting lots of time there if you’re on a computer with 2 or more cores to work with.

Thank you for your answer. I thought they were using in-game footage.

Nah, that’s prerendered for sure. You can use a render farm if you want to render with Cycles. But I would recommend UE4 as well, the next version is coming in about 2 weeks and has some cinematic style features which could be useful for what you’re trying to do.

Which renderfarm is the best for Cycles?

I think your biggest problem is unrealistic expectations. As @fdfxd said that scene was made by entire teams of incredibly talented and experienced artists and most likely took thousands of CPU hours to render on a huge render farm.

In other words, it’s not something a single person does in “little to no time”.

This isn’t true at all. The reality is that neither Blender nor Cycles keeps proper track of scene modification. Lots of things could be cached, it just adds another layer of complexity. Even if you don’t keep track of modification per se, you can compute the hash for the (potentially) modified input data and check if there’s an associated cache entry, which is always going to be faster than a BVH build - it just adds overhead on a cache miss. “Cache BVH” worked like this, it only ended up too slow due to disk/serialization overhead.

“Updating Materials” shouldn’t take long either, my guess is that this includes stuff like “Pointiness” calculation (which also could be cached).

Either way, the argument for not optimizing this is that setup time usually pales in comparison to the rest of the rendering, while there’s also a live viewport render. Of course, if you need to iterate on final frame settings it becomes a PITA.

Why would you recommend it? Have you used it? Has anybody ever actually used UE4 to render a cinematic animated in Blender? The asset transfer alone would be huge amount of work.

If they used in-game footage, they would boldly advertise it. Also, sometimes they advertise as “in-engine” (example), which usually means the game assets are used, but the actual footage is recorded at highest quality with tons of supersampling (which no real-world GPU could handle in real-time).

Yeah I’ve used it, not for anything huge yet though. After all the tool isn’t done yet and the last features are coming in the next update called 4.12. I don’t really know if anyone used UE4 to render a cinematic animated in Blender. But I don’t really see why that should matter, it should work with any animations. (except alembic :p)
Here’s an example of a cinematic made in UE4 (character animation from motion capture in some 3d software, camera animation in UE4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Yh-zFCILR4

As for the assets you can import a whole scene (.fbx) at once so that shouldn’t be an issue. I don’t know if you can bring in camera animation for Blender, but you could just do the camera work in UE4 instead. Working with realtime rendering is really smooth. There are a few cinematic style camera rigs coming in the update too.

And why I would recommend it: it’s free, it’s fast and it’s easy. You don’t have to take my word for it though, you can just try it yourself when the update comes. :cool:

I’ve got to put a good word in for https://lionrender.com/. At the moment it is ‘invitation only’, but I love the simplicity and pricing models these guys are using.

www.render.st is by far the best Blender-compatible render farm I’ve ever used. Although to be honest if you do an hour or so of research you can roll your own AWS render farm and cut out the middle man and save a ton of money.

May I request some key links for AWS, for someone who would like to know more about setting up and using AWS? I’ve looked into this before, but was a little baffled by the documentation organization.

Thanks for the recommendation m9105826! It’s true, a DYI version is cheaper (although our new Studio plan makes our farm very affordable for studios with Blender pipelines). But we do offer a number of things you don’t have with AWS:

  • a very quick startup time, the learning curve to using our service is almost inexistent. No need to learn coding or technical terms, or start tinkering with stuff

  • technical support in case something goes wrong. This is how we achieved a 99.5% success rate in delivery last year (and numbers are looking similarly this year too)

  • clear billing - a single price to pay, billed by the minute. No need to add traffic, round up usage to the hour, storage, etc

  • invoicing - so that the rendering costs can be passed to the final client

I learned from experience that artists and studios are more confident when they know someone has their back with the rendering part, and that it always works. And this has even greater value when there are tight deadlines. There were a number of people I talked with, that confessed they can take bigger projects now precisely because of this feeling.

In the end, as I was saying in my render farms series of articles on the blog, there isn’t a perfect solution for everyone, and the great thing is that everyone has options to choose from.

Marius Iatan
CEO, RenderStreet

This is really pro answer, you kind of touch me :slight_smile:

Unless you’re also calling them liars, that example does not apply. They say the footage is representable of Xbox One, as in they may or may not have used the console but it did or could have ran on the system, regardless as to whether or not the content was made for the actual game (as in they rendered on the system but none of it is actually for a “game” on the system).

That is all weasel language. Either it runs on the console, at that quality and at that framerate, or it doesn’t. If it did, they would advertise it, no matter if it’s in-game or not. “Representable” (rather “representative”) could mean anything.

For comparison, here’s the Battlefront reveal trailer, also advertised as “game engine footage” and “representative of PS4”. Here’s actual gameplay footage on PS4. The difference in rendering quality is quite stark.

m9, I have used render.st, but this lion render is something else, I have not got the best rig in the world, but not the worst either. Core I7-2600 @ 3.4, 24 GB Ram and Ge Force 660 ti. A scene that took nearly 5 hours to render on pc was rendered in 7 min 22 s.

Shaun