Hi all,
I have an animation project going that’s pretty complex (and it’s 159 frames), and can’t seem to get it rendered quickly on my pc (Windows 10, NVIDIA graphics card, 16g RAM). The minimum time I’ve gotten one of these frames rendered is about an hour and 20 minutes.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vnm-_M7nFnc_ReczhHBMhwur1yw2IJSe
I don’t know how I feel about separating the scene into layers, as I’d like to keep the light interactions (shadows, reflections etc.) between everything. And when I try to decrease resolution or samples, it comes out… well, not what I had in mind - even with denoising.
As a last resort I’ve tried uploading the project to various render farms to get the job done, but the lowest price I found was around $50. SheepIt (a community render farm) wasn’t really helpful either, my project was ‘too big’.
Not sure where to go from here. Any suggestions?
1 hour and 20 mins per frame is a long time, and Lego should not be that heavy - unless you’re doing what The Lego Movie did and putting SSS on everything.
I’ve had some success rendering Lego in Eevee - https://youtu.be/pxy9gkCXPGc
screenspace reflections and a sun light with shadows made it good. I think they’ve fixed the Object Info: Random node now if your using that to randomise imperfections (I have to do without it on this anim)
Otherwise - how many light-bounces are you using? are you using de-noising?
You should seriously optimize your scene. The room floor for example has 1M+ polys and every LEGO text on every knob modeled as geometry. Use instancing to create the floor and use normal map for creating the text. You don’t need geometry for stuff that does not significantly change the profile of the object.
Well, I’m not attempting The Lego Movie just yet; but I have pretty much applied SSS to most everything, which may be a factor. I’m using max: 8 light bounces, and 50% denoising.
Nice video, by the way!
A normal map for the studs seems a good Idea; though after searching online, I haven’t been able to find one for the inscription…
I’ll look into instancing the studs as well. Maybe once I get a good normal map for the letters, I’ll be able to apply that to a singular stud and duplicate it across a grid?
I can’t look at the blend because it’s enormous and I’m in work, but if you have already got the text modelled, can’t you just bake it into a normal map?
I’ll render it, I’ve got a machine to stress test anyway and you should have it this afternoon, but use a setup kinda like this if you want to trim off a little rendertime, there is no need for non camera/mirror faces to have the full material 90% of the time, unless you are doing some sss, and even then you can optimize it.
Honestly if you are going to look into doing rendering and you are at this stage, you may want to build yourself a small farm, used servers can work nicely for this ( use nvidia cards, and an external ps for them) as well as shopping for used video cards (ymmv) but I’ve found that it is far less expensive to build your own farm if you are going to do this rather than rely on render farms. Shop around for a while and as a loose rule of thumb if you can get a pcie slot in it, you can run blender in it, just be mindful that anything over 2 physical cpus is going to require a server os if you want to be able to use them.
Another thing you should at least experiment with is the AO Bounces option (under Simplify). Unless you’re making large enclosed spaces, setting it at 3 or so shouldn’t make much of a visible impact.