Do you use Cycles for animation?

Support Materials and Textures
#1

I rendered a 30 sec. animation with internal renderer, low poly, without many objects to animate. It took a while.
now I can’t imagine how long would it take if I use cycles for animation rendering especially with high poly, many objects, full shading.

Cycles is painfully slow even when render one frame.
I use radeon card so I can’t use GPU, and I already adjusted several options known to make cycles faster, but still slow.

Do you guys use cycles for animation and big projects? Or do I have to learn how to tweak internal renderer to make it photorealistic.

I really don’t want to wait days to render a simple animation.

and I realized I had to post this question on rendering board.

#2

Cycles in 2.75 should now have AMD support (unless your card is at least several generations old or older).

Otherwise, make use of the general tips for reducing render times. Use clamping, reduce bounces, make use of the filter glossy setting, turn on MIS for textured environmental backgrounds, make use of per-lamp bounce settings, turn off MIS for mesh lights that are large but weak ect…

#3

Yes, We do large scale architectural animations, sometimes up to 15,000 frames long… we only use cycles due to the amount of artistic time it would take to make BI to look realistic.

#4

With the right material and object setups, Cycles can be surprisingly fast. You can disable some light paths on single objects (for example, if you have a lot of objects - for example, grass blades - that don’t need self-shadowing, turn shadows off for those). Optimize your materials and make use of post-processing, clamping, branched path tracing, etc. to hide remaining fireflies.

#5

Blender internal is very nice, the main advantage is that you have no noise at all. But note that if you use complex materials and lighting (from World tab) for realistic scenes, in internal the render times obtained can be large too (but perhaps still faster than Cycles).