I read that Eevee is the new real time rendering engine that’s supposed to ship with Blender 2.8, but how does that translates to render times? Do you think is suitable to render a full movie? Does that mean that I can render a full 2 hour movie in 2 hours? Do you think is faster than the new Radeon ProRender rendering engine? Actually I have a i7-4790K with 16GB of RAM, one GTX 1070 and one GTX 970. Do you think that rig is good enough to render a full movie in hours? If not, how fast do you think it’ll take to render a full movie? Is Octane a thing of the past? Thanks in advance for reading me.
For a final render, you’ll probably want to crank up quality to the point where it’s not quite realtime anymore. Also, your animation rigs may not run in realtime, either. Then you have all the overhead of writing the frames to disk. The GI caches need to be built, should you use them. You should still be able to finish a frame in seconds.
It will be massively faster than ProRender (which as far as I can tell is slower than Cycles) or Octane. The quality won’t be the same. There will be artifacts. Reflections won’t be accurate. It won’t replace any renderer wherever quality is important.
I wonder for reflection about using a cube map grid that was very dense, and use spherical harmonics or something so the reflection is local and not taken from a point, but interpolated across space.
So basically Eevee is not suitable to render movies. What advise can you give me so I can render full movies in days taking into consideration my present rig?
the question is sadly quite imprecise and way to open for interpretation
since no one knows what you want to create in your movie.
Eevee is also in heavy development so no one will for sure be able to tell you what features
it might have in the long distant future.
After all it entirely depends on your wished quality output and the scenes you are after.
Yes it is, it depends on what style you are going for. Keep in mind that if you want ‘real Pixar quality’ then you are looking at hefty render times on a single rig. If it takes 15 minutes to render a frame, then you are looking at more than a year, just in rendering time, for a 30 min production.
So you are going to wind up using de-noisers, reduced settings, customer shaders and other time-savers anyway. So you need to look at what style of animation and rendering you want to use in your film and decide which way you are going.
A lot of CG artists are very snobby about real-time rendering. In reality, if you push up your settings and design your scene carefully, 95% of people watching your film will have no idea whether you rendered it using path-tracing or OpenGL.
If you give us some idea of what a typical frame from your film looks like and what sort of look you are after, we can try and advise you.
There is no law that says you have to render in Blender either. Unreal is used in archvis walkthroughs that fool many people into thinking they were rendered in Vray.
Basically I want to create a zombie apocalypse movie with Daz Studio models rendered in Blender. It will include buildings (and other city props), some figures and also some zombies. Maybe I’ll have about 10 figures/zombies per scene and also about 5 buildings. I’m not sure if that info is enough to calculate if it’s possible to render it in a reasonable period of time. I hope it is. Do you think is possible with my rig?
I didn’t say that.
Basically I want to create a zombie apocalypse movie with Daz Studio models rendered in Blender.
I don’t think you should be concerned about rendering quality, in that case.
I didn’t saw your post when I posted my previous one so I’m replying in this one. This is an example of one of my renders but I wasn’t thinking about render a movie at that time. I used Daz 3D models. I hope it doesn’t take a lot of time to render some animations using that type of figures and scenes.
Depends on your rig and your art style. We need more information.
As BeerBaron says, rendering that will be the least of your worries.
My rig is i7-4790K, 16GB RAM, one GTX 1070 and one GTX 970. Maybe I can add another GTX 1070 in a few months or substitute the GTX 970 with it. My motherboard has 8x8x2 speed in its three PICe slots and I don’t know if that will be reliable enough for three video card rendering with Blender.
The art style will be basically all Daz Studio and maybe I’ll throw some Mixamo models as well. I also have Poser but I have no experience with it yet so I don’t know even how to export the models to Blender.
Oh, don’t underestimate the challenges of rendering Poser or DAZ figures. Hair is typically created using many layers of transparency mapped geometry, and often clothing makes extensive use of transparency maps too, all at high resolutions. Those slow down rendering in any ray tracer/path tracer, and many game engine rasterising tricks (which I would assume Eevee is using) don’t work well or not at all with multiple levels of transparency (would like to be proven wrong - game programmers always come up with new creative solutions).
For what it’s worth, Rooster Teeth produced complete seasons of Red vs Blue and RWBY using Poser, doing the renders in Poser’s OpenGL engine. That is something that they could pull off easily as they did not aim for photorealism but an anime style.
The amount of computation required for a full movie is insane:
24 frames per second, times 60 seconds times 90 minutes = 129’000 frames (at 1080p that’s more than 250 billion pixels). Even if it takes only one second to render each frame, it’ll be one and a half days of pure rendering. 10 seconds/frame and you’ll be rendering for weeks. If the goal is to render within hours, then your only bets are rasterising engines like Unity or soon Eevee, with the respective limitations in features and quality - path tracing, even with GPU acceleration is not going to cut it here.
That is leaving aside the question of how long it’ll take to write, layout, animate, light and edit a 90 minute film - render time may not necessarily be the biggest concern here.
i agree with skw. additionally you have to consider the many test renders you will do and all the material that you’ll cut off when you finally put all the frames together.
Wonder if Eevee can render individual frames on each GPU. if each is going to perform realtime then you should be able to render in 30 minutes (30 minutes per each card)
However when looking at your project. Doing full length movie is going to be a challenge, have you considered to maybe cut it down to something more manageable like 30/45/60 minute? Or split the movie into three parts (each 30 minutes)
In the end though, best approach is what Blender Institute did and do a test. Just like they just did with Agent 347 and previously with Laundrymat movie. That will give you the best estimation.
We can tell you all amazing and scary stories that you will or will not be able to do it. But stay determined and go for it. Do a test scene, like 1 minute scene of best part of the story, and see how long it renders. Based on that you’ll be able to determine if it is truly possible or required modifications.
If you are planning on hand animating all of this then I would be shocked if you will be doing more then 5-10 seconds of half decent animation a week so why the hell are you worried about rendering, animation is the way bigger time sink.
If you are planning on using eevee for rendering then all the better. It doesn’t even have to be real-time to be super to useful. Each shot in your movie will typically last a few seconds so it could take you maybe a week or two to animate then twenty minutes of rendering if you can wrangle 5 to 10 second per frame out of eevee even 10s-30s is a really good rendering time even if it’s not real time.
If you want to see the quality of work you can theoretically get out of a real time render engine then check out the Adam demo from Unity or the Infiltrator demo from UE4 I doubt a single person can hit that level of quality but at least you will know what is possible.
I am planning on making eevee my rendering solution when its ready but my aim is not in making movies or short films, just short bursts of action oriented animation ‘sakuga style’.
If your aim is disney\pixar quality, not even cycles can do that. But whatever project amateur\hobbist\small team can throw at it - rendering will not be your bottleneck, but skill of the team.
Other problem - eevee is not going out soon, cant do a large project with unpolished tools. I would expect 1.5 years from now until we can safely work with it.
Not sure if you guys catch BeerBarons drift here, tbh.
Would be fantastic in some cases, agreed.
Though:
- several baking steps for recursive reflections.
- each frame of course for animations.
That at least, starts creeping towards raytracing rendering effort.
I wish there were a cheap mocap rig out there, making something like this would be much faster.
with evee, the director could see the actor acting in blender in realtime.
I can’t afford a vive etc though, does anyone make cheap position trackers? (without using camera data*)
As for the original question (can Eevee be used to make a movie), I wouldn’t create a verdict on this just yet as there is still heavy development going on and the oft-important polishing/optimization phase has not even started (that will come after SIGGRAPH in August).
The thing to note though is to not expect advanced, yet detailed lighting effects such as caustics (ie. no good method right now that is capable of doing them in real-time). Another thing is that the detail in the GI in general will be highly dependent on the resolutions you set (all real-time engines are based on rasterization technology so accurate GI on smaller details is not guaranteed).
LOD or Tesselation is good here yes?
as per caustics, one can ‘fake it’ with logic linked to lights, to spawn lights on surfaces but it would get pretty heavy to do in py.
like if any lamp is illuminating a face over X value, and the reflectivity is above y value, spawn light, set angles etc.
(does evee use deferred or forward render?)
Oh I do, it’s just not worth reacting to.