hey dear blenderists,
I’m working on a commercial project and time is of the essence, cycles is awesome, but its renders are long.
a simple frame, pipes on a transparent background, with animated texture, takes 4 seconds to render. the animation is 4000 frames so it’s a lot.
there are more objects in the scene, so obviously, the system calculates them as well even though they’re hidden.
I’m using GPU render, sampling is set to 50 (which is grainy, but can be toned down with a noise reducer), no caustics.
transparency is set between 1-3, bounces 1-5.
I have a geforce gtx780, 16 gb ram and a intel i7 4770k.
4 seconds to render is almost literally nothing. That’s only 4.5ish hours to render in total. For reference, I regularly work with animation taking longer than that for each and every frame. You can check out a render farm if you’re desperate, but you’re really not going to do much better.
My most recent cycles render were two HD football helmets, 180 frames of animation for each. Total render time, just under 2 days. I would kill for 4 seconds/frame…
The simplest way I can think, would be to try render in 2 instances of Blender.
WOrk out how long a GPU frame takes (4s) work out the CPU time(but set it to 1 less thread than physical cores) (EG 8 s) then open Blender twice on the same file.
Open Blend and set it to GPU to render some frames (eg 3000), and open another of the same file, and get it to render some frames (eg 1000), but make sure you’re not using all the CPU, otherwise the GPU one will have delays building BVH etc… hence why I suggest 3 threads for the CPU one (ignoring HT, Cycles hits the cores pretty hard, so definatly want 1 free for BVH etc…)