I am in the progress of making a scene in a short animation. I will render the entire animation soon, but that will take either a long time or cost me some money, so I want to be sure there are no simple mistakes to fix before I start. I plan to maybe add more scenes before and after this one later, but that’s gonna take at least 5 months till I have time. Here are some renders, so feedback can be given:
(I fixed the material for the yellow material for under the gear by now)
I find for metal textures it helps to scuff the edges a bit. I usually just go into texture paint mode, grab a light brush and start tracing the sharp edges. It can also look good to add some darker areas to the grooves, I know there’s a trick to add that with vertex paint.
Sadly, when I tried to render this, it took rayPump way more time then I expected, and it would end up costing a lot more then I can afford right now. I had calculated that, since a free render took like 15 seconds, it would take 15 seconds * 4 (double frame size in both dimensions from free maximum) * 2 (double samples, 600AA instead of max 300 for free) * 3 frames = 60 seconds, meaning I could render 180 frames free in one GPU hour, and at that rate, I could afford the 70 frames left. However, for some reason, it took one full GPU hour to render just the first 3 frames, meaning it would take 80 euros to render the whole thing, which is not worth it right now. I am researching other farms, to see if any have a better price, but I might just need to not use my computer a week, since RayPump seems to be the cheapest out there.
I don’t think it should take that long at all. Your scene looks fairly simple and you should be able to get the same result in blender internal or in cycles using direct lighting at under a minute per frame. Try checking your render settings and optimising them. Also make sure your geometry is optimised.
EDIT:
Also, try improving your lighting. Your scene is very dark, and global illumination renders are very slow with poor light and require many more samples to look clean.
Thanks for the suggestions, indeed my settings where unnecessary high for max bounces, and reducing that allowed me to reduce the number of samples.
I will re-estimate the cost, and probably render sometime this week.
It’s rendering! It’ll take 48 hours, to keep the cost low. I decided to change the camera angle a little bit, because after all my smoothing, it became a little bit too smooth, with several places where I thought a slightly more extreme angle would look more realistic, and also to have at least one frame with all 3 gears from a cool angle. In the process, I ended up showing some of the background I hadn’t actually modeled yet, which I now remodeled.
The finished render! At least, this is how I got it from blendergrid. I am in the process of re-rendering the inside of the tube, since somehow the balls appeared black, instead of their respective colors. That should take about the night, then I can layer this on top of the footage you see, and get something halfway presentable, maybe.
My rendering is completed, here is the final render:
I am not actually very happy, but I had to finish some time. I am not going to re-render, but I still value feedback that I can use for future projects.
My short list of things I need to work on:
*Scale: This thing doesn’t make scene at any scale.
*Lighting: I used to have a yellow light in the scene, but I didn’t update it when I made the other lights brighter. It did add atmosphere though.
*Component modeling: The structure of the first set of gears makes little sence. It just looked cool for a while, but a more reallistic setup would have looked better.
*Some kind of purpose, a reason would be nice.
*Materials: I had a quite complicated node setup, with only about 2 nodes actually doing something, the others I didn’t like, but instead of removing, I just reduced their effect so it didn’t show up in preview. (Some showed up in the final render)
And there is probably more. I’ll try again sometime though, not immediately, but eventually, I’ll actually make a decent quality animation!
