I’m trying to animate a 30 frame sequence that rotates the outer sphere. It’s taking a long time so I was just wondering if this is normal or if there’s something wrong.
You’re talking about the rendering, right?
It’s all the special effects and what not that would make it take a while…How long is it taking per frame?
It’s tahing around 40 minutes per frame. I left it on all night, and it’s still only on frame 16.
40 minutes per FRAME??? What are your render settings? Some settings take longer to render than others unless pre-baked. Radiosity comes to mind for one. Possibly light and env maps, I do believe those can be pre baked too.
I would go to Decreasing Render Time at http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Rendering.
There are all sorts of possible ways to speed things up. Some impact quality more than others.
At 40 minutes per frame, your 30 frame animation will take 20 hours to complete. Every frame in an animation is a complete render of the entire picture. This is why there are render farms, and why animators use every trick in the book to reduce render times.
For tricks in this particular case, if only the outer sphere is rotating, and nothing else in the image is changing, you could probably get by with rendering four or five frames then repeating them in a loop. It appears the only thing you’ll see moving is the noise texture on the bars of the outer sphere. Since the noise is very small and probably random, four or five frames should be enough to fake a complete, continuous rotation without anyone noticing that the frames repeated.
each horizontal bar has a little vertical bit that connects to the next one making a spiral pattern. I need all 30 frames so you can see them moving around.
the big way to speed up rendering: AVOID RAY-TRACING.
Ah, didn’t notice those little vertical bits. I suspect that most of the render time is being eaten up by the glowy motionless material in the center of the rotating bars, and in the glowy motionless material in the background. If this is the case, you can render the interior sphere and background once, and use nodes to composite the animated rotating bars on top of the static background. You’d need a mask the shape of the inner sphere so the bars don’t show through the inner sphere.
Of course, unless you stopped the render, this is all moot, because the 20 hours is about up, and your render will be finished.
Thank you! turning off the ray tracing cut the time for each frame down to 30 seconds
80 times as long? How are the results?
the outside didn’t change much but I had to change the inside
To optimize, you can do things like reducing frames per second to 10 or 12, turn off OSA, increase Threads, Disable Textures in the Output Panel, etc. When you’re ready for the final render/animation, you can worry about the rest. Render farms seem useful, but never used them.