hi guys i’m new here so let me say HELLO~~
my school doesn’t have 3d graphic classes like some other schools
but i always wanted to do 3d modeling and graphics so i started blender i ordered books and other things and i’m waiting for them to come
i was doing the Gus lesson with the animation
and i have 40 frames and i clicked ANIM. so i could have the rendered version of animation
but i realized it takes a quiet a while, the guide that i downloaded says it should only take couple of seconds, but instead it took around 20 minutes
i can’t imagine how long its going to take when i have animation with 500 frames or something…
so i was wondering if there’s any faster way to render animation??
Hi Andifer! Welcome to the club. We hope you have a lot of fun with Blender. What kind of PC are you using? The long render time could be something you’ve done by mistake, some default set too low, or the PC power. When I render, I always start by turning off Ray, Shadow, EnvMap, MBlur, Radio and OSA (all the buttons on the Render panel). All those things take time and are not necessary to add in until you are nearly complete.
Didn’t know about those other settings but that Raytrace button is on by default and that usually makes a big difference in render time.
Yes an animation can take a long time to render if it’s a long one, even with all those buttons turned off. So TIP #1 - render long animations as separate images just in case you have a crash or power-outage while rendering. After it’s all done you combine the images into a movie file.
I have a question about what Larry said. Is there an open source program to combine so many images like that. I thought gimp could but I am not sure. I have done it with small frame animations but anything over 20 is very time consuming.
You have to select all of the images not just the first one
Press “A” with the mouse cursor in the sequence window, all of the files should highlight, then click the Select Images button (or press ENTER).
Andifer :
Other things that will affect render time :
Image size will also affect render time, a 1920x1080 will take a lot longer than a 128x128
Also the default for the SubSurf modifier is Render Levels :2. If you’re using SubSurf, you can turn it down to 1 or even off for testing (to turn it off, LMB on the first icon beside the Word Subsurf (tooltip "enable modifier during rendering).
-The more geometry / objects you have … and the “denser” their meshes (higher vertices count) will also take longer to render. You can experiment with the Decimate Modifer to reduce vertice count.
The more lights you have will also increase render times.
If you happened to have also enabled Ambient Occlusion, that will also take longer.
All that said, you’re inital 40 frames -> 20 minutes is “only” 30 secs a frame, and with a ll the “bells and whistles” turned on, that’s pretty fast.
If you’ve seen the Elephants Dream movie, each frame in that movie was taking ~20 minutes / frame on fast computers. Commercial productions like Pixar …etc can take HOURS for ONE frame :eek: Such is the nature of 3d.
Also, if you experiment with “toon” type shading, that kind of scene will generally render much faster than the “realistic” type.
