tipps to reduce rendertimes? Or very cheap Renderfarms for students?

Artistic Support Lighting and Rendering
1

Hello everyone

I am a student in mediadesign working at an animation for my bachelor project.
So far everything has been going well but the rendertimes are killing me.(I’m rendering with Cycles)

I’d like to render the movie (roughly estimated 2 minutes in lenght) at a resolution of 1280x720p
with only 300 samples it still takes 14 minutes per frame in the first scene I tested so far.
with only half the resoulution and 200 samples it slowly gets berable with 4 minutes per frame…
but the quality is so low.

First it took 40 minutes but took out MultiRes and samples wich helped a lot. ^^"
So far I’ve decided to kick out zooms and reduce the framerate to 20fps to save time and I’ve set the tiles to 256x256 for GPU rendering wich also helped a little.

has anyone any tricks to further reduce the rendertime?

I also searched the forum and found quite some renderfarms, but I have very little money to spend and absolutely no experience with renderfarms. I tried the estimator on 2 or 3 and got out prices over 400 dollar for 3000 frames highres. I don’t have that much.

I also don’t seem to be able to figure out the only free option I read about so far - renderfarm.fi - does anyone know something about this? I seem to be blind to the download … or anyhing alike

(if you’d like to see some wips and examples of the film you could visit synticfaye.tumblr.com)
I would be extremely thankful for any help on this matter
thanks in advance
synticfaye

Ps: I seem to have problems submitting a new thread I hope this doesn’t show up several times now…

2

I think one part of reducing render times is reducing noise. With less noise you can use fewer samples. Look at this for some tips: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Reducing_Noise

Also, look at this for tips on reducing render times: http://www.blenderguru.com/4-easy-ways-to-speed-up-cycles/

I’ve found that a lot of the noise and render time comes from indirect bounces. Play around with the number of bounces and see what kind of balance you can strike between quality and time. Oh, and if you want low render times, use limited global illumination (I think that’s what it’s called).

3

Unless you absolutely need to use Cycles, you could also revamp your textures to be compatible with Blender Internal and use that. Your render time will be significantly faster.

But if you absolutely need to use Cycles, blenderjourney’s advice is all I know about.