untitled WIP

[djembeplay]

This is an early test render of one of my WIPs. It's actually all done now... just need to figure out how I'm going to render it with it's massive render times.

Everything is animated to transition from winter to spring to summer to fall as things sprout, grow, and die.

[Gord.T]

You've been busy. That's a cool tree. The guitar looks real. Is that a model? It'll be cool to see the animation. Sometimes I render in sections at night when I sleep.

[djembeplay]

Thanks.

Ya, I'm doing the full-time rendering thing currently. I sure could use a render farm consisting of about 50 barebones PCs.

The guitar was modeled and textured from scratch. I sort of went nuts on it - I just kept my guitar next to me and really focused on details. I did learn, however, that one couldn't do this practically for every element of a scene if they plan on finishing an animation in one lifetime.

[triplej96]

Really beautiful piece! All c4d?

[djembeplay]

Thanks triple!

Yup, all C4D (with the help of the modules and Bodypaint, of course).

I had to do this in three sections consisting of 1200 frames each. First were the mountains, then the 'middle-ground' consisting of the lake, trees, birds, island, dock, etc. Those two are done... now the only thing left is the foreground.

I'm not sure what to do actually. It seems that, even after extensive tweaking, I'm hitting about 7 hours per frame for the foreground. 7x1200 frames = eeek! However, this is the render time for just one frame, so that includes the initialization time for the scene to calculate everything up to whatever frame I happen to be test rendering... which probably takes up a large portion of that 7 hours. Once I'm rendering all of them in sequence, I'm hoping the render time will be reduced quite a bit.

I couldn't bake anything because almost everything is moving. Also, the main light, the sun, rises on the left, pans across the scene, and sets to the right. So, every frame needs to be rendered from 'scratch'.

[Gord.T]

Why is it 7 hours? Is there one particular piece that's a bottlekneck? Or is it pyrocluster or GI?
Don't use GI for animation if that's the case. Subpoly displacement? You should be able to get it down to 20 minutes/frame. Seriously, why 7 hrs?

[djembeplay]

Idk... it's crazy.

I am rendering at 2048x1152 - that could be part of it. I'm not using any GI. I do, however, have a very high shadowmap resolution (maybe 8000x8000) on my main light... that combined with many objects makes for some of the time. Also, the scene preparation it's self seems to be very long because every single element is animated in some way... even the rocks have moss that slowly grows over them. There is some sub-poly displacement as well on the log, tree, rock, etc.

I think another part of it is that my RAM is almost maxed on this scene (with 8gigs).

So, ya, I don't know. I've sort of put this one on the back burner for now. I've finished a couple more projects since this one and am now finishing up another. I've learned a bit since then and would probably be able to set up a more memory efficient scene / know my system limitations a bit more if I were to do it again.