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Render settings - draft and production

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Message 1 of 11
Logos_Atum
3205 Views, 10 Replies

Render settings - draft and production

Hello there,

 

I would like to preview a 900 Frame animation. What´s the fastest way to render it in a decent resolution? Scanline one one core or Mental ray with min settings on all cores?

 

I´m new to the crew and the setup options are overwhelming.

 

 

 

All suggestions sre very welcome. I´m also looking for resources on the internet.

 

 

Kind regards

 

Daniel

Dogs aren´t flammable.
10 REPLIES 10
Message 2 of 11
Steve_Curley
in reply to: Logos_Atum

Tools > Preview - Grab Viewport > Create Preview animation.
Help > Autodesk 3ds Max Help... > Contents > Rendering > Rendering Previews and Capturing Viewports.

Max 2016 (SP1/EXT1)
Win7Pro x64 (SP1). i5-3570K @ 4.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX11.
nVidia GTX760 (2GB) (Driver 430.86).

Message 3 of 11
Logos_Atum
in reply to: Steve_Curley

Hello Steve,

 

thanks again! Preview is running fine now. For production I will have a closer look onto the help.

I´m going to use a single frame to set it up with all the objects visible to get an idea how long it

will take with the chosen lighting settings.

 

Kind regards

 

Daniel

 

Dogs aren´t flammable.
Message 4 of 11
eodeo
in reply to: Logos_Atum

Mental ray is one of the coolest and best renderers available today. Not only does it come with Max out of the box, it also comes with two siblings- iray and quicksilver.

 

Mental ray is the most feature rich and base the two others are drawing from. If you need the featues, MR is your obvious choice. If, however, you need either speed, simplicity or likely- both- you can use either of the two other rendering engines without chaning your scene- lights, materials, etc.

 

CUDA based GPU rendering solution by nvidia themselves- iray- is mental ray ported to work on the GPU. Its the easiest renderer to set up, gives you same the quality of mental ray if you were to set it up perfectly, and since it's GPU based renderer, it can run notably faster then pure MR depending on the scene and your hardware. It can run on CPU only, but its not very fast that way. It's probably slower then pure MR in most cases. Also, the entire scene has to fit in your GPU RAM, as system RAM is ignored.

 

Finally and likely most interestingly, you have quicksilver rendering solution. Another GPU solution, made by Autodesk to mimic MR rendering, it uses DirectX and thus works on both nvidia and ATi/AMD cards, it is by far the fasterst way to render in Max. Scene dependant, it gives you over 90% of MR quality at fraction of render time.

 

For example, on my i7 4770k a scene with a heavily optimized MR takes about 10 minutes to render, but for quicksilver it takes less than 10 seconds on a midrange GPU like my gtx 460. For this particular night, nature, environment scene, you'd need to carefully examine both frames to notice a difference- it's QS is that good. Its easy to set up, blazing fast to render, gives you great quality and posibly best of all- preserves compatibilty with your currently setup scene- given that you're using MR as your default rendering solution. You can easily swich rendering engines and render only portions of the scene in either mental ray, iray or quicksilver.

 

Scanline is an excellent rendering platform, but for a much narrower range of uses. I still use it all the time, but you need to know when and why to use it. For start it is safe to ignore it untill you master mental ray and satelites.

Message 5 of 11
Logos_Atum
in reply to: eodeo

Hello there,

 

I think so too. Metal ray already was a blast when it was not part of Autodesks package.

 

I read the part about Quicksilver carefully and this indeed sounds interesting, esecially

if you take into consideration the compute performance of recent AMD cards. I will have

a closer look for it.

 

Scanline is good for some purposes I guess, would be nice if it would use all the cores though.

 

 

Kind regards

 

Daniel

Dogs aren´t flammable.
Message 6 of 11
eodeo
in reply to: Logos_Atum

It uses all 8 cores of my i7 4770k. It is scene/content dependant so it may appear as though only few are being used- or you have more than 8 cores.

Message 7 of 11
Logos_Atum
in reply to: eodeo

Hello there,

 

that is quite possible... been using 4 real and 4 ht cores for most of the renderings too.

Though judging from most of the Autodesk renderers in different applications, everything

other than raytracing is single threaded. I ray tends to run oput of video mem in most

cases.

 

Kind regards

 

 

Daniel

 

Dogs aren´t flammable.
Message 8 of 11
eodeo
in reply to: Logos_Atum

What Max are you using?

 

As far as I can remember, scanline used all the cores I threw at it. I didn't have higher than average core count over the years, but still...

 

With that said, I was always sad/annoyed that Max used only a single core for viewport manipulation, animation and preview. Basically, if it wasn't rendering and it was Max, it used just the one core. Max 2014 changed all that. All cores report at least some usage in most of the scenes, while most of the time in most scenes, all cores report very high usages for animation/preview. The same is true of the GPU usage- until things get graphically intensive. Then the usage drops to <2013 levels- well below 50%. It's not video RAM being filled as there is still room as reported by GPU-Z. I'm not sure why this is the case, but for most of my scenes, most of the time Max 2014 is leagues above previous Maxes in both speed and stability as an added bonus.

 

As you may have noticed, I'm quite smitten with Max 2014 ❤️

Message 9 of 11
Logos_Atum
in reply to: Logos_Atum

I´m using Max Design 2014... I´ll have a look if the load on the components scales along with the polycount.

Sometimes time for conversion does not scale linear but almost sqared.... had that problem with ACAD. Con-

verting half of the objects resulted in about a quarter of the time the whole DWG took. It was nasty....

 

 

Yes you obviously are 😉

 

And I´m kind of charmed too.... Last time I used Max the Version count was 4.0...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dogs aren´t flammable.
Message 10 of 11
eodeo
in reply to: Logos_Atum

Ouch. 4 was particuarly nasty and unstable... 2014 must seem like magic in comparison 🙂

Message 11 of 11
Logos_Atum
in reply to: Logos_Atum

It really does- I think they introduced the radial menue and the new colour set for the ui then...

I need to get the manual to my magic wand... probably I´m employing version 4 workflow in

2014.

 

It really is fast and it´s as smart as a web now. I´m going to be a busy spider in the time to come.

 

Smiley Happy

 

Dogs aren´t flammable.

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