Painfully Slow IVStudio Rendering

[wimann]

It seems to me that sometime in the past few years, something was changed and it has caused rendering to take considerably longer than ever before. But I'm open to the idea that maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I'm not sure what all the community would need to know about my machine in order to address possible issues there but I'll throw some information out there via snapshots and if you need anything else, just let me know.

My process, more often than not, is to have a part whose sole purpose is to control an assembly via the part's parameters and constraints to said part. In my most recent experience, planes were placed in the part file with an offset to it's origin XZ plane and parts in a larger assembly where constrained to those planes. In Inventor studio, I would drive the parameters controlling the planes.

So the problem is this, I chose to render (to save time) at 20fps through my animation with the high (not highest) setting for antialiasing but I required 1280x720 Resolution. The assembly was rather large but most of it did not move. I used default settings for lighting and shadows. My problem is that this type of rendering, I feel, used to not take very long at all. Right now, with those settings, it would take roughly 2-3 minutes per frame. At that rate, a 5 second clip would need 100 frames or take 200-300 minutes or 3hr 20min - 5 hours (more often than not on the 5 hour side).

Am I losing my mind and this is how it has always been? That feels like a long time for the quality I was asking from inventor. What can I do to decrease the amount of time it takes to render from studio besides lower quality?

Thanks,

[LT.Rusty]

Rendering HD video is not a quick process.  Ever.

I'm guessing that over the past few years you've probably started to see an increase in output resolution?

It's great that you've got 8 cores - rendering is one of the few multithreaded areas of Inventor - but I do note that they are a little slow in the clock speed arena with only 3.3 gHz turbo boost, and the normal being in the mid 2.xx range.  Faster CPU will help there obviously, but still - rendering HD video is not a quick process.  Ever.

[wimann]

I mean I don't expect it to be real fast. I just expected it to be faster than that given my previous experience. I probably spent (collectively) 300 hours making two 6 minute videos and 2 11 minute videos (with some picture-in-picture as well as reused video clips). Granted I utilized any and all computers I was able to get my hands on during the process (in other words, coworker leaves, I take their seat to render).

So I guess when (not if) I'm asked to render something of similar size again, I should be prepared to say that it is what it is and there is simply nothing I can do to reduce the amount of time required for rendering - aside from hardware upgrades.

I'd also like to ask this as well. In an effort to save time during the rendering process I've been alluding to this whole time, I rendered many images to take the place of moments in the video where no motion is necessary. I noticed a drastic difference in image quality between the still frame portions and the rendered video portions even with the same quality settings. Is there something I can do to avoid this in the future? It essentially makes the video look crisp and clear while everything is still, but once it moves everything becomes noticeably more pixelated.

Thank you for your help.

[swalton]

Last time I did any rendering with IV studio, I rendered my animations as single frames.  I built my animation timelines to have 4-5 frames at each pause in the final animation.  I then used Windows movie maker to stitch the single frames into a movie.  That let me extend out my pauses from 4-5 frames to 20 or 30 seconds without having render 40-60 unchanging frames.  I was also able to add transitions between camera shots and text lables, etc.

This workflow allows you to make changes to individual shots in your animation and render only the changed section.  Then when you open the Windows Movie Maker file, it will consume the changed stills and you don't have to re-do the entire animation.  Watch your filenames to make sure this works.

You could leverage this workflow by setting each of your render machines to render a chunk of the total animation.  Machine 1 renders frames 1-1200 (60 seconds at 20 frames/sec), Machine 2 renders frames 1201-2400, etc. 

This requires a bit of record keeping and overhead to make the final movie.   I recommend creating a storyboard showing the frame numbers and file names for each animation sequence. 

Edited to Add:

For large scale or complex animations, it may be worth learning a dedicated animation package.  One thing to consider: are you rendering concepts or final products.  The dedicated animation tools will require re-work each time you change your design.  Inventor Studio should work better as your design changes.

My other trick was to build test animations at very low quality so that my customer could approve the animation sequence before I commited to a high quality animation.

[wimann]

We have very similar thoughts 🙂

I rendered 5 second clips (on average) on each computer. Which helped me keep track of what had and hadn't been rendered. I used still frames for my non-moving moments in the video. I used Sony Vegas as my secondary editing software instead of WMM. I've tried movie maker but Vegas is far more useful imo.

And yes, it took a great deal of record keeping to make sure I A) had everything I needed and B) didn't re-render clips when it wasn't necessary.

It was just the number of clips I needed that made it so time consuming. If I'm remembering correctly, I had about 80 clips? I think? So 80 clips x 5 hours per clip = 400 hours. So yeah... I could have never done that on one machine in the amount of time I was given to complete the task but even though multiple machines made it possible, I'm still shocked at the amount of time it takes.

[dgorsman]

Quality of stills vs. animation sounds like motion blur being added.  Adding excessive motion blur can certainly extend rendering times, while not enough can make camera movement unnatural (think low quality TV sci-fi movies).

There may be any number of settings which can affect output time (I'm uncertain how many of them come into play with Studio as I use other software).  I suspect it is going to take some rigorous investigation - tweak a setting, render a dozen or so frames, record time and percieved quality; restore setting, change another, etc. 

Budgeting 30-45 seconds per frame for the finished product seems to be a good number.  Thats also why I typically do a low-quality pre-vis render at 6 FPS and much lower resolution, both for my own benefit as well as for input from others before firing up the real deal.

[wimann]

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@dgorsman wrote:

...

Budgeting 30-45 seconds per frame for the finished product seems to be a good number.  Thats also why I typically do a low-quality pre-vis render at 6 FPS and much lower resolution, both for my own benefit as well as for input from others before firing up the real deal.

---

I had a few low quality renderings prior to going final but even with that, you're estimation sounds about right to me. I was getting about 120-180 seconds per frame.

Motion blur is an interesting thought. Though I don't recall ever seeing an option in inventor for it.

[cwhetten]

I rarely do any animations with Inventor, so take this for what it's worth, but I wonder if the quality difference is a video compression thing.  What format are your animation files?

Cameron Whetten
Inventor 2014

[Daniel248]

Hi Will Mann,

Regarding motion blur v. smooth video, we need to remember about the speed of the motion we are trying to capture. When displaying this onto a digital screen, we will come across the notion of “Pixel Velocity”.

This website illustrates this notion very well:

http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/

Regards,

Danny

[wimann]

My video was being rendered from inventor in .wmv format. Though I don't think there's anything I can do to change that. There was never an option (as far as I remember).

[wimann]

---

@Daniel248 wrote:

Hi Will Mann,

Regarding motion blur v. smooth video, we need to remember about the speed of the motion we are trying to capture. When displaying this onto a digital screen, we will come across the notion of “Pixel Velocity”.

This website illustrates this notion very well:

http://frames-per-second.appspot.com/

Regards,

Danny

---

I guess the only stick in the mud with the motion blur theory is that I would often have parts that were not moving pixelate as well. Say, for example, if a pin is inserted in the rendered video and everything in the view blurs.

[ajcraig99]

I have only just started getting my feet wet with animations but with about 500 hours of work so far i think i have found the best workflow, for me atleast.

I render 1920x1080 so it takes forever but i found installing custom video codecs speeds this up somewhat and also resaults in more managable file sizes.

I use lagarith lossless codec and Xvid codec. I alternate between the 2 to eliminate wierd display glitches i sometimes get in the final video.

http://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html

http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec/

I always do a trial render before leaving it overnight to do the final video. When selecting your output settings, select "render: no preview" i can render a 30sec clip at 30fps in about 10-15mins this way and sometimes use it for the final video if quality is not paramount and time is an issue.

When using "no preview" the visual settings are controlled through your typical view settings rather than inventor studio so you can render with shaded edges and whatnot.

Even with my machine having fairly high end specs (i7 4820 @ 4ghz and 64gb ram) it can still take all night to do a final video with highest AA and 1080p.

hope that makes sense and is of some help.

[sam_m]

Tips I've found when rendering:

lighting settings: These make a MASSIVE difference to speed and any "global lighting" styles are very slow...  for speed make sure the sky light (lighting styles -> general tab) is off and "bounced light" is off (Indirect tab).  Also, the more lights the more processing, so only use a couple for highlights and shadow-creation - use the General Brightness and Indirect Ambience to light the scene.

anti-aliasing: highest isn't needed, use high

materials/colours:  bump-maps and shiny faces will slow things down - try to limit their use.

create a new "slimline" assembly for rendering.  Basically save-as your main iam and then remove all internal parts - reduces the number of parts the system has to deal with.

Biggest tip to improve rendering time - scrap Inventor Studio and use Showcase 😉  If you aren't rendering any animations with components physically changing (e.g. springs compressing) then Showcase is sooo much better.  There's an overhead importing the assembly and then setting up your materials (which, once you've setup your "commonly used company materials" you can save for the next assembly/import), but once that's done then it's a lot better than Studio (depending what animations you're trying to do).

As for quality output...

Frame rate:  The greater the frame-rate the more are required to be rendered, so consideration is greatly needed.  animations are traditionally about 24fps, but for Inventor renders I find 15fps is a good mix of quality output vs rendering time.

Rendering:  My approach - render as an uncompressed avi (doesn't add a codec overhead to the rendering process, but takes up a LOT of hard disk space...).  When you've got your "master" output you can then recode with different codecs and settings without needing to re-compute the entire render again.  The last time I did anything I used WinFF to convert a 1.2GB animation to a choice of 9MB or 4MB mp4s of different resolutions 😉

I hope that helps

[admaiora]

As Sam saiys.. for something "big"...

Showcase.. amazing results, easy to use, quick to render.

[wimann]

Yeah I do enjoy using showcase. I just didn't find it practical for my specific project. Large Assembly. Many moving parts. My biggest grief with showcase is that it never seems to translate from inventor properly and I end up having to redo most of the animated parameters and/or the view reps. I feel like once all that is done in inventor, I may as well just stick to it.

William Mann
Designer/Draftsman
Desk Phone : (713) 937-3100 Ext. 3997
Direct Phone : (281) 798-9208
Email : wmann@vbar.com
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[admaiora]

With great assies we use to shirnkwrap a lots, use a low quality managing the scene... and export translating the constraints that need to be animated.

Anyway understand your situation.

[wimann]

I would like to say thank you to everyone who has chipped in to help out.

I'm certain there are many things that can be done to improve rendering time and/or quality.

Thank you everyone.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who may benefit from your contribution.

[dgorsman]

CODEC choice can certainly have an effect on output.  Many have built-in limits on resolution, length, and/or filesize.