Publishing movie issues

[liorman]

I’m trying to publish a storyboard that contain 3 animated shots (each one is 7 seconds)in ray tracing mode and one behavior.
The format is mp4. render quality is 6. Anti-alias set to high. Now 5 days later it still working on it. Showcase is not responding but my CPU is busy all this time with the Showcase operation and since it happens to me before I am assuming it still processing.
I have published the same shots (minus the behavior) a week ago (each shot was 5 seconds) using the same setting as a test and it took "only" 2 days.
My machine exceeding by far the minimum requirements published by Showcase.
Am I missing here anything? or that's just the way Showcase works (which is pretty unsufficient).
Anyway I am using the trial version and just hope the operation will end before my trial will.

[wirefram3d]

what preset are you using (global or ambient?)
what's the movie dimension (800x600? full hd?)

for example, assuming a 1920x1080 format, 6 levels of rendering, AA high, ambient illumination, depending on reflective object quantity, it can take up to 20 min per frame.
you are rendering 7x3=21 seconds of shots + transition, let's say 25 seconds. at 24 frames per second it's a total of 600 images.
20 min per image is 12000 minutes of rendering, consisting in 200 hours (more or less 9 days)
hope it's not the case 😄
if it's a small scene it can take 5 minutes to render a 1920x1080 frame at 6 levels, in this case you need 50 hours (about 2 days)...

also be sure you have selected only the desired slide and not "all slides"

[liorman]

Thank you cikho.

I have stopped the operation (in some point I wasn't sure I didn't do something wrong) and start it again. I have changed each shot to 5 seconds. cut to shot so no transition. 1 slide. MP4 . according to your calculations 5 seconds x 3 = 15 at 24 frames per second its 360 frames. (360 x 20 minutes = 7200 minutes = 5 days) way too much (since I have only two days left on my trial :D) also I have a behavior and I have changed my environment and shedding setting to a specific view since my scene happened in the 27 the floor of a hotel in a specific location . I am using global - my understanding was that global will look better for interior scenes when trying to achieve realistic outdoor views and shedding. All this might add to the process time of every frame. does changing environment will affect the process time? does behaviors adding to the process time? I guess changing the movie dimension to 800 x 600 will reduce the process time as well as the movie quality but I’m not sure compromise quality will be worth the time saving (unless significant).

[liorman]

This is a screen shot of my scene.

[wirefram3d]

man a global illumination render at 6 levels will take ages to render..
with global you get the best results, but it takes a lot more time to do the job..

for example, one of my most complex scenes (helicopter interiors) can take up to 40 minutes to reach lvl2...
probably is not your case, but ofc it will use a lot of time imho..

what do you need the video for?
web? in-class projected presentation?
office presentation?
educational?

another question i have is, considering the small amount of time, is raytracing really mandatory?

why don't you spare the scenes to more than 1 pc at the same time? (guess you have only 1 license..)

[liorman]

I need the video for a client presentation.
I usually use Revit to get good photorealistic walkthrough since our office has many licenses and I can do it in one weekend but in this case I wanted to present the real views that you will see from the space with an helicopter flying by just for fun,
(Revit can do it only per 1 view but not in a walkthrough) and I dont think you can see the environment unless you do it in raytrace mode.

[liorman]

Okay, I had to cancel. way too long to get a 15 seconds movie (after 5 days got only 12% - are you kidding me? ) got a new computer 32 RAM QUADRO 4000 should be enough, no? Well, one shot to render (ray trace mode global illumination rendering quality 2) took more than 12 hours to complete but did it. when I tried to render in a better ray trace quality ( 4 )a slide that contain two shots ( 5 seconds each ) I had to cancel again after 16 hours ( only 2 % done ) really really frustrating.
We have got the building suite just to have better flow between showcase and Revit but frankly what showcase does Revit do better and what Showcase supposed to do (render animation ) it is not capable to do (I don’t know why maybe it needs a render farm ) Very frustrating. The idea behind showcase is brilliant but the performances are very poor (at least for architecture scenes) and as other users noticed it also unstable.

[wirefram3d]

well showcase it's supposed to be a real time rendering software.. ofc it has a raytrace mode built in, but it's not its main focus..

a mentalray render in 3ds max would be twice as fast is not even more..
but, again, you are rendiring a really complex scene (milions of poligons) with the best rendering mode, with high quality and large resolution..
you cannot think to have the job done in hours, even with 3dsmax imho..
mentalray can render a 1280x768 scene with full radiosity support maybe in 2-5 minuts, maybe more..

but, again you need to render at least 240 images.. it still means a minimum of 1200 minuts.. or 20 hours..

another thing you have to consider if you want to do rendering and not real time, is the fact that you have to invest on processor power not the vga..

vga=realtime
cpu=huge calculation (unless you have a GPU rendering software)

trust me, 5 levels of rendering, 800x600, ambient illumination, 50% AA, 10 seconds timeline , if the scene is not complex, 10 hours and you're done.. maybe 15..

save it to quicktime (.mov), best resolution or compression..
and don't be worried if it takes a lot, when it reaches 50% the process speeds up a lot.. 50% is the rendering 50% is the video file creation or something like that

[MarionLandry]

I will have to agree with cikho, perhaps you are expecting to render something quick in Ray Trace that is not possible without increasing your computer RAM! Ray Tracing is dependent of computer RAM to calculate. More RAM=faster computation. I don't personally render animation with Ray Trace because of the time needed. Is there a particular reason why you want to render that scene with Ray trace? What I would suggest to help decrease rendering time is also to analyse the materials in your scene. If all the materials are reflective, it will increase the Ray Trace calculation. I would suggest to turn off the reflective settings of all the materials that don't need reflection. This might help the rendering time overall.
Good luck
Marion

[liorman]

Thank you cikho, Marion. What I dont understand is that I have 32GB RAM in my machine (additional to 2 GB vga )but I can see that while publishing a movie my RAM use is only around 9GB, the CPU goes to 100% but this is alredy the GHz and not the RAM - (I have two quadro processors of 2.4 GHz) so even if I will have a 64 GB RAM it will not make any different.
for rendering only I am using Autodesk Rendering 360 cloud. it is fast, easy, does not take any resources of your computer and gives excellent results. My challenge is really with the walkthroughs. I know NVIDIA offers a solution named nvidia maximus which is basically additional graphic card that use different technology to process your scene(http://www.nvidia.com/object/maximus.html ) which supposed to be much faster ( x7 for quadro 4000 ) and they do say it was designed for 3dmax, I am trying to find out if this will also work with Showcase.

[wirefram3d]

'd also like to share this comparison.
a few days ago i had to render one of my heli interiors for final images and prints.
since the images were a lot and there was the posibility to have to redo some of them, i decided to bring my personal brand new laptop to the office.

office workstation:
quadro fx 4000 (not sure)
24Gb ram
xeon processor dual core (ht tech, means 2 physical cores and 2 virtual).. 2.6Ghz

laptop:
nvidia gt630m
8gb ram
intel core i7 quad 3610QM (4 physical cores + 4 virtual), 2.3Ghz (reacheas almost 3.0 Ghz in turbo boost)
___

well, while the workstation was able to render 1 image, the laptop was able to render 2.. in the real same time
this is obviously related to the processor power, or more precisely to the number of cores imho.

the only problem was the crashes i had on the laptop.. it was not able to render more than 3 images because of ram consumption i think..
obviously the 630M is not even comparable to the quadro, so basically the realtime fps was better on the WS.
so ram is usefull for a long renderin sequence eg videos or image sequence, processor speeds up the process, VGA is the real time way.

if you want to invest on a rendering machine buy a new processor. that's it..
but, again, you'll never be able to render the scene with your settings in less than a week

[liorman]

good tips cikho (regarding the MOV. extention) and you were right. it took to one of my machin (ray trace mode global alllumination advance render level 3 ) to reach 50% about 16 hours and then the other 50% took less than one hour and the other maching did almost the same for another movie with the same setting.
And this is why I needed global ray trace mode (attached links)

http://youtu.be/Vrb6cYwVaKg

[wirefram3d]

cool rendering man 😄
glad you made it in the end