Exporting animations time is not always the same.

[rbsouthbay]

The time it takes for me to export an animtion varies dramatically. The time drastically increases when ever I seem to change something in the animator.

I created an animation about 1:20 long a couple weeks ago,when I first tried to export it was taking way way too long and I tried changing the video compression, frame rates, anti-ailising and just took so long I didnt bother. Yesterday i tried to export again and it only took 2 hours (thats nothing compared to the first time around. So todaqy I made some small camera changes and Im back to the original "sluggishness". No way it will finish in two hours.

Do i need to refresh something after I make changes or what is going on. The time it takes to export is much too unpredictable and usually unreasonably long. Please help.

[dgorsman]

"Unreasonably long" is a little vague.  For reasonable quality animations, I usually experience ~ 20-30 second render times per frame, resulting in around 4 hours for an average 30-second scene.

You may have changed render quality, or turned off lighting, or changed output resolution, or changed FPS, or even tweaked camera positions which resulted in large areas of each image being a single color.  All of these can impact the per-frame render time.

[rbsouthbay]

Yesterday the export process took about 2 hours, that was with 22fps and 16x's anti-ailising, today the same animation (with a small camera change) was going to take 8 hours according to my calculations. I lowered the fpr and anti-ailising and it was much different. What should I try next?

[dgorsman]

Kind of depends what your target quality is.  You can reduce your resolution - smaller frames take less time.  On high resolution displays the lack of quality will be noticeable when the frames are scaled up.  You can reduce the FPS to around 15 FPS - anything less will be highly noticeable, more so if run-time needs adjusting in post.  You should be aiming for 24 FPS for presentation work.

But everything is a sacrifice of quality for rendering time.  There is no "make it run faster" switch or hardware device which retains the quality (no, I'm not convinced the 2-hour render was with the same settings - something changed).  Check everything with single-frame renderings and low FPS/low quality renders before you commit to the full-on render.

[rbsouthbay]

Well now everything seems to be running slow transforming, especially the transparency option is running super slow. This program seems so delicate, is it maybe the models i imported? My building is from Autocad architecture and all the other factory components are from inventor (everything is shrinkwrapped).

[dgorsman]

Performance here is fairly consistent.  WAG: there is a setting in the DWG Reader section of the Options for Architectural materials, so it might be searching for something.