Urgent Help with "large" animation

[masond1287]

Good evening all. I am working on a project at work for a potential upcoming job we are trying to contract. Part of our bid package is going to be an animation of our construction sequence for a small chunk of the Level in the building, just one "bay".

I have been out of 3DS for about a year, but picked everything back up right away. I linked all of my .dwg files directly to 3DS after I seperated the content in the .dwg files onto seperate layers, acting as "selection sets". (only because of the amount of parts in the cad files would have been a pain to select and add individual animations)

Straight to the point.......I animated everything that I needed to thus far to get the point across for the meeting with the client, and the animation looks great when I play it back. However, once I hit render last night to render the animation around 10:15pm....as of this morning the render window was showing that the render still had roughly 30 some odd hours left to render. My work machine is a 8 core processor with 24gb of RAM. When I checked the processes this morning, all 8 cores were completely pegged out at 100%, and using 12gb of my RAM.

I dont have any surfaces applied to the objects in my model and only have one light going in the animation. I have the animation set at 401 keyframes, and am only using one camera.

Is there someone that would be able to help me go through my rendering settings to speed up this process? I dont mind the render taking a couple of hours, but I cannot wait 4 days (the rendering time keeps increasing) to get this video up and ready to go.

If possible, I can go into work early tomorrow morning and setup a goto meeting and we can review my current settings and adjust from there??

Thanks in advance guys.

[masond1287]

I came back in this morning and the rendering is currently at frame 182 of 401. Total elapsed time of 30 hrs 49 minutes. Shows remaining time of 37 hrs 5 minutes left. Doing the math, the frames have been rendering out in an average of about 10 minutes each, some being way longer than the others. I have taken screenshots of my rendering windows hoping that maybe that will help someone respond to this.

[Anifex09]

I am not currently a Max user but very familiar with trouble shooting render issues.  If this was my project I would use image sequence instead of trying to write out an AVI file.  You can composite the frames together in another app.  Too many thing can go wrong when rendering it is important to be able to stop and start were you left off.  

[masond1287]

So rather than rendering out a video in AVI format, would you suggest rendering the animation out as images and stitching them together using Movie Maker? I thought about utilizing a cloud service to render this video out, but unfortunately, with the confidentiality of the project/client, the only cloud that they would probably allow is Autodesk's, and they dont currently support 3ds max files for rendering using Autodesk 360.

At this point, I am definitely open to suggestions on how to proceed with the most fast and efficient process, until I can get all of the rendering settings locked into place for a good path forward.

Currently, I have the Autodesk Factory Design Suite Ultimate, so assuming I would have to use Windows Movie Maker to stitch the stills together? Even then, I would have 401 stills correct? Assuming that the number of stills for the video would be the equivalent of the number of keyframes in my animation?

[Anifex09]

since this is just a demo for a client you can render out a jpg sequence. I don't use Movie maker but I can suggest using Quicktime Pro. Its cheep and easy to use and can write out a high quality MOV from the image sequence. For future projects I would recommend Adobe After effects for compositing.

[Steve_Curley]

Yes, you would have one image per frame of the animation. Never played with Movie Maker but I have used VirtualDub which is free and works well for creating an AVI from a sequence.
Whichever you use, there are many reasons for not rendering direct to avi (except for a low-res "proof"). Want to change something for a few frames? Re-render the lot. Want to try a different CODEC? Re-render the lot. Had a power outage? Re-render the lot etc etc. Heck of a time waster that is. Stick to images, and don't use lossy formats like jpeg (except for a demo). Png, tif, tga should work fine.

[masond1287]

How do I need to set up my rendering settings to achieve individual image rendering settings like you are talking about. Would any one of you have the availability to do a goto meeting or something to walk me through how to set up my options and get me all prepped to hit "go"? I am on a really tight time crunch.

This isnt just an initial rendering for the client. They know what the end result will look like. But we are creating this animation to show our construction sequence from start to finish so they can get the big picture and know our process.

[Steve_Curley]

Simply select your preferred image format (png, tif etc) instead of avi. Max will render each frame with the basic filename and a frame number tacked onto it. So if you render with a filename of "ball" and a format of png you'll actually get "ball00000.png", "ball00001.png" and so on.
If they ask why the intermediate step of image files, explain to them like I did above. In the long run it can save a lot of time, especially with renders that can take hours per frame - you really don't want to be re-rendering them all the time.

[masond1287]

Thanks for the help everyone. Still have some adusting to do. Turned my rendering settings way down and was able to get it rendered out as a video. However, The video plays way way to fast in media player. Is this a setting in my rendering settings that I can adjust? I rendered out the animation at 10 frames per second. Anything less and the video gets all jittery.

[Steve_Curley]

10? Totally non standard. 24fps for film, 30fps for almost anything to be displayed on PC. Some things you can take liberties with, this isn't one of them.

[masond1287]

Wow, I havent even tried anything that high yet. 10 looks good, but I will try 24 for sure. How about as far as slowing the video down? When I replay it within the program, its a good speed, but when it is rendered out as a video, it is way too fast. Is this a rendering setting within my render setup?

[Steve_Curley]

No, it's due to the non standard framerate. Players will be expecting a standard rate, so having 10 frames instead of 30 means it will (probably) play back in 1/3 second instead of 1 second (per 10 frames). You just can't mess with that - it has to be rendered with a standard framerate. There are 3 on the Time Configuration Dialog - NTSC is 30, PAL is 25, Film is 24. Animation played at anything lower than 24 (if it will play back at the intended speed) will not play back smoothly - it will appear jerky. 24 fps is the lowest rate at which the human eye "blurs" successive images into apparently continuous motion.

[masond1287]

So I currently have it set to 24 now. If I render it out, what will my playback speed be in media player? I also rescaled my framerate, so now my frame count is 984 instead of 420something.

[Steve_Curley]

It should be correct, if MP correctly determines the rate. However, the number of frames should be 2.4 * what they were before - each 24 frames now covers the same time as 10 did originally, so 420 originally should be 1008. 420/10 = 42 seconds. 1008/24 = 24 seconds. You shouldn't have needed to change the number of frames (by rescaling) yourself - Max should have done it for you when you changed the rate.

[masond1287]

So does this look correct?

[Steve_Curley]

The rate is (Film) but the number of frames disagrees. If there was originally 420 frames at 10fps you now need 1008 frames at 24fps to give the same running time. Less frames = shorter running time = speeded up animation.

[masond1287]

Thanks Steve. I set the frame count to 1008, which should put my video at about 45 seconds through the renderer. Anything I am missing to get the finished product about the same time?

[Steve_Curley]

I don't think so - it's a standard rate so it should be ok. You could do a test render (perhaps at a lower resolution) of the first few second's worth of frames and check that the player says the correct time. When you render the final, you really should render to an image sequence - going direct to avi is fraught with danger (of a lot of wasted time if something isn't right).

[masond1287]

We have gone the render farm route, and will proably run the image frame render on it tonight. I wont be sending it to the render farm until I run some test renders on it first though.

[Steve_Curley]

Good plan - you need to know it's right before paying to have it all rendered.