speeding up rendering time?

[Anonymous]

Dear Autodesk community people,

Since a month of four i'm wokring with 3Ds Max 2016 and now the latest version 3Ds max 2017. I followed some courses for animating, but i'll get stuck at the render part/process. I want to try to make of lot animation 1080p high quality textures. But my workstation can't handle it all.

In short;
I'm looking for a faster way to render my animations. I'll tryed cloud-rendering well did not have a good experience with it.. I hit some buttons and pooff! all my money was gone.. i'm searching for a other solutions for rendering my animations. Do i have to buy big renderstations of 50.000 EUR?

Can somebody advice in this? I'm hole new in this rendering part..

Kind Regards,

Kevin Hannessen
Qimarox BV

[irishman_team_kilber]

there is no way to really speed up your animation everything need to be calculated and then rendered the amount of ram inside your computer is always a factor because max is a very memory intenive program, it all depends what else you have in your scene

what renderer are you using scanline, mental ray vray others?

the only way to get a faster render is add more memory into your motherboard

[JJWGallagher]

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@irishman_team_kilber wrote:

the only way to get a faster render is add more memory into your motherboard

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This isn't true at all. If you're using a CPU based render engine then the speed of your renders will be mostly based on your CPU. If you're using a GPU based render engine then the speed of your renders will be based on your GPU. RAM does help, especially with large scenes, but it's not the driving force behind render speeds.

It would be ideal for you to let us know what render engine you are using though, as that will affect the answer. Also what is your current hardware setup?

[dgorsman · Accepted solution]

From the attached image, I think its the ART renderer which should be CPU-based.  You're right system specs (which weren't included) are important here, both clock speed and number of available cores.  Other information that would help is how long it took, and how long the OP is expecting it to take (it very well could take a $10k computer if expectations are pushing reality, but a $2k should suffice for most users).  Sample scene that others could test might help as well

Render settings are something of a dark art - there is no "easy button" or check list to just make it work.  Not a good idea to plunk down money for time on a render farm without understanding what settings are necessary - they aren't a shortcut to avoid that.  They expect the purchaser to be aware of those, as well as confirming the desired results with test renders before committing.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis · Accepted solution]

Hello @Anonymous,

Some good insights in this thread.  I just wanted to add that if your frames are taking roughly 2 minutes at HD, you're not going to do much better than that with 99% of the render engines out there.  It's noisy though, and reducing that noise will of course make the renders take longer.  All in all those render times seem pretty good to me, but noisy.

Best Regards,

[leeminardi · Accepted solution]

I would encourage you to consider making use of clever texture and opacity maps to reduce the number of faces from the over 2 million your model now contains.  For example,  I suspect that you have modeled each roller of the conveyor belt as a cylinder with many faces. The conveyor belt could be easily and satisfactorily modeled as a plane with a material that makes use of an appropriate diffuse/bump/opacity map. What does the summary information data say about where all those faces are used?

~Lee 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

I just wanted to follow up here, any progress on your issue?  Were any of the replies here in this thread sufficient to answer your question?  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi all/everybody!,

Okay, so bottom line what you all say is.. is that if i buy a stronger Workstation with more CPU, GPU and RAM(memorychips) or that if i buy 4 worksation(computers) i cluster/connect these which each others, then my rendering process its not going any faster.. both of these options? I see these videos..

See links;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaCawECVHuo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q43AYbRirbA

Thanks in advance for your fast help and support you all!

Kind Regards,

Kevin Hannessen

My Workstation data: Windows 10 pro, v1.4 x64  Processor: Intel(R) CPU E5-1620 v3 3.50 GHz  16,0GB

[Anonymous]

Hi @irishman_team_kilber, I'm rendering with ART Render but sometimes also with iray because i heard that those were the best. VRay is also good they say but is not in my list.

I'm rendering on Windows 10 pro, v1.4 x64  Processor: Intel(R) CPU E5-1620 v3 3.50 GHz  16,0GB

Kind Regards, Kevin Hannessen!

[CAMedeck · Accepted solution]

If you are rendering with a GPU based render engine like Iray, you'll need to use a powerful (and likely expensive) graphics card.  Or four.  But, if you are rendering with a CPU based render engine (mental ray, V-Ray, ART) you can offload the render jobs to other computers.  In the case of animations, where you are rendering many frames, you can utilize Backburner and have multiple machines rendering the various frames (saving as an image sequence, not to AVI) which will speed things up considerably.  If you are doing high resolution images that take a long time to render, you can distribute the render job via Distributed Bucket Render (mental ray) or Distributed Rendering (V-Ray).  This allows you to render on your own machine, and use the CPU & RAM of other machines rendering concurrently.

In the case of rendering animations with Backburner, I've known people that watch eBay and purchase 2-3 year old workstations that may not be the fastest out there, but can be picked up at a reasonable price.  Then they can be added to an internal render farm and for the cost of a new, high-end workstation, you can have a farm of 6-8 machines that can run all day, every day.  There's no need for expensive video cards, monitors, etc.  Just a good CPU and enough RAM to handle the job.

[Anonymous]

Hello @Alfred.DeFlaminis

Yes, the threads were very helpful for answering most of the questions!

[Anonymous]

Hello @Anonymous.DeFlaminis
 
Yes, the threads were very helpful for answering most of the questions!
 
 
Thanks in advance!

Kind Regards,

Kevin Hannessen

[Anonymous]

Thanks Camedeck,

So i can't render with iray with more computers then?

Kevin

[darawork]

There does seem to be some mention of an 'iRay' renderfarm here: http://www.nvidia.com/object/iray-server.html

Also, You might be able to use an external GPU caddy unit to help out iRay, but you really need to use Thunderbolt to get a decent bandwidth. If you're ever looking to build a GPU rendering workstation in the future, look for a motherboard that can house a few GPUs on the board.

[darawork]

Iray-Server Beta (with support for nVidia Pascal type cards) released today: https://forum.nvidia-arc.com/showthread.php?15267-Iray-Server-2-1-Beta-for-Pascal-GPUs-available 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thanks for the update! When you are all set, please mark any/all of the posts that helped you with a solution.  I really appreciate it!  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hey Alfred,

As you see my new post on the forum subject. I bought a new graphic card(Nvidia Quadro P5000).

This is a start for the begin and then maybe later i will buy some computers for CPU  cores for Batch-rendering

And i will use Cloud-rendering for tough deadlines and when its very busy here at work.

Also this link helped me:

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/max-station/v9-tips-for-speeding-up-3ds-max--3ds-max-design

Thanks in advance!

Kind Regards,

Kevin Hannessen

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thanks for the update!  I really appreciate it.  Hope things are going well with the new toys!

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Has anyone thought change the program code to only run calculation on what you see in the view?

One way around this would be to have the ability to select the Renderable toggle on and off in the object properties in the animation. One could manually select everything by hand that would not need to render and tell to not render until a certain frame or frames.

I did a test. 

A single sphere took 7 sec at 10 frames

I then inserted a bunch of geometry that was out of sight in the view. It took over 10 min!

Just a thought. Maybe not possible.

[darawork]

Adobe have being doing this for years, and AD isn't primarily a graphics
company. Or is it? 🤔

Gpu acceleration is available in Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects...
Nearly the full suite.

But, we wouldn't want that sort of stuff. Seems complicated.