Rendering time saver idea

[Anonymous]

This may be too obvious but what if the only geometry that rendered was only the geometry that is in the view?

In other words all scene geometry not in the active view would not render. This would drastically decrease the render times.

Now I realize were seeing as a finish render is just what we see in the scene however  the program is calculating everything that is not in the scene.

I have tested this. I rendered 10 frames of just an animated ball.

I then inserted a bunch of geometry  that was out of the view.

the render times went from 7 sec for 10 frames to 510 sec for one frame.

[dgorsman]

What about reflected light?  i.e. if there is something very red, just out of frame, and it has a relatively hard/reflective surface, there would need to be red light "bounced" to that animated ball.  Even worse, if it comes in to frame later in the animation the ball suddenly gets a reddish color to it.  And that's to say nothing of highly reflective surfaces.

I'm sure there's *some* version of this in play already with the more advanced renderers, but as in the above example it can get rather complex.

[Anonymous]

I understand what you are saying @dgorsman however if we had the ability to turn on and off the renderability of out of vew objects in our animation it would still be an advantage I believe. In my opinion I would not need objects in another room reflecting in the current room. By nature reflectivity and or lights can not go thru walls correct? I agree with what your saying however not all cases in my opinion would support this.

[Anonymous]

I am so confident this will be worth it that i am going to try something. I am going to save a few copies of my file. Each copy will only open doors as I enter that room. Just prior to the door opening i will open that file and turn on the render ability of  the objects in that room and turn off the render ability of the objects in the room I just left (after I have entered that room and closed the door behind me). It will be time consuming however by far less time to do the overall renders. If I had the ability to turn on and of the render ability by key frames within the same file I would not need to consume drive space with redundant files.

[dgorsman]

A thought does occur to me.  While we as humans can look at something and say "that does/doesn't need to be considered" software must compute what is/isn't out of view.  So the extra time you're seeing for the added objects may not be time for rendering, but the time needed to compute whether or not they should be rendered.

[Anonymous]

Now that's a good point! And well put I might add.

Too bad the code couldn't just treat the none rendered geometry as none existent so it would not need to calculate whether or not it was needed. Here is what i am doing now because even with the rendering turned off with it just being there bogs my system down to  much to get anything done.

I turned my one file into 8 files. Each file has geometry deleted. Its a big pain if I change something.

I would like to know if the pro's do stuff like this or do they just have super fast systems and dont worry about it?

 

[dgorsman]

At least in some aspects, the pro's don't worry about it because they're usually sending heavy lifting to the farm.  Their workstations are high end, but built for day-to-day operations rather than rendering.

"Oh yes, the render of that dog is gone.  We... sent it to the farm.  Don't worry, it's happy there with all the other renders!".