Rendering Questions?

Deke

I'm new at using Daz Studio for animation and gearing up for a project. I'm getting some great result with lighting and use of Ueberenvironment. It takes about 4 hours for a 3 second shot to render at 1920x1080. Some questions:

--any way to cut down that time?
--I plan on comping shots in AE. Would it be better to skip the motion blur in rendering here and do that in AE?
--I'm working on a mac tower I got just for Daz work.
--I've heard about Octane, but understand it only works on a PC
--any great tips on an idea rendering set-up? Video card? Software?

Thanks.

Jaderail

The Simple answer is do not use Uber in Animation. Uber lighting is one of the highest Render times that can be used in DAZ Studio. Even the AoA Advanced Ambient light would be better than UE in DAZ Animation. I personally use All Default hand created lighting just to avoid Shader based lighting because of the render times involved.

Deke

I see what your saying. I only stumbled upon Uber as it was in a lighting present in a tutorial. And the results were pretty amazing. The with and without Uber is night and day…or should I say cartoon and photo-real. I'll explore Advanced Ambient light as an alternative.

NoName99

dkutzera said:

I

--any way to cut down that time?
--I plan on comping shots in AE. Would it be better to skip the motion blur in rendering here and do that in AE?

Thanks.

Hi dkutzera

I like to apply motion blur in AE, it not only cuts down render time, but it's nice to apply the motion blur on top off additional compositing.

Another way I occasionally save time is by rendering out of Daz in layers. I often will render out characters and objects that are the focus of the shot on their own layer with my render settings cranked as high as my computer can handle. I will then render the foreground and background on separate layers with lower quality at a much faster render time.

Also, if your camera inside of Daz is locked down, you can always render out the background as a still image with your render setting cranked high, since it's only one frame it shouldn't take long.

I will then import all the layers into AE, and apply a Camera Lens Blur or Box Blur effect to the foreground and background layers to simulate a depth of field.

Other than saving render time, it's nice to be able to apply fx to layers individually.

Hope this helps!!

Deke

When you lower your render settings for background layers, are you decreasing the size of the image? Or is this some other adjustment? I suppose a background could be rendered at 1080x720 instead of 1920x1080 and simply enlarged in After Effects. It is great to use blur in AE to simulate depth of field. The shots really come alive when that's done.

NoName99

Yes, That's the basic idea.

I usually render the backgrounds out at 1280x720, with a shading rate of 1.00, and Shadow Samples of 8.

As you guessed, I then increase the size to 1920x1080 inside of AE. Since I'm applying a blur to the background, the lower quality is insignificant.

I do the same thing with foreground objects as well

I should mention that if your scene involves overlapping shadows, this technique will require adjustments, and in some cases it may be better to just render the entire scene out at high quality when you can, like overnight or while your away from your computer.

That said, I do prefer to render out in layers as often as possible.

NoName99

Just to piggyback what I meant by overlapping shadows in my post above this:

This is a Still Image of an Establishing Shot from an animation I did.

Now that I'm scrutinizing it as a single frame, I'm noticing some minor problems with it, but as a full animation they aren't noticeable.

In any case, Genesis is the primary focus of the shot, with TyRex in the foreground.

I could have rendered everything out on separate layers and "faked" the ground shadows in AE, but I loved the overlapping shadows on the ground, so I had to render out the entire shot as a single image sequence.

I also enabled The Daz Cameras Depth of Field and keyframed it to stay focused on Genesis while the camera pushed in toward her.

Daz cameras Depth of Field renders EXTREMELY SLOW, so I rendered the shot overnight while I was asleep.

When I woke up, it was still rendering, lol!

If I remember correctly, it took about 12 hours or so to render.

Anywho.........what was my point?

Oh yeah, shadows.............if a shot has heavy shadows that fall on the foreground and background, rendering separate layers may not be practical, but if the shadows are not visible in the shot, separate image sequences will definitely speed up the render times.