Hi!
I finally got to the body feathers part of the course, and suddenly it started to take forever to render! The preview viewport takes a couple minutes and slows down my whole computer, and the actual render takes /forever/. I think if I had let it finish it would have gone on for hours, I was already at an hour or two when I reached the point below.
Anything I can do to render faster? Or is this just normal for this course? I have a very modern computer with GeForce GTX 1070 and am using GPU rendering. I think Kent said at one point that a frame in the final animation only took him like 10 minutes to render, but mine is already taking much longer with no background. Maybe he does optimizations on the body feathers later.
Just want to make sure I'm not doing anything wrong that's ruining my render speed. Thanks!
Preview
Actual render, took an hour or so (Blender says 02:54:00 but I didn't think it took that long..)
Settings
that's a fairly high sample rate on render...
maybe try 250 to start with and see if there is much noise...
if so try 500...
if still noise maybe search for some denoising techniques...
if I understand correctly the time you mentioned is 2 min and 54 seconds?
hope this helps...
:D
I just tried and this render took 18 minutes on a single one of my GTX 1080's . It is the fully finished bird with all textures and materials. I set it to 1000 samples and the resolution was the full standard 1920x1080 px to try to match your similar setup, although it had a fully lit scene.
I was going to suggest that you played around with the direct and indirect clamping values and I noticed after the render that mine were both at 10 (not sure why, this seems to be what I had it set to when I rendered it a couple of years back) . Anyways, I know it doesn't solve your issue but atleast it maybe gives you something to compare too. There are lots of ways to reduce render times , such as clamping values, filter glossy values, light paths ect, I would do some lower resolution, and lower samlple tests to see if you can figure something out. Lastly, try different tile sizes for your GPU renders, as they can also make drastic differences. I know that for GPU renders, larger tile sizes are better , and smaller (such as 32x32, 64x64) for CPU. In the image I rendered, I used a tile size of 420x270 (1920/4 and 1080/4)
Good luck!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the response! The format was actually something like 02:54:00.00, so it was saying 3 hours. I almost didn't trust it, because it didn't seem like I was waiting that long for the render, but I must have lost track of time!
I'll try to tune it down to less samples, thanks for the help!
Hi Matthew,
Thank you! It's really nice to have other people on this site doing the same tutorials, so I can compare! I'll try adjusting some of those settings and see what happens.
Your bird looks great! Hopefully I'll get to that level of finished-ness soon, haha! I knew this course would be a ride but I'm amazed at how many hours I've put in just so far.
Does your computer tend to slow down during the rendering? Like, I can't even click around Blender's UI - maybe that's normal, since the GPU has to work so hard to finish the render.
I'll let you know how it goes. Happy CGing!
Yes it does, if you only have one GPU , then it will be devoting most of its power to rendering and thus your UI will slow right down. Personally , I have 4 GPU's , and these days , you can tell Blender which ones to use for rendering, so If I am at the computer while rendering, ill tell Blender to only use the other 3 GPU's and keep the display one free so I can continue to work, but if I can leave the computer to render , Ill set all 4.
It is a huge advantage having multiple GPU's if you are rendering a lot whilst you want to keep working on the computer.
Also , if you have any issues with the Piero course, give me a shout and ill see if I can help. My model is fully textured and rigged , although I have yet to animate it.
Good luck!
Hi Matt,
Good idea, maybe next time I buff up my computer I'll buy another GPU!
And thank you! You're advice has been very helpful so far, I appreciate it. :) It's nice to know I can message you if I get stuck.
Best wishes!
Hey Matt,
Thanks again for the advice before! It worked great. I got the below product in just 15 minutes by changing the tile size and the clamp. :) He mentions setting the clamp to 10 in the tutorial to fix artifacts in the eyes, so that's probably why you had yours set like that.
The below 15 minute render was only 50% of the size of the full 1920 x 1080. I also set samples down the 500. Unfortunately, scaling up the resolution really wiped out my GPU! See below.
When I set samples back to 1000, with a full 100% HD resolution, it took 1 hour 48 min. TT__TT Maybe 1000 samples really is just too high! It looks a lot better this way though, so too bad it takes so long.
Not sure if there's anything I can do to fix that, but your advice cut my render time down by a /lot/! I was using the default 16 x 16 tiles and that just did not work. So thanks so much for the help!
I can't think of what's causing mine to go slower on the same settings that you used... I have a lot of transparency involved on the edges of the feathers, so perhaps that takes longer to compute. If I figure it out I'll let you know, it's quite the puzzle!
render times are the big hold back for making this something easily done by the average user...
that is those of us who can't afford a render farm...
:D
