After doing my previous BB8 render, I got an itch to try to turn it into a short animation. This is the first animation I have ever made. Except for some obviously glaring mistakes, that I didn't realize until after rendering (floating in the air for a keyframe here and there, or head being detached from the body which fortunately can't really been seen from the camera angle), I'm quite happy with it. Oh yes, I added some sound effects, just to try it out. So I was able to get some experience with that as well.
Render Time: 3 hours
Render Hardware:
- Machine 1: GTX 1080
- Machine 2: Generic AMD CPU
I used the CrowdRender addon, which can be found at: www. crowd-render.com. This allows you to connect multiple computers. It's still in early development, but if you have a bunch of computers at home, you can easily connect all of them to minimize the time it takes to render. And it's free!
At first I thought I would set the samples to 500, wanting to get a crisp animation... but after starting the rendering, the estimated time was about 10 hours! So I did test renders and settled for 125 samples. Anything under and the image started to get grainy. I turned on clamp indirect and also denoising. Oh, and the tile size was set to 256*256 for the machine with the GPU and 32*32 for the CPU machine. I tried different sizes and felt it was a good average. Again, I had heard of the the Tile Size add-on. Not sure why I didn't try it. Maybe just too excited about finishing my first animation, I guess.
I will definitely check out the links, and hopefully I can improve on my render times in the future. I really appreciate the help! And this whole time I felt so good about getting it down to "just" 3 hours. :)
Great job, Markus! Wow 3 hour render... how many samples did you use and what tile size? I'm presently using one of the daily builds of Blender 2.79 (2.79.6) which includes the awesome CPU+GPU render ability that Blender 2.8 uses but is sadly missing from 2.79b official build. No longer is 256x256 tiles needed for gpu rendering... now you can set tile sizes to 32x32 and let the cpu help the gpu. Makes a huge difference. Enable in File > User Preferences > System > Cycles Compute Device > CUDA and check both the gpu and cpu as devices. :-) I think the clamp direct and clamp indirect settings can help too, allowing you to use less samples to achieve cleaner renders and thus lower render times.
Older but excellent article by Andrew Price: https://www.blenderguru.com/articles/7-ways-get-rid-fireflies
This is a video showing about some basic render optimizations, although it doesn't cover that new gpu + cpu feature in the experimental builds. Grant also doesn't mention that the Auto Tile Size add-on has a little settings icon on the right which lets you change the default power of 2 tile setting (it's set to 256x256 by default), which is why the addon picked the tile size it did. With the experimental version of Blender, you would set it to target 32x32 though. Sorry if I rambled too much... but as one who spent lots of time trying to optimize my own renders, I feel for anyone who has to suffer through long render times. :-)
https://cgcookie.com/tutorial/uber-fast-rendering-optimizations-in-blender-cgc-weekly-3
Very good job Markus. I watched in slowmo and am very impressed.
@bowse Thanks! Many of BB8's movements are quite easy, as he doesn't really have any limbs and so on. And that's kind of why I chose this as my first animation. But as a beginner, I was surprised how easy it was to make BB8's movements too robotic, to the point where it didn't look believable at all. And also how extremely difficult it can be to give him some lifelike personality.