I'm rendering out a 1920 x 1080 animation that is 4.5 billion polys and is 28 seconds at 24 fps. It is telling me this will take 15 days. Forgive me because I am new at this but does that sound like a resonable render time? (i7 2.8GHz vue 8.5 win7 gforce 9800)

I have also gotten the impression that most of the people on this site are rendering stills as opposed to animations. Most of my questions will be dealing with animations so is there a better resource for me?

that is probably a reasonable time to expect unfortunately.   you might be lucky and get it down a bit if some of the frames are less complex, but it also might go the other way.

Not sure that theres any other real site thats just for animations, i think theres a fair few animators here though, mazak being one of them.

It's a long time but I'm rendering out in an image sequence so if it crashes I don't hang myself, also I can check the frames and start and stop the render as needed. My scene is pretty much consistent so the render times for each frame should stay mostly the same

thats good to hear :D

28 seconds per frame is very fast. There is no way around it. If you have more than one machine, you could use network rendering, or use a professional render farm (like Ranch render farm who specializes in Vue)

nah, 24 frames per second over 28 seconds isnt it? so 672 frames, about 12 hours per frame i guess.

Quote - nah, 24 frames per second over 28 seconds isnt it? so 672 frames, about 12 hours per frame i guess.

A bit over 30 minutes per frame you mean, right?

And I agree, that is pretty fast for such a large render size.

TD

Yes a bit over 30 mins a frame on final setting. I think render farm is out of the question as I have poser animations inside this animation.

 on Ultra it came to something like 960 hours...so i decided not to go that route

Quote - Yes a bit over 30 mins a frame on final setting. I think render farm is out of the question as I have poser animations inside this animation

When i was still using a render farm I had Poser animations running inside Vue animations wihout issue.

I thought they couldn't do that...I guess I need to find out more about that. I guess I would provide them the pz3 and the obj and the vue file?

Always optimize render settings for EACH final rendering you do, folks, you often find each one has different issues :)

My tutorial on that

http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/48.html

and that is a HUGE size for an animation, why the heck do ou need it so big? No offence, it's just way beyond the norms ever needed for typical animation use!

Hm, what you could try is doing the animations at half the size then using Genuine Fractals or similar, to icnrease their size in postwork, my art rig is dead so I can't chekc if my copy of genuine fractals does batch filing which would be required really, or a lot of patience!

And if you did that you'd need to chekc there was no flickering/loss of quality on the animations.

Agree with silverblade, here. Never ever use preset render settings. They are either too low or too high, but never quite right.

Agree with silverblade and Bruno, do make some usersettings that'll suit your needs.

If the Poser animation dynamics becomes an issue, you could try importing it to DAZ studio and export the animation as COLLADA. I've done so, it works.

haha, oh dear, swedish maths again :D

Silverblade,

Thanks for your tutorial and I will do that next time...I'm too far into this one to start over. It's basically a river/forest scene for my movie...lots of trees and reflections.

 I started with this for the base:

http://www.cornucopia3d.com/purchase.php?item_id=5477

his user settings at the resolution i needed would have put it at over 900 hours. I took it down to the lowest usable preset and probably could have reduced it further. Adding motion blur etc in post.

Maybe it's my animations and objects that are adding to the time as I didn't try rendering his animation alone and see the times.

30 min it's excelent, with quality I am rendering it's very good if I have one frame in 30 hours. It's why render farm good idea.

Volter

well, you can adjust texture AA on each object now, which should help a lot :)

ie poser folk, or other major item, large in the scene, up close, or of extreme detial (say a really complex rugged sharp mountain) do need a lot of quality, texture AA etc, but many other things do not
lot of tweaking you can get really good renders, 1068x1050 (my fave resolution) out in 3 to 8 hours, depending, >8 hour ones usually are so long because of volumetrics enclosing the scene (like a metacloud used to create a fog bank, or the nebula my space scene was in that I used to make the tutorial)
thats on a 3 year old quad core