How long your render takes?

[tecsun]

I'm working on an interior walkthrough test finding a balance between quality vs render time, turn out the render time is too long even a single specular pass and it is really grainy. I don't even turn on the GI. Seriously how long you guys usually takes to render a single frame in animation?

What you guys think - 4 mins 49 sec (Q6600, 6GB RAM) for this render (was hoping 2mins+-, haha, am I too stingy on the render time and machine spec?):


Also, Alex Roman mentioned that his latest Silestone commercial used 1-10 for image sampler and brute force... It seems the render time is too expensive to me (well Alex if you see my thread please help ^_^).

Alright... I could be wrong keep seeking for lower render time, if the render time is normal please hit me hard and I will simply go withdraw money and buy new machinessss. T_T

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Some time ago I was working on a commercial shoot. 6h per 720p render frame. 2k frames to go

Id say 5 min per what u got should be fine...

[tecsun]

wow! 6 hours! That costs about 51293.3usd using Rebusfarm cost calculator. I guess if you need extra render pass that will consume quite a lot of time too, how you gonna balance your budget with that (if you don't mind to share)? We don't seems to have that kind of budget here, especially when we need to deal with currency conversion.. that cost a lot.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Renderfarm ? We didnt use it back then and I would never use it... 10x q6600 oc 3ghz + few dual quad workstations did the job... By now they got their own server farm... (I'm not with them anymore)

for £10k u can make around ... 10x quad 4 ghz 12gb ram... its not that expensive if u ready to tweak in hardware for a bit, instead of buying ''pro'' premade server nodes...

The key is to optimize scene cheat and talk with client about render costs, sometimes if they rly on heat u can just say, if u want the job done u pay for render farm service... and u just send them the bill from rebusfarm if u decide to use it..

Where u guys from ?

[tecsun]

That's a lot of machines working on the job. We're from Malaysia, getting 10x q6600 (now would be i7) with the spec you mentioned will cost around RM60k - 70k here, which consider quite a lot here together with all the licenses fee. It's not like our neighbour country - Singapore, if you got 2k salary and save 100% you're getting a machine in 1 month, but if you got 2k here in Malaysia, you gotta spend 2 month to buy a same machine.

That's why our work priority is always down to optimize the scene to get the best render time sacrificing a bit of here & there (there come my 2 mins expectation, hehe~). Anyway, you're right, next job I should bill them... cross finger I can get them sign the budget.

btw, you running your own biz now?

[add101]

scene does look quite big and complicated/detailed...
What settings do you have? Brute force and 1-10 for AA will give a nice quality, but will take a lot longer to render.

the settings i usually adjust to speed up renders for previews are: Adaptive DMC settings lower. maybe 1/2. GI settings lower. DMC sampler noise theshold higher. maybe up to 0.1 or even 1 for early previews.
for final renders you want to go a lot higher, but how high depends on the scene/project/client/ and what hardware you have available.

also, displacement and some other effects can slow scene renders a lot.

that time doesn't sound bad if you're rendering to HD size, i would have though a bit less without gi, but it looks like there are quite a lot of lights and reflective geometry, so that time doesn't sound very long.
you could try optimise geometry on chandeliers if they have a high polycount. not sure how much difference it would make, but if they are instanced or easily selectable shouldn't take too long to test.

more machines are good i've got aq6600 as a render slave. looking forward to an i7 (or some other 2011 cpu..), will double render farm speed (i7 920 is about double the render speed of Q6600/8400) just need some budget. next year sometime.
nice scene.

[add101]

how many lights are there in the scene?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

can u upload scene to server maybe? I'd have a look at it in free time...

And no I dont own my on bizz, but I'm on to something now, I'll start it in few weeks I hope hehe

[tecsun]

add101 -

not very complicated scene, used a lot of instance, no displacement, quite a lot of lights in there. For the specular pass I used no GI. But for render, I tried Irr + LC, the result is bad with Irrmap set to -4(min) -2(max). Then I re-render using the prepass method in 1.5 help file, some strange noise appear on the wall on the left although it won't flicker (guess is the interp. sample = 5 caused the problem?) and I got serious flickering on chandeliar (now it rendered 40mins+- on i7 930):


When you said Brute force, do you mean Brute Force + LC? I gonna try that out later. Wish the time is acceptable.

agree with you, gotta get more machine. I'm looking at Dual i7 but seems it is not available? Dual Xeon sound good, but quite pricey... Maybe I will end up getting i7 950. Wish I can build blade server.


DADAL -

So you would post somewhere the WIP?

I will ask my partner whether he mind me to post the scene up... If he doesn't I will post you the link.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

up to u, from my side id just optimize it the way id render it and send back to u, see if that helps ur production....

Server? all u have to do is

Rack case 1-4U
Standard gamer motherboard
i7 of ur choice = oc minimum 4 ghz
12-24 gb ram
some hdd to run
some GFX (keep in mind future expansion to GPU rendering..)

and u done, its not that hard... spend 100-200£ on some old scrap pc, open it tear apart, put back together if ill work u ready its quite easy... thats for cheap server farm...

More expensive farm..

Xeon ONLY if you go for EVGA OC motherboard, and 2x 6/8 core xeon OC to 4 ghz...

All come down to pretty much electricity bill and how much space u got... U can either have 16 ghz of power in 1 case or 32.... simply speaking...

[Crayox13]

Can you guys post some prices and how you charge for the animation? I mean how are animations generally priced? I know it depends on the details, but per frame or second? Also, maybe you could post also, where you are from.

[tecsun]

DADAL -

Back~ was very busy with production work. My partner's prefer not send the maxfile, sorry. We ended up with prepass each frame method, about 4 hours on i7 930 and 6 hours++ on Q6600 (included prepass render time).

For the server, I'm looking at Intel i7 2600, the 32nm processor. It seems it has been leaked out to the market before its actual launch date in Malaysia. We saw some shop start selling at around i950... looks very attractive.