Practical/cost-conscious rendering tips?

[CrispyDuck]

Hi,

I've been working on a short film and have been both looking forward to rendering and dreading it due to the costs. The test frames are looking great, but I'm now at the point where I have to optimise and cut corners cleverly. I used to work more as a freelancer and I'd have a lot of other artists offering tips for rendering but now I work more independently, mostly in the arts rather than VFX or animation. I'm also a student now, doing a PhD about CGI simulation and art, so I'm not immersed in a production environment anymore. I'm probably missing out on some current best practices or cheeky hacks. Anyway, that's the background, the more concrete questions I have are:

Fly-through animation - My scene has an animated camera flying through a very detailed interior environment with a lot of lights and light emitting materials. Am I right in thinking that with Hash Map lightcache I don't need to rely on precalculating the lightcache or enabling fly-through mode?

Lots of lights - I have about 100 lights, and many LightMtls to simulate a TV studio interior. I'm using Adaptive light evaluation with a cap of 25 lights. I'm wondering if this is enough, if raising that number is recommended? I'm also wondering how adaptive light evaluation works with a fly-through animation - if the lights being evaluated are constantly changing, will there be glitches in the scene illumination?

Physical camera DOF - I love in-camera DOF, but the additional render time is going to bankrupt me so I'll settle for a Zdepth pass. Anything I need to remember? Any plugin suggestions for After Effects? I'll probably also spit out a velocity pass for motion blur too.

VRay Lens Effects / Bloom and Glare - This has been really important in my scene - I have a lot of studio lights shining into the camera and it's been super useful to instantly preview the look of a final render in the VFB. But I'm unsure whether this adds an overhead to my render when I'm going for 5500 frames, and if it's worth deferring lens flare effects to comp as a way of saving time/money on the render? In which case, will doing the lens flare in After Effects look as good as in the VFB? Will both methods work off the same pixel intensities?

Denoiser - I think I'll have to have to work with a relatively high sampling threshold, something like 0.020, and use VRay's denoiser on top of that to clear up the graininess. It'll be the first time I've used this workflow, any tips? Can I go higher that 0.020?

Large scene size - my scene is 1.5 GB, and actually it's generally been OK to work with as I'm pretty organised with layers, referencing and naming etc. But would it benefit render times to use more VRay proxies? I don't have a lot of dense meshes, it's just the general amount of geo I have that's bulking my scene up.


I realise there's a lot of questions here - feel free to answer some, all or none, or just flame me, your choice.

I'm just trying to replicate the informal pre-render conversation I used to have with a Lead Artist or TD at work. But there we would have a farm and if a render went wrong we'd just cancel it, no money lost. Not quite the same when you're rendering on ChaosCloud or any other farm.

Attached are a couple of frames for context.

Thanks!

[GeorgeSafiArch]

Hi Crispy,

Just a suggestion on using ChaosCloud.

I am not sure how much you have used it, but it is a great service and really makes animations seamless.

For me the best part is how easy it is to upload a giant file like yours then make small tweaks and only need to upload the little changes that were made instead of the whole file again.

I personally never do animations, but one day I decided to give ChaosCloud a test and wound up doing a fun 10 second interior using my own cash just because it was so easy to take my scene from a high resolution final quality still render (8000x4000px at all high settings VERY low noise) to a 1080p HD video of reasonable settings and acceptable noise with a bit of testing.

Because of how easy it is to test things on ChaosCloud with the simple export and the fact that it only uploads your tweaks and not the full 1.2gb every time, my suggestion is to try to make full use of the frame step test method.

Render at your full resolution of choice (1080p? 4k? not sure what you are going for) maybe 220 step frames, that should give you 25 frames.

Render it how you would ideally want, with as few optimisations so you get the quality you would really be looking for.

Then re-render those 25 frames with all of the cost cutting shortcuts you can think of.

Compare the two.

This should give you a really good idea of what you can and cant live without as well as the render times and costs involved.

It will also help you to figure out any bugs or lighting issues.

I would suggest doing multiple 25 frame tests until you are happy.

Provided there is nothing fancy at certain points in your animations each frame on Chaos renders very consistently. So if 10 frames cost $10, 100 frames will cost $1000 (not always but I have found this to be much more consistent than other farms).

In the end 25, 50, 75 or even 100 test frames will be very expensive to render but it is a worthwhile investment if you plan to render 5500 in the end

Hope that this suggestion was not too obvious.

The main takeaway from my babbling is that CC makes it much easier to test things because of the easy upload so it will best to make use of this advantage to answer your own questions, if no one can give you clarity on them.

[CrispyDuck]

Hi George,

Yup! I've been using ChaosCloud and was really impressed with how minor changes to my scene file don't necessitate another full upload, there's no other farm that does that and I've tried a few over the years. And I think we're on the same wavelength regarding test frames - I usually do a lot of frame step tests. Thanks for the suggestions!

Crispy

[GeorgeSafiArch]

That's great Crispy,

Sorry for the obvious answer which you have clearly already tried.

Just wasnt sure if you had experimented with ChaosCloud specifically yet.

Anyway good luck. Hopefully some animation gurus can give you better advice on your specific questions!