How can you optimise MR to Render animations in jpeg.

[ShadowDash]

I want to use Mental Ray in my animation videos. However its a lot slower than scanline. I render the animations into images and there are lots of items like trees, building, cars etc, so they take some time. Especially with the MR Pro Materials. I do use a render farm,however rendering lots of images can take a long time, im not rendering one image, it s a bunch of images that make up an animation. However still is there any kind of settings that can be changed to get it to render faster while still looking pretty decent.

[Geek]

Hey!


Sure is.There is a hole bunch of settings,defining the look of an image and of course,it's render time.I think that rendering and render optimization itself are equally important."What do i have to do to make it render faster..."-well,first off ,start from revising sample rate.In 3ds max:mental Ray Renderer-->Processing-->Diagnostics tab.Then,once you find the best min max sample rates go to "sample" contrast.It's called "Spatial Contrast" in 3ds max.Then you might want to diagnose the raytracing algorithm(BSP,large BSP,hierachical grid).These setting can be found in "Raytrace Acceleration-->Method" tab.If you use Global Illumination (along with Final Gather) then it's another big part of render to be checked.Shadows,the way that they are built might also play significant role in "how long will it take":).So as you can see,there is a lot of stuff to fix and revise,depending on what your final image must look like and,of course,what "long render time" term means to you.

[Shimrod]

Side point : I don't know if you think the same, but it seems to me that jpegs created by max are very blurry, compared to other formats like tiff ou tga.
I never use jpeg as output format.

[ShadowDash]

Well thanks. Right now my render times at about average are withen a minute, So maybe like 50 secs or 40 secs. Which that may seem good, however rendering over 1000 or even 2000 images can take a long time. I have a feeling im might not get any faster. I have about 7 computers on the render farm, About 4 have Quad Processors. I believe i am using global illumination. Im definitly using final gather which also definitly slows things down. So i'll play with those settings and see what i can do.

Shimrod, i never thought about that. I have always used jpegs and they never seemed blurry. Also i import the jpegs in to adobe premiere, so im not sure if tiffs will work. Also jpegs are smaller and since i will have like 1000 or 2000 images i need to conserve space. However i will try the tiffs and see if i get any improvement in quality.

[ShadowDash]

Oh im sorry, i checked the rendering times and its actually takes from 2 mins to 3 mins. And final gather is really main part of which slows things down. It will be stuck on one paticular part with a lot of small objects in it for like 40 secs.

Also i went to the mentalray render-->processing-->diagnostics tab. But there no settings there only a visual check box for enableing sampling rate visual.

I saw in the render tab on the top is setting for spatial contrast and sampleing rate.

Is there anytips on optimiseing final gather. Is it even neccessary. It seems to do a lot of the shading.

[peengoh]

And final gather is really main part of which slows things dow

what are your final gathering settings? are you storing and using FG maps every N frames? are you storing the photon solution? to improve render times generaly i render in passes.

cheers

[vancliff]

As it was said make the fg calculation before rendering and you will save a lot of time. I always do it. In nth frame i put 5 and that make like 600 frames from 3000 for the calculation. Store also the photon maping. You can use medium final gathering for the calculation that would take like 3 hours for 600 frames. After that my renders normally take 19 seconds in a Phenom x4 black edition system with 8 gig of ram. I use 1/4 for antialiasing and box filter.