Rendering one Frame of Caminandes taking over an hour and half

I bought the Caminandes DVD and I tried rendering the animation at HD resolution.

Just one frame is taking over 1 and half hours to render.


Now I have 12 GB of RAM and while rendering it is only using 2 GB.

How do I make the speed of render fast, other then trying to join more cpus in a network.

Can Blender use both CPU and GPU to render instead of only relying on one?

While rendering my cpu and GPU is giving temperature of 85 and 90 degrees.

This is my config

Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i7 950 @ 3.07GHz 48 °C
Bloomfield 45nm Technology
RAM
12.0GB Triple-Channel DDR3 @ 539MHz
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. X58A-UD7
Graphics
E2040 (1600x900@60Hz)
E2040 (1600x900@60Hz)
2047MB NVIDIA Quadro 4000 (NVIDIA)
1023MB NVIDIA GeForce GT 520 (XFX Pine Group)

Can I try adding more graphic cards to speed up the render or make Blender utilize all 8-12 GB of RAM for rendering?

Any suggestions?

regards

Sunny

Are you by any chance using a 32-bit version of Blender?

I am not sure how do I know which version I am using?

The splash screen in help of blender is not showing whether it 64 x or not.

I am downloading the latest 2.71 64bit just to be sure

How do I configure memory usage in render palette or user settings?

You are rendering a production shot, furry Character, motion blur, lots of textures…and in Full HD. This rendertime is to be expected, especially since your CPU (i7 950) is already about 5 years old.
Also, don’t worry about the memory usage, more memory usage does not mean faster rendertime, it’s rather the opposite. :wink:

The only thing you can do, is to simplify the scene (remove assets, reduce subsurf level, less hair particles…)

While the Caminades guys didn’t push things to Hollywood extremes in all honesty a movie like Caminades isn’t meant to be rendered on a single computer. I got the USB but never attempted to render a frame but I doubt my render times will be any better.

So if I have to make such short movies what kind of set-up does I require? Can you please give me an approx system configuration list for one or two computers?

Quite frankly the setup I bought that time was meant for making animation movies but I understand more CPU is required than RAM.

So does Blender handles network rendering? How exactly do I connect 2-3 computers to render fast with blender?

Complex animation is usually handled by render farms. Here`s a tutorial from CGCookie on how to set one up: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/08/09/setting-up-a-render-farm/

You could also use some 3rd party renderfarms like raypump.com or render.st

Thank you that link is very interesting. I thought I had to buy 2-3 computers with monitors to create the render Farm.

If I am running windows 7 on my main setup do I need to have windows for the render farm or I can still use linux with the VPN?

I am In India and using 3rd party render clouds will be very expensive. Maybe I will use them for the final rendering.

Well the render farm link on CG cookies is saying, more the RAM better for rendering?

  • RAM (6x): The more the merrier when it comes to rendering. This Corsair 16 GB 2-stick combination fits best in my budget.

I think the easiest Way to render something over network is to load the Blenderfile on all your machines and then set your Qutput Directory to the same networkdrive for all the Computers and check Placeholders.

Instead of buying mutliple machines just for rendering, its probably cheaper if you use a renderfarm(assuming you are not rendering animations through the whole year). You could also ask friends to help you once your animation is finished, to get it done faster.

If you want to use CPU and GPU at the same time, you could start 2 instances of Blender with the same method as described above but on a single machine. But keep in mind that bigger Scenes may consume too much ram for your graphics card. You can take a look at the CPU/GPU benchmark threads and then try to render these scenes on your machine, to get an idea if its worth to upgrade a few parts of your machine.

More RAM is useful for rendering, but not all of it is used all of the time and it does not necessarily produce a major speedup. A less than optimal amount of RAM can cause a slowdown however.

Think of it like these energy drinks that claim they have “Vitamin B12 for energy!” This claim is actually nonsense. B12 does not produce energy in the human body. Only sugar does that (and fat and carbs and whatnot that get converted to sugar). A deficiency in vitamin B12 however can cause you to feel tired. Energy drink commercials simply make the contrapositive claim: since too little B12 can cause a lack of energy, more B12 must make more energy! They can get away with this because of poor regulation of health claims, but that’s off topic.

The point is that RAM in rendering is similar to this claim. The more the merrier, but it’s not actually going to make your renders go any faster than your computer can calculate. Too little RAM on the other hand will definitely slow you down.

So having 8-12 GB Ram will be sufficient rather than having 16 GB for each cabinet in the farm?

Totally depends on your project. During the production of Tears of Steel we couldn’t use some machines in the Blender Institute for rendering because they only had 8 GB of RAM and wouldn’t render certain shots with lots of geometry, textures and footage.

Ok then I will buy such motherboards which can have upgrades for RAM but Max 16 GB will be enough right?

My current sytem has upgrade max limit of 24 GB and with the new 8 GB RAM sticks I could probably upgrade to 48 GB, but will that be necessary for the main machine? or I can just do with 24 GB?

It looks like it will be a long time until you need to worry about using these levels of RAM.

The more RAM you have, the more complex scenes you`ll be able to render. The more CPUs you have, the faster rendering of the said scenes.

So basically CPU or GPU = speed of rendering

RAM = complexity of your scenes - textures, geometry, etc.

RAM will not speed up your renders, it enables you to make more complex scenes.

Great, by then I will probably buy a new system only.

For the Farm CPU, should I get 4 Cores or 8 Cores?

For the time being I will only setup 2 machine in the farm and then upgrade as and when I need to render long hours of animation.

Right now the idea is to render only short trailers and 30 second ad movies.

As I understand then for rendering the more cores/threads, the better. Thats why the CGCookie guys went for AMD. Correct me if Im wrong.

My problem is while I am rendering with Blender ( whether CPU or GPU) and also with Vue ( which has only CPU support) temps of both my GPU and CPU are going over 85-90 degrees.

Now in this condition I am unable to do any other work while rendering is going on. It will put extra load on both the components making them unstable in long run. I am basically tied down, because while rendering is going on I cannot do anything and high quality renderings take hours for both the software.

So another machine is required just to continue rendering while I keep working on my current machine.

The point is should I buy another machine and setup the render farm with that or build a render farm as shown in the link above and connect with my current setup?

I will not be buying complete 6 machines for the farm, I will start with one or two and then proceed to get more depending upon how much high end and lengthy rendering is required. But the link above gave me a great idea to save enough space in my room which is small anyways.