I had heard of Blender before, and I knew that it is a 3D production tool, so I was really amazed when, while I was looking for a (free) video editing tool, I discovered that Blender could also do that!
I decided to use it and all was fine until I also decided to create a clip with my name in 3D (or anything I could do). After following the steps in this tutorial [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV43xNQDOFs&index=8&list=WL ] I managed to create one.
The problem is on the rendering times. Although Blender starts nicely and renders each frame at an average of 2 minutes at the beginning, after some time (several hours) it takes more that 30 minutes to render each one. What am I doing wrong? What can I do to reduce the render times? I noticed that it starts the slowing down after all of my RAM has been used and then it starts using the SSD (the pagefile maybe?). At the same time at the start of the render the CPU is working at 100% and after the memory fills CPU usage drops to under 10% and the SSD starts working like crazy (maybe the pagefile?)
Hi, it is really hard to say without he file but you can upload files < 30 MB on pastall > http://www.pasteall.org/blend/
You need to have 10 posts in forum to attache any files here.
8 GB are a lot but can be reached easy in Blender with high settings in Subsurf, big textures, arrays and particles.
Are you maybe on a 32 Bit OS?
For some reason I can’t upload the file @ pasteall… it says upload failed…
Anyway, the scene I have is just a text, transformed in a mesh, which isn’t rendered at the end, a particle system for making smoke coming from inside the letters and a force field moving from one side to the other. So, no textures and no subsurf (even though I don’t know what the later is…) The os is Win 7 64bit.
At the start of your animation there is probably less smoke on Screen then later on - that explains increasing rendertimes. If the Scene doesn´t fit into RAM anymore at some point it is very likely to take much longer to render.
Maybe decreasing the number of particles(or their lifetime) or the Resolution on the smoke domain would help to lower the needed amount of RAM.
Thanks! I thought about that too. But I left it as it was and since there were only about 20 frames more left, I stopped it and used it as is. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post a Youtube link here (to show off - it was the first ever thing I did with Blender =) )
Thanks anyway, I’ll keep that in mind for the 2nd time I do something!
Quick question… Rendering output to an image sequence? Or directly to video? That can make a difference.
If you’ve been rendering directly to video, try rendering the frames as an image sequence instead and use the VSE to turn those image files into movie strips when done. Not only less system resources needed at any given time by splitting those steps, but if animation rendering is interrupted for some reason it’s possible to pick up where you left off - as where direct to video doesn’t allow that.
Other than that, volumetric smoke is an “expensive” effect. I didn’t know I had inadequate CPU cooling up until I tried it. (Games and such never taxed it that hard.) Depending on settings used it will take a while. Lower some of the smoke settings first. If you’re rendering under Cycles and willing to give up some quality, I’d suggest to start cutting volume bounces under light paths, and perhaps reducing steps or increasing step size under volume sampling.
I was indeed rendering it as a movie file. I did try to render it as an image sequence on another try but still, after moving to the frames where the smoke was scattered all over the place it took the same time as when I was going for the movie. Thus I believe that the problem was that I used waaaaay too many particles and resolution… The finished project came out quite adequate for the job I wanted it to do so I don’t complain! Next time I’m trying liquids!
By the way, I never found out how may I continue my renders (when I’m outputting an image sequence) from the last completed frame, after I stop the rendering process, for whatever reason…?
