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Cinema 4D Animation Rendering
I am using CINEMA 4D r9.012. I have a scene with animation and was wnating to render the animation 1030 frames — I’ve always just used the “Make Preview” and set it to full render and all frames.
I did this, and I suppose it started it in an “External Renderer” as CINEMA 4D calls it — I saw the status bar at the bottom left, going slow — it’s been 3 hours and it looks like it’s only 10% complete.
I went to render in the editor just a screen, and it made the status bar for the external renderer disappear — but I can tell its still working because my CPU us 100%, and when I try to close C4D it warns me that the external renderer is working.
My questions are…
1) How do I get the status of the external renderer now that the progress bar at the bottom left isn’t there?2) Is there a better and perhaps faster way to render my animation in full-render quality to an uncompressed AVI, rather than the “Make Preview”.
I’v had no training and this is just the only way that I know to render the anmiation — maybe I’m doing it right, I don’t know — but it has worked in the past (and is working now — just taking forever and now I lost my status / progress bar).
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5 Replies
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Sounds like its working you are just asking a lot of it. My progress bar does not always move either only when it is calculating a different element like hair.
Its hard to say with out seeing your scene but 30 hours for 1000 frames of animation is not unusual.
As for a format to render out, its different depending what you want to do with it. If its just a test I render out quicktime h264 since its fast and looks nice with a small file size. When I am rendering to send directly to editing i go with Quicktime animation pretty big files put perfect quality. However when rendering for compositing I go with a Tif image sequence. These are what I use because they are formats that work with the other software I am using.
/randy
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1) don’t know, if I do that it comes back, maybe it’s at the start of the next frame (maybe it’s different in 9)
2) if you Render to Picture Viewer you can always tell where it is since it’s rendering in a separate window
but as Randy said it won’t be faster since it’s really the same thing. To make it faster you’d have to optimize the scene (if that’s possible in this case) or get more processing power.
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Oh, I have the same problem now and could not find any advice online.
It’s one of my first animations, I played around with preview render and wanted to try out the final render animation.
Differently to Travis, I only have 400 frames. I started rendering last night, so it is over 12 hours now and there is no sign of the end. I can only feel it is still rendering, CPU is 100%, C4d would ask if i want to interupt the process and the machine itself working fine.
I have the area in my animation where lots of 3dpolys are used. It took me 4 to 5 hours to make visuals of it and I’m affraid this bit slows down whole animation.
Any ideas how can I optimize it?
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It sounds like your rendering.
400 frames can go fast of slow depending on the scene and your computer. The same scene renders 4 times faster on my work computer than it does my laptop. A good way to estimate your render time is to preview render one of the heavy frames and then multipy that time by the number of frames you are rendering./Randy
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The best ways I’ve found to speed up your renders are as follows
Reduce render depth (render settings>options>ray depth etc.)
Dont use dispersion on transparency or reflections
Dont use GI (although it will speed up your preparation time untik you are experienced at setting up lights manually)
Dont use Ambient Occlusion (produces good results but is slow)
Dont use Caustics
Use geometry and animation settings for antialiasing (or none)
Transparency setting to no refraction
All of these settings will reduce the render quality to a certain degree but some in particular render depth can often have little or no visible impact. Here are a few general tips
Dont have too many transparent textures, in particular over other transparent objects.
Use instances where you have multiple objects that are the same
Learn how to use render tags so objects outwith the view or that you dont need/want reflected aren’t calculated
I’m by no means an expert in C4D but hopefully this knowledge will help you both out a bit.
Joe
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