Render Times and Preview

[Mark]

First thing I want to check with you is the following : Are you rendering in the Red engine, or are you using Red as a plug-in through an NLE. The reason I ask, is because in my experience, Red works faster as a stand-alone. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great plug-in, but a better workflow for complicated comps is to set-up in NLE, save the Red setting, then open the standalone. This is due to the RAM and processing that the NLE must pass along to Red.

I am assuming that you are working in the stand-alone (The Engine). To speed up previews, turn off motion blur on all layers. Motion blur is quite render intensive. Turn on motion blur to check a few frames, but then only enable it for final render.

Now, render times obviously are all due to your machine. Your machine seems to be a pretty quick machine. I am on a PC (dual 3.2 Xeon). Rendering can be quite long with Boris Red. Many reasons factor into this. You are working with 3d objects in 3d space. Things like lighting and textures has to be calculated. Also, unless you check back-face culling in the extrusion tab, the back face will have to be rendered even when it is not seen.

Other things that can help speed up work is pre-rendering. Your back face has a still image with a chroma-key applied. Could you not chroma key the PSD and then simply export as a TGA this frame, then map this to your object. The chroma key is being calculated on each and every frame. When you export from Red this frame (File-export-TGA), the TGA will retain the alpha info from your Chroma key. Anything that is a still, and doesn’t animate can be pre-rendered in this manner to save time.

Are you using reflection tracks ? These can add time to the rendering.

I recently rendered a 10 second movie. It was my company logo (AI file) extruded, mapped back to front and back with a reflection map. The reflection map was a water background that I created using the noise map. The 3d extrusion was then duplicated, filled with black, tumbled and blurred to create a reflection. I also used the water background as a displacment map for this reflection. This was all composited over the water background which had the noise map, a slight blur and the tritone filter applied to it. The text was animted to spin slightly with motion blur. This short movie took around 10 minutes to render on my machine. Not too bad for 3d text.

I have also worked on projects, on other machines that took way longer.

It is impossible to say if these render times are too long. I am suspecting that by preparing materials in advance, along with settings such as back face culling that you will be able to reduce these times….dramatically ??? I’m not sure.

Hope this helps,

Mark

[Gregory Leno]

Hi Mark,
Thanks for your informative post.

[mark harvey] “Are you rendering in the Red engine, or are you using Red as a plug-in through an NLE. …
I am assuming that you are working in the stand-alone (The Engine). To speed up previews, turn off motion blur on all layers. Motion blur is quite render intensive. Turn on motion blur to check a few frames, but then only enable it for final render.”

Yes, I am working in the RED engine.

[mark harvey] “Also, unless you check back-face culling in the extrusion tab, the back face will have to be rendered even when it is not seen.”

When I check back-face culling the image on the back is blanked out and does not show through the “glass” when viewing from the front

[mark harvey] “Could you not chroma key the PSD and then simply export as a TGA this frame, then map this to your object. The chroma key is being calculated on each and every frame. When you export from Red this frame (File-export-TGA), the TGA will retain the alpha info from your Chroma key. Anything that is a still, and doesn’t animate can be pre-rendered in this manner to save time.”

hmmm. Sounds like a great idea.
The chroma key is applied in order to drop out the black in the image. So Just so I understand correctly, If I export that frame with the key applied and then map that frame to the object, it will come back in with the alpha retained. I know thats a little different than you were recommeding but exporting it without the key applied will just bring it back in as a solid black won’t it? There is no alpha in the original image.

[mark harvey] “I recently rendered a 10 second movie.”

Is it posted anywhere so that we can see it?

Hey thanks again for your help. I just might get this yet

greg

System=
G5 dual 2.0 –
3.5g Ram –
160g internal hd –
250g internal hd –
Two 500g Lacie Big Disks via Firewire –
20in Apple cinema display

[Mark]

Hello Greg,

The chroma keyed export is what I meant, sorry, maybe it wasn’t clear in my post.

I re-read your original post, back face culling will not help here because it is a transparent glass…..for any 3d where the back is not always visible then back face culling would have helped.

My 3d movie is not posted anywhere…at the moment I am so busy with projects that I don’t have time to get it to my webmaster. It was more of a test than anything else…I will have to check if I still have it.

Good luck, I hope these will help…don’t give up, Red is an awesome tool to have in your arsenal.

Mark