Upgrade suggestions to handle RealFlow for C4D

[Shawn Miller]

[Ron Moore] “I’m at a freelance crossroads when it comes to moving to the next level and am looking for some guidance from the group. I’m running the RealFlow plugin for Cinema 4D R17 and an 8-hour render time for a 4sec simulation is really counterproductive. I’m running Win10 on a 3.2GHz 8-core AMD FX-8320E processor with 8GB of RAM and my graphics card is a Radeon R9 270. My main question is whether to just scrap the whole configuration and start over (which is out of the question budget-wise) or if simply moving to a better graphics card might do the trick? Also, I hear Octane Render is a vast improvement over the native C4D renderer, but it requires an NVidia card, and I don’t know if it would play well with my AMD system. Well there it is. Can I salvage reasonable performance out of an aging computer or is technology accelerating faster than I can afford to keep up?”

Hey Ron,

How dense are the meshes you’re working with, do render times go down with less detailed simulations?

Shawn

[Ron Moore]

Shawn,

Appreciate the suggestion. In RealFlow I lowered the Resolution down from 2 to 1 and dropped the Density from 1000 to 500 and cut the render time down from 4min /frame to 2.5min/frame, so I guess we’re making some progress.

Ron

[Shawn Miller]

[Ron Moore] “Shawn,

Appreciate the suggestion. In RealFlow I lowered the Resolution down from 2 to 1 and dropped the Density from 1000 to 500 and cut the render time down from 4min /frame to 2.5min/frame, so I guess we’re making some progress.

Ron”

Ah, that makes sense. I’m also a RealFlow user (RF2016), so I’m not a stranger to the long renders. I’ve used Octane and Arnold for RF scenes and they both have their strengths. On my machines, Arnold seems more stable on high poly meshes where Octane crashes more, but renders faster – both render faster than C4D’s physical and standard renderers though. I haven’t tried ProRender yet, but that may be an option for you. Since you’re currently using an AMD graphics card, you might try downloading the demos for Arnold or Vray to see if either suits your needs. Word of warning though, Solid Angle/Autodesk recently stopped selling perpetual licenses for Arnold, so you’re looking at a fairly spendy subscription. Otherwise, you might consider a powerful Nvidia card for Octane or Redshift.

Shawn

[Ron Moore]

Thanks, that’s about what I figured my options might be. What, if anything, have you heard about Krakatoa renderer, especially for these particle simulations?

[Shawn Miller]

[Ron Moore] “Thanks, that’s about what I figured my options might be. What, if anything, have you heard about Krakatoa renderer, especially for these particle simulations?”

I never got into Krakatoa, but I’ve seen people produce really great work with it. I imagine it will cross my path at some point, but I don’t have a strong incentive to try it at the moment. What about you, is it one of the options you’re considering right now?

Shawn

[Ron Moore]

Well I’ve heard some good things about it, but my reservations are centered more around whether my system can handle much of an upgrade, or whether I need to consider building for the future and starting over. Would a higher-end NVidia card actually improve those render times that much, and how well would it mesh with an AMD cpu? For the time being I’ll probably stick with what I have and simply crank down the resolution.