[Thirin Vogler]

Update: Since nobody was able to help me and I came across even more threads on the internet without solutions I went ahead and using a bit of coding magic was able to create a workaround that is acceptable for me.

I wrote a powershell script that loads up C4Ds renderer, makes it render a set amount of frames (until the time increase problem gets too much) and automatically closes and restarts it afterwards (resetting the problem). With this you are able to get around the problem with minimal time loss + it gives you all the control that you need. Simply change the first 5 variables to your situation.

$numFrames=4700; #Number of frames in your scene
$frameCurrent=0; #Frame you would like to start rendering from
$consecFrames=100; #How many consecutive frames you'd like to render
$projPath='"F:\Other Libraries\Documents\Projects\Stage\Stage Final\Stage Final.c4d"'; #The path where your project is located
$procPath='"C:\Program Files\MAXON\CINEMA 4D R18\CINEMA 4D.exe"'; #The path where you installed C4D

$temp=0;
for($i=$frameCurrent; $i -lt $numFrames; $i+=$consecFrames){
Start-Process $procPath '-nogui', '-render', $projPath , '-frame', $i, $i+$consecFrames-1;

$Running = Get-Process 'CINEMA 4D' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
while($Running){ #Wait and check until current process is finished to start the next iteration.
sleep 5;
$Running = Get-Process 'CINEMA 4D' -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue;
}
$temp=$i
}
Start-Process $procPath '-nogui', '-render', $projPath , '-frame', $temp, $numFrames-1; #Render the rest that cannot be divided by $consecFrames

This should work. I am still testing it out, but so far I did not have any errors. Thank you anyway for anyone who replied.
-Thirin

[Thirin Vogler]

I understand that AO and GI increase my render times drastically and I can certainly see how 2D Planes and edges could give them problems. When I switched them both off I could see a real drop in render time.

The i7 8700k is actually the really fast one, because I mainly work with After Effects instead of C4D. It has 6 physical cores and 12 virtual ones. I planned on using a GPU accelerated renderer for C4D, but I have yet to buy one.

My textures are fairly big, because the camera gets quite close to the characters in the scene (thats why I use the placeholders in the image. The total render of all my characters is roughly 20GB). They are around 3500×4000 pixels.

I went ahead and let it render over night just to see if it does eventually cap off and it does! It seems to average out at 3 or 4 times the initial render time. So if I start rendering at frame 100 it might take 30 seconds the next one 31, then 32 and so on, but if I start rendering from frame 1 the same frames now take roughly 2 minutes when the renderer reaches them. Why is that? There has to be something building up and not getting flushed or some calculation that looks back at previous frames.

Finally about the scene change: I certainly see differences in render time when the camera switches positions, but I can tell you that the problem carries over with a cut. I am not sure if it gets reset after a camera move, but the incremental increase of render time is in every scene.

-Thirin

[Thirin Vogler]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply.
I have attached some still frames. As you can see the scene itself isn’t actually flat. Just the characters in it are. AO and GI was mainly used for the 3D objects rather than the characters. The cloth simulation is in the big flags on stage. I have double checked their caches and recalculated them.
The characters were prerendered as individual frames and imported as a sequence (I found rendering them as whole movie files made the preview incredibly slower).

-Thirin