My first thought is, "Cooling."

Super Sampling, High Quality Shadow both increase the rendering effort.  That, running for longer times, may be causing an overheating issue.

Try monitoring some temps.  Your motherboard should have some utilities.  It could be the CPU, GPU, RAM, or even a motherboard (chipset) that's getting hot.

Another option is to open up your case and literally point a fan into it and see if you can run at full intensity for longer times.

Your 18,000 frames will give you a 37.3 GB file, and I assume that it is written to disk in stages. I've never worked with such large files. There may be temp files, so you would need enough space for that. But what is puzzling is that without the quality settings things are fine, so it doesn't seem to be file handling.

You could monitor RAM usage with Task Manager and see if it goes up, which would indicate a memory leak of some sort.

Another thing you can do is monitoring GPU temperature and video RAM usage with GPU-Z.

I'm not aware of any issue being reported or confirmed in this area. There are issues with rendering sequence to Indigo, but that is another matter. In fact, the only overload I have encountered thus far is with rendering an Indigo sequence.

We learn every day! :cool:

I used to output at 1280x720 (as target), but I'm now upping it to 1920x1080.

Is there anything post-processing-wise that could be done to the image sequences for further improvement?

I have used iClone since 1.52, and it has never bothered me. I've given up explaining the reason for the 60 fps; look for my posts elsewhere. I think in time, not in frames. That way it doesn't matter whether I render at 24 fps, 25 fps, or 30 fps; it always comes out right.

Back to rendering quality; I find that more interesting.

So it looks like Brigade is kind of a cloud-based solution related to Octane? I tried to make sense of their web page (had trouble loading it because of its fanciness), but it wasn't clear to me what they are actually offering.

Octane would be interesting, though.

It's the same as iClone 5: 54,000 frames at 60 fps, so that's 15 minutes.

Of course, right now the setting in iClone 6 is limited to 1800 frames, unless you load an empty iClone 5 project first as a workaround. I would like to give credit for this clever idea, but I forgot whom it was from...:blush:

And that is a ridiculously long single scene, even for me!!!

That was an oversight that has been fixed in 6.01. You can know set the render frame rate from 1 to 30 fps.

I would like for RL to reinstate the iClone 5 settings where the frame rate can be adjusted from 1 to 60 fps for image sequences.

You may remember the old Westerns where the wagons are accelerating and wheels seem to first stand still and then turn backwards.

If the wheel or a propeller turns form one frame to the next so that the next spoke or blade is in the same position it seems to stand still. To remedy that you would need to change the rotation speed so that the next spoke or blade is a bit ahead for the next frame.

We slice what is continuous rotation into pieces and those pieces may just overlap in a way that makes it looks incorrect. Real film has the benefit of motion blur and that could be really helpful here.

And both have learning curves way off on the far side of being fun. :w00t:

This is not a typical iClone problem by the way. Even in regular movies, if you have say a bunch of speeding up wagons, it sometimes looks as if the wheels slow down and then even start turning in the opposite direction.

If the frame rate is 30 fps and you have a wheel with spokes for example and it takes 1/30 of second for the wheel to turn the radial distance between two spokes, the wheel seems to stand still when you view the footage. At 25 fps, you will have 1/25 of a second between two frames, so the next spoke will have rotated past the position of the previous one, giving you the impression of a rotation.

The same could obviously be the case with a propeller, giving the impression that it stands still at a particular frame rate. The only remedy is to change the animation.

One advantage that regular film has is motion blur. When a propeller moves at high speed you don't really see the individual blades, but more something like a whirling disk. A few members who have been working a movies involving propeller aircraft, actually use some thing like a disk to simulate the fast speed effect.

Motion blur would be a great addition to iClone.  It has been requested more than once.