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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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I wonder if someone can share their experiences rendering final video. It seems the process is painfully slow.
I am rendering 3.5 minutes animation clip in 720HD (did not dare to start full 1080) and projected rendering time is about 3.5h.
Is this normal at all? Is there anything can be done to optimize a project before starting video rendering?
My computer specs
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz, 3401 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Memory: 16 GB
Video: SAPPHIRE AMD Radeon HD 6870 1GB - (Latest Drivers)
Windows 7 64 bit
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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That must be a pretty complex scene to be taking that long, Do you have lots of particles? Physics? PhysX will not render on an AMD card, and falls back to the CPU. The graphics card is the most important variable usually for iClone. If your using lots of different textures, you may also be filling up your VRAM. If buying a fancy new Nvidia GTX card is something within your budget, it would make a big difference.
There are different rendering modes, but you lose a lot of nice things using the faster modes, like bump maps and water reflections.
It's always good to think like your building your sets in the real world. Only build what the camera will see. It robs some of the joy, but also gives a good puzzle to solve ;)
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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Got it Rampa, thanks.
Yes, the scene is quite large - over 50 props, countless trees /grass, a few types of particles (not all the time though), over 40 audio tracks, music/sound effect altogether. Not much physics though. And cameras are taking all around 360 degrees shooting at times.
Still would not settle for fast rendering... Guess I'll start 1080p and go to sleep :D
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By AverageJoe - 10 Years Ago
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Isn't iClone supposed to be a real time animation system, built on the technology of a game engine? Why can Unreal or Unity do real time animations ala cutscenes or cinemtatics, with much more advanced and complex scenes which play out and render at actual runtime and do it with little or no degradation in performance, but iClone doesn't...?
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By JIX - 10 Years Ago
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It´s a must to deliver frame rates for game engines like Unreal and Unity, so they put all their efforts into fps in first line, I guess. No gamer would accept significant frame rate drops, because only a constantly high level makes a game playable in many cases.
For iClone that´s also important, but maybe not that important. Anyways ... RL should improve the engine and not only in terms of speed IMO.
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By mark - 10 Years Ago
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I would certainly think about adding some/most, especially any music/sound effects, in post using your NLE. That should take a huge load off of iClone and speed things up a great deal...maybe;)
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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It´s a must to deliver frame rates for game engines like Unreal and Unity, so they put all their efforts into fps in first line, I guess
Yes , they do. How?
I suggest you to download the free UDK 4 and the "Infltrator" demo level. It's very instructive and help me a lot to understand how they did this.
1- All meshes are very very very optimise with low poly and one or 2 textures map. They spend hours like Swooop do just to optimise the props.
2- UDK 4 use a LOD tech so all props have 3 mesh resolution depending the camera distance
3- UDK 4 bakes all props static meshes shadows on texture , so the engine don't have to compute. If you move a mesh just to modifiy , you must rebake the shadow.
Using props from daz , sketchup wharehouse etc,,, that are not optimise for realtime you will have a drop frame rate for shure.... Optimising is 80 % of the job prop creation. Ask to swoop ;-)
For conclusion , I've very good result and good performance with Iclone since I use true optimize prop for game engine. Try it ! ;-)
Hope this help.
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By justaviking - 10 Years Ago
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I find it interesting that I can "preview" my scene at 30 (or more) fps, but then it drops to 7 fps when rendering.
Things to consider: When I render, I also turn on a higher resolution. I also turn on anti-aliasing, so in while rendering. Both of those actions require more memory. Also, I think iClone puts more bias into quality over real time speed when rendering.
In my experience, the biggest impact on rendering speed is staying within your video card's RAM. I have a modest 4GB video card, and when I try to render a scene that wants 4.3GB, my rendering speed plummets. That speaks to the optimizations that sw00000p and mkakerkart were talking about.
I suggest a tool like GPU-Z (free) to monitor the memory usage of your video card. If the needs exceed your available memory, that is a sure-fire way to kill performance. The same is true for your CPU, but it's far more likely to happen with your GPU when running iClone.
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By CaseClosed - 10 Years Ago
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justaviking (10/18/2015)
I find it interesting that I can "preview" my scene at 30 (or more) fps, but then it drops to 7 fps when rendering.
This means iClone is using one technology to render the PREVIEW on your monitor, and another technology to render to an image. Maybe we should ask Reallusion to give an option for WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) so we can get fast renders for film making. Just render the PREVIEW as quick as it appears on screen.
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By Wacky-Wabbit - 10 Years Ago
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I've rendered some videos at just over the same length, and it takes a while. I have rendered a relatively large (prop-wise) video in iClone 5, and it did well. However, when I loaded the same file into iClone 6 and attempted to render it, the program "barfed!" Somehow, iClone 6 just stopped working during the attempted render. That was frustrating to say the least. Not sure why though. Well, at least I know that I can render in iClone 5, which I will continue to use for that project for now.
Computer: Dell XPS 8500
Processor: Intel I7-3770 CPU
Speed: 3.40 GHz
RAM: 32.0 GB
Operating System: Windows 10, 64-bit
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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CaseClosed (10/18/2015)
justaviking (10/18/2015)
I find it interesting that I can "preview" my scene at 30 (or more) fps, but then it drops to 7 fps when rendering.
This means iClone is using one technology to render the PREVIEW on your monitor, and another technology to render to an image. Maybe we should ask Reallusion to give an option for WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) so we can get fast renders for film making. Just render the PREVIEW as quick as it appears on screen.
You will get a speed increase when rendering in "Preview" mode instead of "Final Render". There are also settings for super-sampling and shadow quality when in "Final" mode. If your preview is looking good to you already, then you might just want to render in preview mode.
The textures and other stuff using VRAM generally have a far greater effect on your speed than the poly-count.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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I did not mention how many times iClone crashed on me. All during test rendering or just loading a project. Every time I close iClone, I am scared, that I would not be able to open my project again. Computer restart, clearing iClone temp folder and closing all other apps helped though.
Now back to rendering. I was also wondering why is it playing live 60fps is fine but rendering is just 0.7 fps (1080p) (I would be a happy camper, if I had 7fps as justaviking mentioned). Should probably do more testing with rendering in "preview" mode and compare the quality and speed. I've achieved just a little better speed by collecting a clip into iMotion plus file, removing animation and loading it back for the main character. But I suspect countless trees are the real bottleneck here (as sw00000p suggested). Would need to carefully plan the scene next time. And yes, graphics card is due for an upgrade too.
Thank you all for suggestions :exclamationmark:
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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Not sure why though
Because Iclone 5 has only 4 lights casting shadow. Iclone 6 is build on infinite lights casting shadow.
For those thinking that UDK 4 is far better as iclone 6 , do the test by importing all your scene and relight as in Iclone and try to render.... You'll be very surprise.
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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Would need to carefully plan the scene next time
This is exactly how you must think to speedup your workflow. It's like making movie like Maya but with a pipeline of game engine.
Or you can hide all the unseen props depending of your camera view.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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mtakerkart (10/18/2015)
Not sure why though
Because Iclone 5 has only 4 lights casting shadow. Iclone 6 is build on infinite lights casting shadow.
For those thinking that UDK 4 is far better as iclone 6 , do the test by importing all your scene and relight as in Iclone and try to render.... You'll be very surprise.
That made me thinking about shadows for my trees. I cannot test now as it's rendering. But If I remove all shadows from trees and then add only for those close to the main stage, where it is actually can be seen. Should that improve performance?
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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Should that improve performance?
Scene: Heightmap terrain : "Butte" 609 baobab trees , 2 lights
preview mode Render time in mp4 2 fps with shadows 10 fps no shadows
final render/super sampling 2x2/high quality shadow 9 min for a 8 secondes 800x600 mp4
final render/super sampling 2x2/no shadow 1 min for a 8 secondes 800x600 mp4
Graphic card:
Geforce GTX 760
8 Gig Ram on my pc.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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mtakerkart (10/18/2015)
Should that improve performance? Scene: Heightmap terrain : "Butte" 609 baobab trees , 2 lights
preview mode Render time in mp4 2 fps with shadows 10 fps no shadows
final render/super sampling 2x2/high quality shadow 9 min for a 8 secondes 800x600 mp4
final render/super sampling 2x2/no shadow 1 min for a 8 secondes 800x600 mp4
Graphic card:
Geforce GTX 760
8 Gig Ram on my pc.
Awesome mtakerkart!
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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Also, if you have multiple lights in an outdoor daylight scene, you probably only want one of them to cast shadows. I think your better off rendering with shadows, but being frugal with them.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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OK, I am puzzled even more now.
Render: 1080P, MP4, 200 frames test (actual render of 100 frames @ 30 fps), "Preview" mode render.
Saved project under different name and started taking stuff out of the project while testing rendering speed.
Found that most weighted items were sky and terrain. Fine, after totally cleaning up the scene, shutting down all visual and setting project preferences to default, the render speed was.. only 5fps.
However, if I start a new project and do the same rendering test, the speed is... 10fps.
And nothing I could do to match the render speed of cleaned up project to freshly created...
Update: At any rate, "managing" shadows has saved me a few hours for final rendering of the project. 2.5 hours projected @ 1080p for 3.5 min clip.
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By CaseClosed - 10 Years Ago
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rampa (10/18/2015)You will get a speed increase when rendering in "Preview" mode instead of "Final Render". There are also settings for super-sampling and shadow quality when in "Final" mode. If your preview is looking good to you already, then you might just want to render in preview mode.
The textures and other stuff using VRAM generally have a far greater effect on your speed than the poly-count.
Rendering in PREVIEW mode is not the same as the rendering in the PREVIEW window. The PREVIEW WINDOW is much much faster, and the results are WYSIWYG, so there's no guessing what your results will be. Rendering in PREVIEW mode is not WYSIWYG from my experience.
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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Yeah. I don't know what all the differences are. The only apparent one is that the scene window is real-time, and the output is not. The output has a locked frame-rate, and takes as long as it needs on each frame. The real-time scene window will just skip frames if needed to stay in real-time. Many of us have graphics cards that can easily render our scenes at 30 to 60 FPS in the real-time scene preview. But I'm sure everyone has managed to get 5 FPS at one time or another in the scene window and scene big jumps, because even at 5 FPS, it's still in real-time. I'm guessing it may just be a less efficient way to use a game card. The benefits of game-type system for the scene window are quite obvious; instant feedback. For final render, it's more important to make sure that there are no skipped frames, and the FPS is consistent.
If we could give it more time per frame would we get a better render?
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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When you hit "play" , Iclone is just displaying on your screen , this is realtime. When you render , your pc compute the video codec , embeded to a video file and deal with your hard drive to store your movie... That's why it's little bit longer to play on the same "preview" mode.
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By CaseClosed - 10 Years Ago
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rampa (10/19/2015)If we could give it more time per frame would we get a better render?
One of the biggest time savers doing it this way is that you know exactly what you are going to get. You don't have to figure out where the problems are, because you can see them. Yes, if you can control how much time per frame, like only advance to the next frame when you know that the current frame has been captured and saved, then you are golden.
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By CaseClosed - 10 Years Ago
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mtakerkart (10/19/2015)
When you hit "play" , Iclone is just displaying on your screen , this is realtime. When you render , your pc compute the video codec , embeded to a video file and deal with your hard drive to store your movie... That's why it's little bit longer to play on the same "preview" mode.
This is what one would assume, but I found that I got unexpected anomalies when I rendered to PREVIEW mode; whereas, when I rendered directly off the monitor, I got exactly what I expected, and it looked sweet.
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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It's certainly possible to just capture the screen. But it'll only be suitable for relatively simple scenes. If you make sure to bake all your physics, and make sure your FPS is 30 or above, it'll work.
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By mtakerkart - 10 Years Ago
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I got unexpected anomalies when I rendered to PREVIEW mode
Strange because I have the same result with a render picture on preview mode as the preview iclone window....
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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I finished rendering in "Preview" mode. As far as I can see the quality is excellent for this type of scene.
mtakerkart (10/19/2015)
When you hit "play" , Iclone is just displaying on your screen , this is realtime. When you render , your pc compute the video codec , embeded to a video file and deal with your hard drive to store your movie... That's why it's little bit longer to play on the same "preview" mode.
I understand what you mean. I used to use this computer for ripping blurays, and generally encoding/re-coding whopping size videos. I was always happy how fast it was performing. So there must be something else other than dealing with video codecs in iClone (there obviously is :)).
The final size of the video for 3.5 minutes was about 1GB (with default renderer compression settings). So I decided to convert it to AVI and compress it a little. My Avidemux finished the job in 4 minutes (practically real time) and I have decent quality with 230 Mb file size.
Yet iClone renders a blank, fresh project with nothing in it with the rate of only 10 fps. So it is not only the matter of having a "heavy" loaded project that slows down the rendering process.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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Opps... duplicated post :D
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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You'll get a similar effect if you switch to "By Frame" playback mode. I supppose locking the output to 10 FPS makes sure that no frames are skipped.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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rampa (10/19/2015)
You'll get a similar effect if you switch to "By Frame" playback mode. I supppose locking the output to 10 FPS makes sure that no frames are skipped.
Yes, right and even a "preview" renderer mode is locked to this rate. I think iClone should consider giving us a choice though and more rendering options.
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By CaseClosed - 10 Years Ago
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mtakerkart (10/19/2015)
I got unexpected anomalies when I rendered to PREVIEW mode
Strange because I have the same result with a render picture on preview mode as the preview iclone window....
Yea, grass was doing weird things, and other anomalies.
My scenes are intense, and they do not come close to playing back in real time... maybe 1 frame per second. Quality is much more important to this project, than preview speed. The quality is stunning. I can navigate through the scene in real time, but if I hit play on the timeline, it's like I said, maybe 1 frame per second, sometimes longer. But that's fantastic when it comes to render time. Wait a few seconds, boom, capture that frame and save it, then the next one.
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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I wish they'd give us some additional reflection plains for the "final" quality. I wonder how a big a hit a screen-based reflection pain is? The water doesn't seem to be much of a hit.
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By JIX - 10 Years Ago
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What we really need is a superabundance of computer performance, which is affordable! ;)
DirectX 12 seems to be promising so far. Well, hopefully even a small step for more fps/watts ...
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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MistaG (10/19/2015)
rampa (10/19/2015)
You'll get a similar effect if you switch to "By Frame" playback mode. I supppose locking the output to 10 FPS makes sure that no frames are skipped.Yes, right and even a "preview" renderer mode is locked to this rate. I think iClone should consider giving us a choice though and more rendering options.
Pretty sure that must be system specific. I'm getting probably ten times that rendering nothing. I have an Nvidia GTX 770. I think I was closer to 10 FPS rendering the abandoned house or church scene.
I would encourage you to get yourself a new GPU with 4 gig of VRAM.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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rampa (10/19/2015)
MistaG (10/19/2015)
rampa (10/19/2015)
You'll get a similar effect if you switch to "By Frame" playback mode. I supppose locking the output to 10 FPS makes sure that no frames are skipped.Yes, right and even a "preview" renderer mode is locked to this rate. I think iClone should consider giving us a choice though and more rendering options. Pretty sure that must be system specific. I'm getting probably ten times that rendering nothing. I have an Nvidia GTX 770. I think I was closer to 10 FPS rendering the abandoned house or church scene. I would encourage you to get yourself a new GPU with 4 gig of VRAM.
I want to reiterate just in case. This is you mentioning for 1080p, right? Because other modes are quite fast on my system.
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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Looks pretty close at 1920. I'm getting about 15 FPS with the old house in Preview render, and about 1 FPS in final with 2 by 2 sampling and HQ shadows. Same speed for MP4 or WMV. 3840 is WMV or image only, and I got about 5 in preview.
So, my error there. I was running 1280 before.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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rampa (10/19/2015)
Looks pretty close at 1920. I'm getting about 15 FPS with the old house in Preview render, and about 1 FPS in final with 2 by 2 sampling and HQ shadows. Same speed for MP4 or WMV. 3840 is WMV or image only, and I got about 5 in preview.
So, my error there. I was running 1280 before.
OK, great. Now that we render the same scene with the same frame size, it has to be my GPU. Because I'm getting 3 fps for "preview" mode and final /2x2/HQ shadows is just about 0.25 fps
Thanks!
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By Kelleytoons - 10 Years Ago
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Just to give you some more data, I tried rendering the Abandoned House scene, at 1080p with High Quality shadows turned on and supersampling set at 2x2 and I got around 90 frames a minute in final render mode on my NVidia 970 card (I have an i7 dual-core machine but it ain't particularly fast, as it's at least a year old and wasn't top of the line when I bought it).
I got around 370 frames per minute in preview mode. So, oddly, my 970 card is two or three times slower than Rampa's in Preview, but about 50% faster in final render mode. (Which is weird but hardware ain't my thing - I'm a software engineer :>).
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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Thanks for the update Kellytoons. I was looking into buying 970. I would probably still get it and see if there would be any changes in performance.
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By MistaG - 10 Years Ago
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What is it with duplicate postings...:w00t:
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By justaviking - 10 Years Ago
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I typically get around 5-10 fps on my final render.
Typical output is... MP4, 1920x1080, 4x(?) anti-aliasing.
My worst-ever performance was 2 to 3 fps during preview, and 23-seconds per frame (0.04 fps) while rendering.
That was for my big iClone 6 "unlimited lights" test, with 10 avatars, about 25 lights, and a full forest of trees.
According to GPU-Z, it resulted in a 4.5GB memory load on my 4.0GB graphics card.
I attribute the majority of the poor performance to having exceeded my card's available memory.
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By Rampa - 10 Years Ago
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I've found that lots of lights kill the performance pretty quickly. Lots of tees and avatars don't have as big an impact.
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By genao87 - 10 Years Ago
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God damn JustAskViking, you have a full blown 4GB video card and Iclone uses it all. So it is safe bet to get the 980Ti or Titan that have 6GB.
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By justaviking - 10 Years Ago
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genao87 (10/20/2015)
God damn JustAskViking, you have a full blown 4GB video card and Iclone uses it all. So it is safe bet to get the 980Ti or Titan that have 6GB.
To be fair (sort of), I intentionally created a stress test for iClone 6. I exceeded expectations in that regard.
I believe a lot of people have come to the realization that there is plenty of room for optimization in iClone. In fact, I was able to demonstrate cases where having a reflective surface in a scene would cause my GPU (not CPU) to run at 100% even when iClone was idle (not playing). If I minimized iClone, the GPU would idle again. I think I'll test that again, now that I think of it.
There are many good reasons to be thoughtful when creating your scene. I'm not good at it, but we should always think like a "real" movie producer, and you only build what the camera will see. If you plan your shots, you don't need a forest of trees behind the camera. You don't need fully rendered buildings if you only see the front surface. You don't need 4k high-resolution textures on unimportant props that will never be more that a hundred pixels high on the screen.
But with all that said, I was salivating over rumors (circa Dec. '14) of an 8MB "980" card. It turned out to be only that, just rumors. But I am extremely impressed with the specs and reviews of the 6GB 980 Ti. I'd love to re-render my test case on that card. I'm willing to accept a card if anyone wants to donate one to my experiment. ;)
For anyone who is curious, but hasn't seen my lighting stress test before, here it is once again for your convenience.
CORRECTION:
My Radeon 6850 seems to have 1GB of memory.
Strange that DXDiag was saying 4GB. It had been a while since I looked at the actual specs of my current card (rather than the ones I dream about), so I repeated what DXDiag said without thinking anything was amiss. GPU-Z reports 1GB. Hmmm, strange indeed.
My test project, though, did require a bit over 4GB of video memory, so there was a lot of swapping going on.
That's why I'm so excited about the 980 Ti.
Maybe I'll get one someday.
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By JIX - 10 Years Ago
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There are many good reasons to be thoughtful when creating your scene. I'm not good at it, but we should always think like a "real" movie producer, and you only build what the camera will see. If you plan your shots, you don't need a forest of trees behind the camera. You don't need fully rendered buildings if you only see the front surface. You don't need 4k high-resolution textures on unimportant props that will never be more that a hundred pixels high on the screen.
So true, but because it´s not real at all, the software should lighten the users workload wherever and whenever possible. At least this is preferable in my opinion. Sorry RL, again some workload for you guys. ;)
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By justaviking - 10 Years Ago
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It's true that a good rendering engine will cull "out-of-sight" objects from the rendering process. But on the other hand, it's in the scene, so it needs to be taken into account to a certain extent. We have to accept some responsibility for the load we put on our system. It's also a responsibility for the people who create and sell props. A well constructed prop is both beautiful and efficient, both in texture and polygon count. (Shhh.... don't let anything think sw0000p and I might be in agreement on something. Shhh...)
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By JIX - 10 Years Ago
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Sure ... just throwing in some visions of the future. No worries, I don´t expect them to become reality at one swoop. ;)
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