Too slow to render for animation

[Bobbysmith05]

Hi need help quick

I'm trying to use Corona with 3Ds max 2015 to produce an animation of approx 3000 frames in 1920x1080.

 The scene is a simple 12mx12m room with two windows (using light portal) the animation is the build up of a wall cladding system. It has some some brackets and tiles no complex geometry or textures nothing that should be difficult to render.

Textures are low Res 1024 highest most are less. A HDRI map is used as a sperhical bitmap in environment slot. Corona camera is used.

It's taking about 20min to render each frame with a pass limit set to 18 this is far too long for a simple scene. settings are mostly standard. Path tracing primary and UHD secondary.

Machine is a i5 quad core 8GB ram Nvidia k2200 graphics. Not the best machine I know but 20 min a frame is making the project unfeasible. Any suggestions? Any help much appreciated

Thanks

[romullus]

I5 processor, 8GB RAM, sounds like really low specs machine for rendering, especially for rendering animation. Did you run Corona benchmark? What time do you get? https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark

[Bobbysmith05]

I know it's not the most powerful today but still shouldn't be taking 20min to render such a simple scene. I'll give the benchmark a try. I wish as hoping to there are some settings or something that can speed it up.

In any case I've been using 3ds max since 2010 and we had much lesser machines back then and we could still render animations in those days

[PROH]

...but not with a physically correct result. Since you're on max2015, you could change to mr and render it out with a faster but less correct result. Won't look as good as Corona, but....

[Bobbysmith05]

What about Vray?  Used Vray in 2010 and it was on a average computer from that time era and ran fine.

Is there a way to add capacity to my computer like a render node? Is it possible to buy single render nodes rather than pre built farms that cost tens of thousands

[mferster]

Have you looked into using a render farm to render out your animation?

[Bobbysmith05]

Yes been doing that but the cost is outrageous makes it impossible to profit from the job. Would like a cheap way to add capacity such as building a couple of cheap render nodes

[TomG]

If you are using the standard Corona FairSaaS, it comes with 3 render nodes, so you could have one main machine and 3 others contributing to the render. What I did when freelancing and rendering animations was buy a couple of refurbished dual Xeon machines to add as nodes. So, definitely an option!

[Bobbysmith05]

I've just had a quick look and online and seen a few reasonably priced refurbished available. I don't know much about computers outside of the programs I use to be honest. What is a Xeon? It's the processor I assume. Seems to lots of versions about. How do you know if it has dual Xeons?

[TomG]

It will usually be explicitly called a Dual Xeon machine, or under the tech specs will say something like 2 x CPU type, the "2 x" meaning it has two of them. Single Xeon machines do exist, but defeat the point of a Xeon :)

EDIT, just a random Google to show an example of each (in no way a recommendation for either machine, just examples of how to tell the difference)

This is a dual Xeon:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1VK-001E-0F182

This is a single Xeon:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F6AC2948

[sebastian___]

If the camera is not moving, and if only a certain percent of the image is animated, you can render only that portion and maybe save some time.
Later you can even add a slight 2d general movement in after effects or some freeware video editor.

EDIT :
You can even animate the "crop" or the rendering portion selection - so it will follow the area of the screen where the animation happens. An animation can start as a very small portion of the screen - so the rendering will be very fast, and it can increase in time.
But the final image output will be the final complete resolution, so it will be easy to composite on top of the background. Not sure how clear is what I just said :)
 
Also if you would have at least a second computer, you can render on one and continue to work on the second one.

[Bobbysmith05]

It will usually be explicitly called a Dual Xeon machine, or under the tech specs will say something like 2 x CPU type, the "2 x" meaning it has two of them. Single Xeon machines do exist, but defeat the point of a Xeon :)

EDIT, just a random Google to show an example of each (in no way a recommendation for either machine, just examples of how to tell the difference)

This is a dual Xeon:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=1VK-001E-0F182

This is a single Xeon:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA68F6AC2948

Would this be any good? Assuming I check it out and it works

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-Dual-Xeon-E5640-2-67GHz-32GB-128GB-SSD-2x-2TB-Radeon-R7-370/303089265517?hash=item4691872b6d:g:uywAAOSwLMRcgmBd

Z800 it has dual Xeon and 32gb of ram. I'll be looking seconds hand and a couple if years old.

[Bzuco]

If 100% photorealism is not so important you can use unreal engine or unity to render animation. It will take one or two days to prepare scene(PBR textures, prepare objects for prebake shadows/ realtime GI, set reflection cubes, ...) but you can save a lot of monney and also time. 3000 frames can be rendered in game engines ~ 30min on your computer. GPU is not so important, even office dedicated low end graphics card is enough.

[Bobbysmith05]

Ok thanks but would the PC above be any good at Corona rendering? What kind of spec would be needed to render 3000 frames at a reasonable time ie not days. I don't wanna buy a PC only for it to be marginally faster.

I'm looking at a 3 year old machine in eBay.

Z600 Workstation, 232GB SS, 2x Intel Xeon Quad Core, 2.67GHz, 24GB, GTX 960

What can I expect from this machine?

[romullus]

Run the benchmark with your current machine, write down the result, then search the list for xeons of your interest and compare render times. When you'll know how much faster xeons are comparing to your pc, then it's very easy to calculate how long it will take to render one frame of your animation on them.