Author Topic: General tips for speeding up rendering without sacraficing image quality...  (Read 1603 times)

2022-07-21, 12:00:16

Luke

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Hey all,

I'm wondering if there are some general tips for speeding up rendering, particularly with animations...? things like collapsing the stack on geometry inc. uvw modifiers, using proxies (if so what type of objects) etc etc... general stuff like that.

I'll be creating some animations with moving cameras and objects, are there things that we can adjust in the performance settings that might help, once again without affecting the image quality?

Any advice is always greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

2022-07-21, 14:00:03
Reply #1

maru

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You can render one frame and see what takes most time: the pre-rendering steps like parsing, calculating displacement, etc, or maybe the actual rendering process?

In case of no moving objects (fly-through) it's easy to save the GI precomputation time by reusing a single GI cache file for all frames. This way the GI does not have to be recomputed for each frame.
See: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528617365649

With moving objects/lights it is more tricky, but if they are moving smoothly, and not very fast, you might get away with using the "load+append" option. That can also help reduce GI calculation times per frame.

If you don't want to save your frames in a high bit depth format (like 32-bit EXR), you can go to the System tab and change Highlight Clamping (not highlight compression!) to non-zero. Values like 1-2 should work, but you may need to find the right one by trial and error. This will clamp the brightest pixels in the image so you will actually get better quality of things like hard edges and shorter render times. The drawback is only that it clamps those highest values so you lose the high dynamic range.

Simplifying materials helps with render times. For example: using a single Corona Physical material with texture masks for different properties rather than a Layered Material with two different materials in it that are mixed together (obviously this is not always possible).

It really depends what the scene looks like and what features you are using. If you could share some images/screenshots/sample frames, that would be very helpful.
You can contact the support team here: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new


Marcin Miodek | chaos-corona.com
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2022-07-22, 01:22:47
Reply #2

Luke

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You can render one frame and see what takes most time: the pre-rendering steps like parsing, calculating displacement, etc, or maybe the actual rendering process?

In case of no moving objects (fly-through) it's easy to save the GI precomputation time by reusing a single GI cache file for all frames. This way the GI does not have to be recomputed for each frame.
See: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528617365649

With moving objects/lights it is more tricky, but if they are moving smoothly, and not very fast, you might get away with using the "load+append" option. That can also help reduce GI calculation times per frame.

If you don't want to save your frames in a high bit depth format (like 32-bit EXR), you can go to the System tab and change Highlight Clamping (not highlight compression!) to non-zero. Values like 1-2 should work, but you may need to find the right one by trial and error. This will clamp the brightest pixels in the image so you will actually get better quality of things like hard edges and shorter render times. The drawback is only that it clamps those highest values so you lose the high dynamic range.

Simplifying materials helps with render times. For example: using a single Corona Physical material with texture masks for different properties rather than a Layered Material with two different materials in it that are mixed together (obviously this is not always possible).

It really depends what the scene looks like and what features you are using. If you could share some images/screenshots/sample frames, that would be very helpful.
You can contact the support team here: https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Hey Marcin,

Thanks for that, here are some screen shots. I'm rendering at 1920 x 1080, we have moving cameras and moving objects...

Does things like collapsing the stack on the geometry make much / if any difference? Proxies? My render times aren't huge but I'd love to be able to get them down a bit if possible...

I'm using PT + UHD (animation flicker free) with lock sampling pattern off, I've not changed any of the settings/values... and I'm rendering to noise level 2.4% fwiw...

« Last Edit: 2022-07-22, 04:42:49 by Luke »

2022-07-22, 13:02:41
Reply #3

TomG

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Proxies are for viewport performance only, and have no effect on render time or quality - https://support.chaos.com/hc/en-us/articles/4528606821137-How-to-use-proxies-
Tom Grimes | chaos-corona.com
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