Spec needed for animation

[Bobbysmith05]

What's a realistic spec needed for rendering 4k to 7k frame animations in 1080 res, nothing near photorealistic but reasonably nice textures and lighting. The render times would need to be a couple of days say 5 at most for all frames.

At the moment I'm using a xeon twin 5650 and a i5 with 24gb and 8gb respectively as a master and node. These two computers are so slow that it makes animation unfeasible for me I'd be looking at 10 to 15min per frame. (they make any type of rendering practical unfeasible with corona)

What is a realistic hardware for this task, I'm just wanting to see if it's within my price range or just a pipe dream.

[clemens_at]

well, if you want to render 5500 frames in 5 days with one machine, you need to hit around 1:20 per frame.
X5650 with 6 cores(12 threads)x2? around 2 minutes for corona benchmark?
With a gen3 threadripper 3970x (better yet a 3990x), you are about 4 times faster than your current setup getting your much closer to your 5 day limit.

[Bobbysmith05]

Hmm my 5650 takes hours to render anything in corona even a simple scene with no textures at 1024 res will take a couple of hours to get anywhere near an acceptable noise level. 2 min on benchmark means nothing

[TomG]

Well, the Benchmark is useful for a) run the benchmark on your machine and then b) compare the results to other machines on the results page, to see how much faster they would be than your hardware.

So if the benchmark is 3 minutes on your CPU and 1 min 30s on another, your 10 minute frame would be a 5 minute frame (roughly, and assuming no errors in your scene). So, you can run the benchmark on your machine, and see what score it gets, then see what other CPUs get, to get an idea of what speed increase you will get in your scenes.

[Bobbysmith05]

I did use the benchmark for this purpose when I bought the 5650 I compared it to my i5. I5 ran 11 min and 5650 around 2 min however in real world rendering the performance is almost identical. In one scene the 5650 renders a frame in about 9 mins the i5 in 11 so very little real world difference. Both these times had noise that had to be dealt with post process.

I'm honestly not sure if I'm doing something very wrong in corona to have such poor render times. Even if I load up a new scene default settings, put a box, one hole for a window stick a HDRI in environment slot and render with no textures this will still take a long time to get an acceptable noise limit.

[TomG]

Would be unusual for there to be such a small difference - things like hard drive speeds, running out of memory, size of textures used, etc. might play a part; or inefficient set up of the scene (e.g. bad albedo).

Would be interesting to see some test renders, with the full range of stats (rays/s, time, passes, noise level etc.) to see what you mean, plus some further details on the entire hardware, along with which version of Corona, which host software and version, and so on. You could even send in a scene via private uploader. See https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000524006-how-to-report-issues-3ds-max (there's also an equivalent for C4D, https://help.c4d.corona-renderer.com/support/solutions/articles/12000033461-how-to-report-issues-c4d )

BTW, do you have Benchmark results from both machines, your machines that is, not other people's 5650 and i5 on the results page, but your actual machines?

[Philip kelly]

Sounds like a render farm job to be very honest.

[Bobbysmith05]

Would be unusual for there to be such a small difference - things like hard drive speeds, running out of memory, size of textures used, etc. might play a part; or inefficient set up of the scene (e.g. bad albedo).

Would be interesting to see some test renders, with the full range of stats (rays/s, time, passes, noise level etc.) to see what you mean, plus some further details on the entire hardware, along with which version of Corona, which host software and version, and so on. You could even send in a scene via private uploader. See https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/5000524006-how-to-report-issues-3ds-max (there's also an equivalent for C4D, https://help.c4d.corona-renderer.com/support/solutions/articles/12000033461-how-to-report-issues-c4d )

BTW, do you have Benchmark results from both machines, your machines that is, not other people's 5650 and i5 on the results page, but your actual machines?

I'll benchmark both machines today and post the results. The i5 only has 8gb of RAM could this bottleneck the xeon machine when using distributed rendering? If I send you 2 scenes I've made you can see what I'm trying to render and see if I've made a cock up in the scene somewhere (entirely possible) otherwise think I'll look into various real time rendering options since they'd achieve the level of realism I'm after.

[TomG]

If the i5 is running out of memory, it could potentially cause issues with DR. You could try rendering with just the dual Xeon and no DR, see if render speed actually improves :)

You are welcome to send us the scene for sure, private uploader info is on the how to report issues link above. Be sure to post here to let us know what the filename(s) is/are if they have to go via dropbox (or if small enough to use the form submission, be sure to include the link to this forum thread in the info on the form when uploading).