Category: Planning

As my animation is coming towards the final stages of completion, I feel the need to research and test out different render settings in order to speed up my workflow. I often find that I spend a long time waiting for my renders to complete after making small changes which has a detrimental effect on my workflow. The video below gave me some useful times on how to speed rendering up:

Optimising Scenes in Cinema 4D from Luxx on Vimeo.

Overall, the tutorial Optimising Scenes in Cinema 4D focused on two crucial elements: 1) Having low render settings for the development stage of the animation and 2) Having high render settings for the final render when the animation is complete.

Low Render Settings:

Within the tutorial it went through each individual setting, basically turning ever setting down a couple units so that the overall speed of the render is decreased. All of the settings were specific to the physical render engine which I intended to use anyway – the most significant alteration of the renderer was the Sample Quality, as the setting was changed to medium, this drastically changed the values within the setting which was, at first concerning as I thought it would provide enough detail. However, I later found out that this would be more than sufficient enough for development stages of project as it would allow for the render times to drop drastically which would further allow me to make alterations much faster.

Example render using the low settings:

High Render Setting:

After I had used the low render setting to make the desired alterations to the animation, I had to figure out a higher setting for the final render which involved turning everything up. As I was planning on using the physical renderer, I decided to turn the default Sampling Quality setting from medium in the low setting to high – this further bumped up the units to produce more detail and most notably decreased the error threshold to 1%. After conducting a test render, I felt that I could have changed the Sampling Subdivisions up a couple of units more to produce more detail which would be desirable at the cost of a bit extra time, which I feel it is worth.

 

Example render using the high settings:

Conclusion

Using the low settings will produced really fast renders which will in turn speed up my workflow as I will be able to make small changes quickly to my animation, however, this speed will come at a sacrifice as the quality wont be as good. Oppositely, using the high settings will produce really high quality renders which will be very beneficial when coming into after effects as it’ll look very aesthetically pleasing, however, this quality will also come at a sacrifice as the time it will take to render each time will be very long. The image below shows two test renders I conducted with the different render settings. Overall, I feel that both images look identical on screen which is very surprising, however, the low render setting took far less time in comparison to the high render setting – approximately 5 mins 10 sec less. The low setting would be far more beneficial for me to use in the development stage of the animation as it will allow for render times to decrease, which in turn will increased my workflow allowing me to change and tweak settings fast. After the development stage has been completed, I can then switch to the high render setting which will give me better detail ready to export to After Effects.

After completing my storyboard, I realised that I would need to find some interesting materials to texture my object with in my animation, this tutorial caught my eye because of how vibrant and interesting the textures were as well as the object itself. The tutorial was made by Patrick Foley:

Initial stage of the tutorial focused on the different render settings. Overall, the physical renderer was used and I learnt a lot about it that I never knew before – the physical renderer  setting is a special renderer, including a physical camera that will be used in order to render photographic effects such as real 3D Depth of Field, Motion Blur, Vignetting, Chromatic Aberration etc. The benefits of using the physical renderer is that its faster than using the standard renderer when dealing with images with multiple, combined effect listed previously – this will be a good setting for myself to use within my project as some of the scene will have Depth of Field enabled, meaning that the physical renderer will render it out quicker when compared to the standard. Additionally, Ambient Occlusion and Global Illumination were selected too – Ambient Occlusion (AO) determines the degree to which each visible surface point is exposed and darkens it accordingly & Global Illumination (GI) is the interaction of light between different objects within a scene (reflects light of different materials to illuminate it).

Alongside of the render settings being set-up, a camera was also added to the scene and angled accordingly – when it was added, the co-ordinates were all zeroed out so that when the shape was added it was centred perfectly. Although this is something very simplistic, it was also something I had never through about doing before, when testing I had always added the camera and roughly placed it in the centre of the screen, this process an guarantee that the object will always be centred 100% of the time (Shortcut letter ‘O’).

The second key part to the tutorial was the creation process of the objects. The main project consisted of 3 objects: A main sphere, An atom Array and Smaller surface spheres. It was interesting to see the how the objects were being layered up so that the atom array or the mesh was sitting inside of the larger sphere and also the smaller sphere were bing attached to the surface – I feel that the noise added to the larger sphere under Displacer > Shading > Shader > Noise made it more interesting and actually allowed for the atom array to look more organically integrated into the object. In addition, I didn’t know that I was able to add object to another objects surface under Object > Sphere & Up Vector > Surface within the cloner settings – this will be useful if I want to add any extra shapes to any object within my animation.

The last core part looked at the materials used to texturise the objects – the main sphere consisted of a really aesthetically pleasing marble effect that was made within the colour section of the material, I had full creative control over the colours as it gave me a gradient to select colour from as well as allowing me to control the strength of it too. The atom array consisted of a reflectance channel, that was coloured a faint yellow colour, as the underlaying properties of the object were very shiny, adding the yellow above made it appear to be gold in colour. And finally, the smaller surface sphere has very similar material characteristics to the larger sphere, just without the marbles and noise effect.

Another interesting piece of information that I found when following the tutorial was that Patrick used another display panel to view his project. I found this very useful when creating this tutorial as it was continuously rendering the scene allowing me to see what the object would look like with more detail and additionally, it also allowed me to fix the panel view to the camera – further meaning I could tweak it the editing panel and see a live preview of what the changes looked it. I feel that this would be extremely useful for my project, however, it is key to note that the performance of the instant rendering slowed down dramatically when textures were added, especially those that were reflective (like the gold mesh). The screen grab below shows how the primary large editing panel allowed me to make changes to the project while the smaller rendering panel gave me a live instant feedback.

The following screen grabs show my workflow within C4D and the renders are frames within my work: