Optimizing the Render
Added 2019-07-19 21:46:23 +0000 UTCHey guys! Due to the long time periods involved in the work that I do for my animations (plus the fact that I'm still working a full time job), I'm not able to post content updates as regularly as I'd like. So, to help supplement that, I'm going to try to make regular progress updates like this to share what I'm up to with the community ^.^
I've been struggling a bit with render times for Hit the Showers. Even after switching to a GPU based engine and investing in an RTX 2080 Ti, my PC was spending upwards of 25 to 45 minutes per frame, putting the project completion date some 4 to 6 months into the future. The problem is that internal scenes with small light sources and fur produce a LOT of noise in the render unless I really crank up the sample count, which increases rendering time proportionately.
Well, I think I had a breakthrough the other night, when I managed to knock about 10 minutes per frame off that figure x3 The solution was to aggressively target the rendering engine to those high noise areas. Not only did this speed up the rendering. but the final image was higher quality as a result. This might not work as well for closeups, where the screen is filled with fur (the source of most of my noise), but I think I'm on the right track ^.^
On top of that, I'm planning on investing in a second RTX 2080 Ti card. My MB will support it, but heat management is another question since just this single card produces enough heat at max load to turn my tower into a volcano LOL
I also found some good settings in After Effects to clean up that remaining noise and make the final version clean enough to be acceptable =)
