Slow render

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genieworx
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Slow render

Post by genieworx »

we are trying to render a number of scenes from an animation we did.
At the very start we made the mistake of creating all the scenes in AI and ended up with the line thickness problem. We did not have time to recreate the vector files nor the people who knew how to draw in moho. Usually the people who design our characters and the people who animate are different. Any ways our solution was to render the anims 4 times the orignal size take it to a compositing prog and scale it down so the line thinkness will get smaller (thanks to moho tech help).. this worked nicely as long as we render in uncompressed. We tried to use the animation codec but at this resolution the final output has serious broken frames (with the animation codec).. so we ended up using the uncompressed.
Now the problem is the animations seems to take tooooo long to render we dont think this was the case when we did some test anims. Anyways maybe this is normal at this resolution but it take us about 48 hours to render a 9 second scene with medium complexity. we use a g4 733 with 640 mb ram..
Do you think we are doing something wrong here? we are doing batch rendering most of the time,,,
thank you....

BTW for the price moho rocks...
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

That does sound like a really long time to render. It comes out to about 10 minutes per frame? Depending on the complexity of the scene and the kind of effects you're using, I guess it could take that long. What kind of resolution are you using?
genieworx
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Post by genieworx »

hey...

Its 3412 x 1920
uncompressed


do you have any idea why the animation codec messes up the frames??

thanks
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

Are you sure the frames are messed up? I'm sure it wouldn't be able to play them back in real time, and so you would see tearing or other artifacts if you tried to play it back. If you just move the timeline to a random frame in the animation, how does that one frame look?
genieworx
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Post by genieworx »

yeah i am sure,,,
it gets all broken up when we play it on qt or when we pause it on a single frame. we took it to after effects and commotion to see if we can rerender it, scaled down to the correct size but the frames are all fragmented.
it only happens at this resolution if we go 25% less than this its ok..
but more than the broken frames we are more worried about the rendering time. i guess this is normal for such huge size, right? maybe the broken images is a codec error.
also i am wondering,, why does moho render objects that are hidden behind other objects. moho seems to be rendering from the bottom layer to top regardless of the visibility of the object. If i am not wrong i think it also renders objects that are out of frame because the rendering time does not change regardless of the camera being zoomed in to an object or showing the wide.
just wondering if there was a way to render just the top layer and whats visible. If this is a technical limitation its fine i understand but this is major rendering time grrrr if we are to do a lot of long animations. we are thinking of remdering seperate layers and combine them later in a compositing prog..this might save us more time. right?
i really love moho and i think you guys are doing a great job. the ai import is gettin better. i really dont care about gradients and effects from ai to moho.. but if you can get the lines interpreted perfect i will be real happy.. (i know this has been talked about here a lot and you guys have come real far on this... :)
we have been a doing a lot of batch rendering, it would be great if we can customize each file on the render que and also if the rendered filename would remain on the render que with a mark to indicate rendered. i wish there was an estimated time indicator.
also wondering are there plans to enable moho to network render?
sorry for the long messsge and big wishes..
you guys are doing a fantastic job,.. thanks
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Lost Marble
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Post by Lost Marble »

genieworx wrote:also i am wondering,, why does moho render objects that are hidden behind other objects. moho seems to be rendering from the bottom layer to top regardless of the visibility of the object.
This isn't as simple as it may appear. To humans, it may be easy to tell that object A is completely covered by object B, and so it can be ignored. To Moho, however, this isn't apparent until object B is rendered, and at that point A is already done. To make things more complicated, what if object A casts a shadow? Even if object A is completely covered by B, you might be able to see part of the shadow. In that case, A must still be rendered in order to compute the shape of the shadow it casts.

These are just the simple examples. There are many situations where it would be very difficult to determine in advance whether or not object A is visible or if it is covered up by object B. Think layer masks, partial transparency, brushes or noise that break up the shape of a line, etc.
genieworx wrote:If i am not wrong i think it also renders objects that are out of frame because the rendering time does not change regardless of the camera being zoomed in to an object or showing the wide.
No, objects that are out of frame are not nomally rendered. If the layer has an effect like layer shadow or layer blur, then some objects that are just offscreen will be rendered, since they may contribute to the visible shadow. If you don't have any layer effects, then offscreen objects are skipped.
genieworx wrote:it would be great if we can customize each file on the render que
Customize in what way?
genieworx wrote:i wish there was an estimated time indicator.
If you render from the command line (see below), there is an option to print out some status about the remaining time. This is only an estimate though.
genieworx wrote:also wondering are there plans to enable moho to network render?
Moho can render from the command line now. So, setting up a network render could theoretically be done by anyone with some scripting experience. Network rendering doesn't necessarily require direct support in Moho. For more about command-line rendering, see here:

http://www.lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1318
genieworx
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Joined: Tue Feb 01, 2005 9:05 am

Post by genieworx »

thank you for the quick reply.. appreciate it..
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