Testing... 123... Testing...

Stardust Glows

(TM) 2016 Copyright, Joseph A. Wraith 

   I think I spend most of my day on contract work testing animations prior to going to final renders.  It can be a real pain when you are trying to get a job out on a designated deadline and yet you still need approvals on motion prior to going forward with the final output.   Plus, you have to make sure that the renders look great not only in the motion, but also lighting, textures and what not.   Most of the time you end up with surprises if you don't test which can later lead to reanimation and re-renders.   No fun.   Rendering alone can take up to 2-4+ minutes a frame sometimes. Yes, you can do small renders without textures, lights and so on, but there are still possible issues that may occur that you didn't see doing them that way.   I do on occasion render like that, but I prefer the full on approach, I don't want any surprises at all.  I can see more and feel better control of the images at full size with everything on it.   

  I use programs such as Maxon's Cinema 4d with is awesome, but there Editor Rendering Engine leaves a lot to be desired.  Sometimes what you see is not what you get, especially when it comes to the Hair Plugin, I love this plug-in, but don't try and add Motion Blur to it when rendering in the Physical Render, the hair will disappear when it wants to, probably to many calculations and I have a very super-fast extremely jacked Mac Pro.   So I usually have to do motion blurs in post using After Effects and whatever plug-in will do it quickly.   It saves on rendering time anyway, but the AE blurs, no matter what plug-in you are using are still not quite as good as the C4d Motion blurs are when not using Hair.   I mean you can see when the Hair is actually being rendered between the missing hair frames that it would, or could possibly be a beautiful render.   It's a bit disappointing to say the least.    Yes, I have talked back and forth with Maxon about it and they have no clue.   They only offer that I should use their Standard Rendering Engine when rendering motion blurs on Hair, but I am not happy with their standard render's motion blur, it's not very good and is a little too random looking even when you use the controls, plus it's a render hog as well, it's just exasperating.   So you have to test, and test and test until you see what you want.   I don't have that kind of time and neither does my client.   Most of these animations I do are 1080 format at 30 fps so they are HUGE!  They can take several days to render just one scene, and when doing 7-10 scenes, that is 2 weeks down from doing anything else, but watching the soup boil.  More no fun.

   So I have to find things to do with my time, like create new art for myself, write a blog, go to the beach (if weather permits), play on the Xbox, you know - stuff to keep me busy between watching the render soup.   I also have another Mac to play on as well, but it's a bit older and not as fast as my new Black Can Mac.  So testing and rendering creates down-time because you don't want to pull the memory, or calculations from the renders to do something else on the same machine, it just slows it down more.

In the end, testing and rendering can be a good thing because you can work on your own stuff if you have an extra computer standing by, or you can find something else to do, but you still have to keep an eyeball on the work rendering because you will get surprises no matter what and you don't want to see those in post.

Back to the Render Soup...

JW