Rendering animations using Vray can undoubtedly leave you in frustration when it comes to render times. The high gloss materials, reflections and displacements that you use for still images can make your total animation rendering time beyond manageable.
Here is a compiled list of tips and tricks to help keep those render times down but still keep a high standard of quality and there will be more to add soon. If you think you have any useful suggestions that you wish to share, you can leave them in a comment below or email them to us.
Displacement
Using displacement in still images is a slow process. When it comes to animation this process becomes far more complex and usually involves careful planning, especially if you need to keep that carpet looking like carpet.
Tip: For areas such as grass and carpet, use 3d mapping. The textures for the 2d mapping will need to be loaded for each frame and if the texture maps are large this will take some time. For carpet and grass, the edge length for 3d mapping can be set quite high and still look good. The lower the edge length, the more Vray subdivides the mesh and this increases the render times. Edge length is resolution dependant, the higher the resolution, the higher this value should be. You should also make sure that the view dependent option is enabled. This can reduce flickering due to the quality of the displacement being spread much more evenly.
Antialiasing filter
In order to keep the render times low, you usually sacrifice the quality of your subdivisions for lights and materials which in turn introduces noise.
Tip: By using sharpening filters such as Mitchell-Netravali you are introducing more noise into the render on top of the noise already created via the low subdivisions for lights and materials. Try to use blurring filters such as area instead. It will generate less noise and help blur out the noise that already exists.
Glossy reflections
The biggest slowdown of all is glossy reflections within your materials. There is no escaping using them if you want your materials to look realistic.
Tip: Keep the glossy reflection range between 0.7 and 1 and adjust the subdivisions accordingly. Chances are that within a animation lower glossy values will go un-noticed. If the result is satisfactory you can use light cache for glossy rays and then the calculations for glossy reflections will be much faster.
Reflection/refraction depth
Surrounding objects are important for reflections and refractions. The max depth determines how much of these surrounding objects are used within the calculation.
Tip: Lower your max depth values to 3 or 4. When a reflection or refraction can no longer be traced it will look to the exit colour. You would set the exit colour to a similar colour to the material that it is reflecting and/or refracting. You can control this individually for each material or in the global settings.
Global illumination
Vray slows down as more objects are introduced into the scene that are contributing to GI.
Tip: For objects such as trees in the background, exclude them from receiving and generating global illumination and shadows.
Calculating GI
Not everything has to be on during the pre-calculation of the GI.
Tip: Displacement can be turned off when pre-calculating the irradiance map and light cache. Turn it on when you do the final render.
Excluding objects
You may have areas within a scene that are not visible in the first few frames but are visible later on. Leaving these objects visible for the whole animation will certainly keep your render times high.
Tip: Plan your scene, use layers and group them accordingly. If there is an upper floor of a building that does not come into view whilst on the lower floor hide it completely. The chances of it contributing the reflections and/or refractions of the lower floor are small. Break the animation up in to small sequences and use multiple cameras.
Subdivisions
Shadows and glossy materials are controlled by subdivisions. A low subdivision gives higher noise and a high subdivision leads to longer the render times.
Tip: For animation, subdivisions can be lower than they would be for still images. There is much more going on in the scene, i.e. moving object’s and cameras. A little extra noise will go un-noticed.
Managing available memory
Large complex scenes require a lot of system memory to store all the information for rendering.
Tip: By using Vray proxies you will free up memory for other calculations. If you stay within the memory limit you won’t actually speed up rendering by using proxies. Once the memory has been used up, 3ds Max and Vray will start to use the system page file. This is when the rendering starts to slow down.
Vray uses dynamic memory and static memory to calculate various processes. These two processes can play against each other over the available system memory.
Tip: Processes such as displacement use dynamic memory. For heavy scenes that have displacement you can increase the dynamic memory limit to help the rendering process. Increase the default value to around half your available system RAM, memory must be kept free for other processes. Keep in mind that by increasing the dynamic memory limit you are reducing the amount available for the static memory.
To be continued…
If you have any questions about this post, or are in need of further explanation of any of the tips mentioned, please leave a comment below.
HI,
Thanks a lot for your detail information.
but i have some queries that i want to share with you.
Actually i am creating one environment in 3ds max with vray(One racing circuit with animation). in that circuit(race track) i want to show grass & ground displacement. But my scene is large. so plz advice me on how can i show grass & ground displacement.because it will take too much time for rendering. also How can i unwrap the terrain like stuff in 3ds max …
Reply…
Hi,
Please contact support and we will be happy to look at your issue for you.
For heavy scenes, raisng the Dynamic memory limit is very important. Depending on your available ram, 4000 up to 10000 MB is improving rendering speed a lot…
Hi,
Dynamic memory limit will indeed help with the render times but it is scene dependant. There are various processes within Vray that require either dynamic memory and or static memory.
These two memory types play against each other for the available RAM on the system. Things like displacement require dynamic memory, so you would increase the dynamic memory for scenes such as this but you risk reducing the static memory which is used for the majority of calculations.
I will add it in as a tip though. Thanks!
Hi,
firstly, let me congratulate you on this excellent website. I have gone thru most of the tuts posted here and wish to complete the same soon. Hope to see more of these in the future.
Secondly, I have a problem with an exterior scene animation. I have rendered a scene with a lot of trees in 3DS Max with alpha for the environ and have rendered the Background in Vue. So far so good. The problem is that when I put the trees on the BG, the trees have a white mask around them (antialiasing??) Now in the animation, the BG does not match the tips of the tree branches..
Any suggestions? I have already rendered over 3000 frames.
Regards,
GP
Hi,
If you are saving them as Targa files make sure Pre-multiplied Alpha is un-ticked and you render against black. Also use a non blurring filter like blackman.
Hi
I save these as .tiff files with the alpha channel on. Despite this, I get this issue. I had used hdri image for environment which is removed thru the alpha channel during compositing.
Alpha will remove any environment map used. If you want to keep the environment HDRI map then don’t use the alpha.
There are various ways to keep an environment background.
Hi
Let me rephrase this as I think, my communication is not clear.
I have rendered cameras separately both in 3DS Max and Vue and am compositing this in AE.
The 3DS Max file has the trees with HDRI Map in the environ which I am removing in AE.
Vue scenes are with lots of hills and clouds which will be the BG layer for the 3DS Max rendered images.
Now the issue is that the trees in 3DS Max are coming with a white mask around them which is visible when composited against the Vue output.
I am sure this is something to do with pre-multiply (AA) or something, but unable to sort this out.
Hi,
Did you try what I suggested above?
“If you are saving them as Targa files make sure Pre-multiplied Alpha is un-ticked and you render against black. Also use a non blurring filter like blackman.”
Also:
1) Try turning off the filter for the alpha in the bitmap settings. Set it to none.
2) In After Effects, I believe there is a setting to remove the white halo much like you can in Photoshop, called Interpret Footage. Or in Photoshop: layer, matting, remove white matt. Do this as a batch job.
3) Render at a much higher resolution and turn the AA filter off, then downsize the image in post. Then apply your sharpening or blurring filter.
Thanks James,
will try these out and let you of the results.
this tips are very useful to me thank you very much
Hello, you are talking about memory handling (static+dynamic). What is about the new feature in Vray to set the memory to 0, so vray is taking as much memory as it need. Is this the best solution for the future or where is the difference?
Thanks for starting this posting – there are much uncertainties for this issue.
Best Regards
When you set the Dynamic memory limit to 0 Vray will use as much free memory as there is available. Since there is no limit on the amount of memory Vray will use, there is a risk of your system crashing.
I wouldn’t recommend using it all the time, unless you really need to use all your memory for a complex scene.
my current system
SOFTWARE
windows 7, 64 bit
vray 2.0 64 bit
3ds max design 2012 64bit
HARDWARE
2 xenon 5450 3.00 GHZ processors
quadro fx 4600 756MB
8bg RAM
I was using 8GB ram and quadro fx4600 but now i am upgrading to 24GB ram GTX 590 how will this affect my rendering performance in Vray after this upgrade any idea ?
The Quadro graphics graphics cards are designed to handle heavy constant use such as CAD as they are able to run at a lower temperature. This also benefits from 112 CUDA cores which can be used for real time rendering but it has only 768MB of memory which is not much for storing your scene for rendering and running your viewport / other applications.
The GTX 590 is a much newer card and is not intended for heavy constant use. On paper is much faster and from experience they handle heavy constant use fine providing there is enough cooling as they get hot. It has 1024 CUDA cores and two separate GPU’s each holding 1536MB which totals 3072MB. But bare in mind the scene can only load on one GPU not two. So you would only have 1536MB of available memory. See here for a bench mark test completed by Vray users on GPU rendering. http://www.mintviz.com/wp-content/uploads/gpu_chart2.png. Your FX 4600 is not on there but you can clearly see where the GTX 590 sits in the stats. In order to render using the GPU you must use Vray RT. The GPU will not contribute to the rendering at all when using the CPU.
24GB of RAM will certainly improve your rendering times as it will load and prepare your scene for rendering much faster than before. It will also help with larger scenes that have things such as displacement. You can never have enough memory! Keep in mind RAM is just memory it doesn’t make your actual rendering go any faster it just makes it load faster. The actual rendering is done by the CPU.
thanks a lot james, looking at the benchmark for the GTX590 its impressive and i feel wuite satisfied with the benchmark result so hopefully with 24GB ram and GTX590 i assume will have good render time and performance. i think i saw on some other site it was mentioned the GTX590 uses 1536MB and the other 1536MB for physic calculation but u can assign both the GPUs if your not going to use physic calculation. IS THIS TRUE ? so will the extra 24GB ram will make the light cache calculation faster when rendering ? and for the final image rendering the CPU is doing the rendering fast or slow depending on the type of CPU type n speed
Hi,
Each calculation uses a combination of CPU and memory. The more RAM available the faster the data is fed to the CPU. Light cache for example uses both memory and CPU. When increasing or decreasing the sample size, the RAM usage is affected. In regards to the GTX 590, the scene has to be loaded on to both GPU’s. It is the same as having two separate graphics cards working together. As a comparison 1 x GTX 590 will be as fast as having 2 x GTX 570.
hi i am new to this site
can u suggest the best configuration for rendering animations and still images with real fast…right now i am using intel xeon quade core with 8 gb ram dual processor
Welcome to MintViz!
Upgrading your system memory will certainly speed things up. Perhaps double it to 16GB? If office space isn’t an issue I strongly recommend investing in a small render farm rather than a single PC. It will help you manage your projects much more efficiently.
any suggestion for a modest render farm, what is the price range ? any links ?
The best space saving option would be to purchase a blade/rack mounted system. Depending on the space available you could buy a rack that has room for future expansion. This how ever can be expensive http://www.boxxtech.com/products/RenderBOXX/rendering_Series.asp. The cheaper option would be to have a range of desktop PC’s but this would require a lot of space. The desktop PC’s can be what ever you can fit within budget. As you have a PC already, I would advise matching the specification of that at least.
plz im in a deep trouble of rendering an animation with 200 frames with vray.plz help me to render it fast.help me soon plz.thanks so much
Hi,
We offer one to one consultancy to help solve the issue you are having with your project. Email us to find out further information.
Hi, I’d like to disagree with you about disabling displacement on a prepass phase: the gi samples will be in a wrong place there for causing problems, however in cases where displacement is very small this could work
Hi,
Yes, this is true. It depends entirely on your scene, some of the tips mentioned will work, some will not.
Im new in this area, im sorry if my english is bad..
which one do u prefer?
Gtx580 3gb or 590 ?
big regards.
The memory available on the GTX 590 3GB is split in half, so it is essentially two graphics cards. Where as the memory on the GTX 580 3GB is not. If you were to purchase one of them, the GTX 580 would be a better choice for available memory.
thx for the reply…
i wanna rebuild my pc this week..
gimme an advice pls..
proc. i7 26ooK
Mobo..?
Ram ..?
PSU..? minimum voltage?
GPU.. 580 3gb
how about the GPU brand? im still confuse about the quality.
and how about ssd? is it amust?
im using this PC for 3dmax + vray, Phtshp, AE & illustrator
im sorry if my english bad
best regrds
Hi,
It would be difficult to suggest a PC specification without a budget. Also there would be an issue of availability from country to country. My advice would be to look at websites such as http://www.dell.com and have a look at their high end PC set ups. Such as the Dell Precision Workstations that are specifically designed for CAD.
2000$ max
Hi!
Thanks for this page. Really helpful. One question:
Does it matter how I setup my AA mode and filter for Irradiance Map pre-calculation? I know I need it right for rendering, but not sure about pre-calc.
Same question goes to Global Subdivision Multiplier.
Thanks again.
It is best to have all your settings finalised prior to pre-calculating. Changing them after may well lead to unwanted artifacts.
Hi, i am rendering a animation with 3 boxes in the studio scene, and the textures of the boxes are flickering, only the textures. I am using the basic vray materials with a png in the diffuse channel, without reflection, gloss or another effect .
I am using IRR+ brutal force, preset High-Animation.
I’m thinking that this can be the AA.
Any tip?
The anti aliasing settings may well be the cause of the flickering, what are your settings? Certainly for animation it is best to use a blurring filter such as area rather than a sharpening filter.
Final Render
Adaptive QMC
min 2
max 4
VRayLanczosFilter
Without flickering but increase the rendering time a lot.
Before i was using:
Adaptive Subdivision
min -1
max 2
Area
Using adaptive subdivision will certainly cause flickering, have a read here http://www.interstation3d.com/tutorials/vray_dmc_sampler/demistyfing_dmc.html. It is a very detailed article on how sampling works. You mention adaptive QMC, what version of V-Ray are you using? The latest version uses adaptive DMC.