This is a textual version of Ways to Speed Up Blender Cycles Rendering, hope Andrew won’t mind me writing a textual version of his video. ;) This post is mostly for self-reference and does not contains all the methods shown by Andrew.
We’ll see how we can create better renders and how render times can be reduced by merely changing some factory settings, and also what prices we might have to pay for that optimization.
This is kinda a manual for new Blender user which I compiled up when I was learning Blender.
First of all, when you’re switching from Maya, you’ll find the interface a bit alien. Blender has an option to behave like Maya, but in long run, that’s not gonna be productive.
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The Basics # Right-click selects any object. MMB rotates the scene (we’ll se pivot point later in the post). Shift+MMB+mouse movement pans the scene. Ctrl+MMB up and down zooms and zooms out of the level.
Back in time when I used to see Photoshop’s layers section, there was a list of things named like Darken, Multiply, Screen and so on. They used to change the color when that particular layer was placed on some other layer.
Later in my college days I came to know these were the well known blending modes. There are mathematical in nature and does maths on pixel by pixel basis.
Nuke is a very powerful VFX tool in the industry. But at the time of learning, people often don’t pay attention to the optimization. Which leaves them with relatively longer render times.
Note: Not every point can be followed. Do whatever is possible.
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Hardware Related # Get Two Hard Drive # When you read footage from the hard drive, and write/render to the same hard drive, you actually make hard drive do double the work. Keep another drive (maybe a small one?) to render/write stuff.
Below is a list of procedures a compositor should follow. I also have a blog post compiled of optimization tips, which should work as side document to this post.
Distortion # Evey footage has some sort of distortion. Not dealing with distortion before 3D integration can result in catastrophic disasters. It’s good to first undistort the background plate > do the CG integration > use the same undistortion data to re-distort the whole output. This way CG will be distorted as well. Giving a feel if it was shot with a camera.
Although newer version of Maya have incorporated Solid Angle’s Arnold renderer. NVIDIA’s (formerly mental images) mental ray is still used in production quality rendering.
People coming from Maya’s basic shader e.g. Phong, Blinn, Lambert don’t get daunted watching the mental ray shaders. So today I’ll explain what they actually mean.
**mi - **mi is short for mental images, the facility in which mental ray was developed. You now know what is that mi in all the shaders.
Every videographer once in their career gets in a situation where they face flickering of video, this happens in a low light situation. This guide will help you get out of that situation to some extent.
Adjust the Shutter # 180-degree shutter rule says to keep the shutter double of the fps. So that if we’re shooting at 1920x1080@24fps, our shutter should be minimum 48. Most camera won’t let you go down to 48 but you can round-up, safely.
