Hi,
I am wondering if someone here can help me out. I am trying to render a sequence of cloud using maya fluid effects. However, it's taking forever to render even at low quality. How can I improve the render quality and rendering time?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a million.
Stephen
you can lower ther resolution but then the lower quality render setting will show even more. You can make it pretty love like even 3x3x3 or whatever where the voxels are all square. What quality are you rendering at? (Both on the fluid and in the Render Globals)
thanks for the info. currently my render global is set to preview quality only. and my fluid resolution is set to 40x4x40 and shading quality is 4. My problem is that the rendered images still come out spotty and noisy and it takes about 6 min per frame. Thanks for the help, really appreciated.
shchein
you are doing clouds? Thats odd that you get that problem. The presets render pretty nicely and they have a resolution of about the same and a render quality of 1.5 ish.
6 minutes a frame isn't that bad really, I have renders that take 20 -30 minutes a frame, I've hard frames take longer than an hour. It's going to be hard to cut that doen much more than 6 minutes what were you hoping for? I can't belive it's spotty with those settings. Try Mental ray that might fix it.
I took the cloud preset from the visor and changed it's resolution to similar rez but with the shading quality at 1.5, .02, adaptive/jitter, linear. and it took 2:20 on a dual g5 2.0 ghz, it looked a liitle grain like textured, I'm assuming that's what you mean spotty, so I uppded the quality to 4 and it took 5:17 and there is no spotting. can you post an image of your spotting, I know duncan understands taht a lot better than I do he might just see it and know right away what to do.
I also tried a mental ray test with the 4 quality settings and it looked the best and took 5:23 so give that a try.
You can also try turning OFF useRealLights on the fluidShape(if the internal directional light is sufficient for your needs). Avoid having more than one light on a self shadowed fluid.. the render time could almost double with each new light. Also try Mental Ray. Its fluid render is more optimized.
Duncan
Hi Duncan,
Thanks for the advice. Switching to Mental Ray sure speed up the rendering speed. However, I still need to turn up the render quality in render global to get rid of the noise. I am still looking for a way to speed up even more. my target is about 2-3 min per frame for some cloud rendering. Hope I am not asking too much. Thanks.
Stephen
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the info. Yes I was trying to render some clouds and I started using the presets from the visor and tweaked to fit my needs. I know what you mean by grainy, I have no problem with that, I can always blur it a bit during compositing. I have tried Mental Ray and the results are better so I am staying with that. I think the spots in my render has something to do with the textures. I will try to work on it more. I would like to show you an image, but I don't know how to post it here. Thanks for the info, again.
Stephen
If you have a detailed noise texture(high frequency, high depth max) then you need higher shading quality settings to resolve it without dots. Avoid "billow" as it is slow. Also avoid hard thresholds in your opacity graph. The sharper and finer the density transitions in the cloud, the higher the required quality setting.
Duncan
Hi Duncan and Dave,
Thanks alot for the info. This has been very helpful. I will keep trying and I think I am getting there. Thanks again.
Stephen