Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Rendering on new iMac 2.1ghz for 2 weeks..
- Thread starter atomcoeur
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
How much memory does your machine have?
If your machine starts swapping while rendering, adding memory can easily more than half the rendering time.
Each time memory gets swapped on disk, all the pending operations are stopped while the page is written on disk (slow as hell) or a new one is loaded in memory (a tad faster), then the rendering of the frame goes on.
So you have the swapping overhead to take into account
BUT if you are rendering on disk, you end up with concurrent access on your hard drive (although I'd bet that swapping memory has a higer priority than writing userspace data).
Long story short, swapping on a memory / disk intensive task may very well be your bottleneck, even if you had a quad G5 with 512 megs, or an octo cray one, the rendering would still take weeks.
well, now, feel free to post and state that you have 4gigs in your iMac so I can look like a pompous prick
Good luck with your project!
If your machine starts swapping while rendering, adding memory can easily more than half the rendering time.
Each time memory gets swapped on disk, all the pending operations are stopped while the page is written on disk (slow as hell) or a new one is loaded in memory (a tad faster), then the rendering of the frame goes on.
So you have the swapping overhead to take into account
BUT if you are rendering on disk, you end up with concurrent access on your hard drive (although I'd bet that swapping memory has a higer priority than writing userspace data).
Long story short, swapping on a memory / disk intensive task may very well be your bottleneck, even if you had a quad G5 with 512 megs, or an octo cray one, the rendering would still take weeks.
well, now, feel free to post and state that you have 4gigs in your iMac so I can look like a pompous prick
Good luck with your project!
lolPalad1 said:well, now, feel free to post and state that you have 4gigs in your iMac so I can look like a pompous prick
maybe there is somebody with a brand new quad that can help you. if someone has this cinema app ass wel, maybe someone would like to test how fast his/her quad can do it.
even a better idea is to start an 'Apple Mac Hardware - Cinema Test', make your scene downloadable and people will want to see how fast they can do it. They do have to hand in the result off course.
even a better idea is to start an 'Apple Mac Hardware - Cinema Test', make your scene downloadable and people will want to see how fast they can do it. They do have to hand in the result off course.
hcuar said:It'll be fine... they are spec'd to run that way. Granted you are causing wear and tear... however most people think that just starting up your computer daily causes more than using it!
yea i always say that hehe.. I guess it'd be alright I'm just getting paranoid cause it's new although come to think of it my pbook ti has gone through worse - i've been known to give my computers a good work-out..... anw thanks everybody!
Mac Kiwi said:
Thanks for the tip. Can't believe I haven't thought of that before....
Doesn't crash often, but when it does, it's damn annoying.
atomcoeur said:
Ok
No like the others said stills wont be faster,just safer.
Something to watch for with reflections is that you dont have a mirror to a mirror type situation where one just bounces rays from one to the other.
You can use compositing tags to reduce the aliasing etc on objects further in the bg.The new ver 9.5 lets you add basically anything as include exclude to a comp tag now,if youre using 9.5 that is.
Pyrocluster is known for being waaaaay slow.It was released with 8 I think it was and people used it for a while and then just didnt,it was just to slow.
If you can hold off your render and have a bit of cash you can spend then get Pers {Mdme Sadie} Storm Tracer plugin,its really quick.All its effects are rendered using sprites as opposed to particles.Its a very capable plugin.
As for lights a good rule of thumb is to turn them all off and then slowly turn one on and render.If you check your lights this way then quite often you will find a couple of fills may be able to be chucked as they dont do much.Sometimes you can also substitue visible lights with some noise,will reduce your render hit once again.I am assuming your shadow maps are 256x256 or maybe a little bigger?
dubbz said:Thanks for the tip. Can't believe I haven't thought of that before....
Doesn't crash often, but when it does, it's damn annoying.
nw
I read a story on CG Talk one day a few years ago.Some poor guy was doing a huge render {May have been Maya} anyway he used .mov.His render then crashed about half way through a couple of thousand frames.He was left with some kind of corupted QT file which was about 700m in size I think.In the end he just had to chuck the QT file and start again.
Great thing about stills is you can also run an action or make a droplet to tweak stuff in post.
Mac Kiwi said:
another great thing kiwi, remember the memory overload i had? with stills it barely uses half of my memory and renders at a costant rate of 1f per 3 min, which is fantastic (however slow it may sound)- so thanks for that. I think I'm going to renice Cinema4d so it uses 95% of the CPU as opposed to the 77% it uses now - and then pray.
As for the pyrocluster thanks for the tip - didn't know you could get sprites on C4D - it's a bit too late now anw but i'm ok with its speed cause i'm using it at a very very low res.
Excellent
Oh Pyro does an excellent job of pyroclastic effects dont get me wrong,the render hit just doesnt justify it is all.
Good luck.
Oh Pyro does an excellent job of pyroclastic effects dont get me wrong,the render hit just doesnt justify it is all.
Good luck.
Just 65C?
With the temperature monitor i have seen that my imac is above 65 (all the time) and hovers arround 75-80C or even 83 when using handbreak. Do you think it is time i called apple? And i am sure it is in Centigrade!
With the temperature monitor i have seen that my imac is above 65 (all the time) and hovers arround 75-80C or even 83 when using handbreak. Do you think it is time i called apple? And i am sure it is in Centigrade!
RENDER TO/FROM AN EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE!!!
Can't emphasize that enough, the iMac G5s do get uncomfortably hot when encoding, especially for that length of time. As long as all of the rendering is based on an external disk, you'll eliminate a HUGE source of heat within the machine. Trust me, I've had my machine shut itself off because it got too hot doing exactly what you're trying to do. Once you go external, no problems.
This is, of course, assuming that you don't want to just leave the whole thing in a refrigerator.
Can't emphasize that enough, the iMac G5s do get uncomfortably hot when encoding, especially for that length of time. As long as all of the rendering is based on an external disk, you'll eliminate a HUGE source of heat within the machine. Trust me, I've had my machine shut itself off because it got too hot doing exactly what you're trying to do. Once you go external, no problems.
This is, of course, assuming that you don't want to just leave the whole thing in a refrigerator.
Seeing posts like this makes me feel bad owning a Dual 2.0 GHZ Rev.B G5.
The most I use the processing power for, is Folding@home, then ripping and encoding DVD files I have, Digitizing Albums (good old LPs), encoding video for my iPod Gen5, and some light work in the Gimp.
Whatever you are rendering, I hope it goes well, and like many of the folders on here have stated (especially those with iMacs) you should be fine. Just keep it nice and cool, and if possible do this kind of work on an external drive .
The most I use the processing power for, is Folding@home, then ripping and encoding DVD files I have, Digitizing Albums (good old LPs), encoding video for my iPod Gen5, and some light work in the Gimp.
Whatever you are rendering, I hope it goes well, and like many of the folders on here have stated (especially those with iMacs) you should be fine. Just keep it nice and cool, and if possible do this kind of work on an external drive
.
3D animation is one of the most processor intensive things your computer can do. Thousands of consecutive images rendered each needing calculations of lighting, textures, reflections, movement, motion blur, particles, camera movements and post processing. All that and after the two weeks of rendering you will end up with about 15 to 20 minutes of footage (+or- depending on complexity).dops7107 said:
Sorry, i don't actually have anything useful to tell you ... but wow, leaving a computer to "compute" for 2-3 weeks. I know nothing about Cimema4d. What takes that long to calculate??
This is one reason (there are many) why Pixar takes 3 years to complete a 90 minute film.
It all depends on what is in the render frame at the time. your animation may progressivley become more complex as it moves along. a reflective object that is not in the rendered frame in the beginning of the clip may slow the process as it enters into the picture and logically speed up the render as it leaves.atomcoeur said:
The estimated render time only applies to the estimated time of the current frame render, times the remaining frames. I'm pretty sure your resulting render time will be days +/- different than the original estimate.