Progress Log: Optimizing (Patreon)

First of all I want to say an enormous thank you to everyone who is still here! I honestly thought when I put out the post talking about a long wait for this animation, that most people would up and leave, so to see that this many folks want to support me in making a big project is really touching. Thank you :)

The voice acting came back for the intro section of the short film (I really need to come up with a title for it) so I can now animate the faces to match it and then set that all rendering.

My plan from the start was to render this using RenderStreet's One subscription. I wanted to get good quality lighting and materials in a complex scene, and not have to sacrifice on that in order to render it at home. For about $120 monthly you get 30 minutes of rendering time per frame using the One membership, which is sooo cheap, as this project would cost thousands of dollars on a standard render farm! And especially thanks to the increase support from you recently, I can afford to reinvest some of that money back into doing this.

All seemed good when their price calculator suggested one frame would take 17 minutes, which is well under the 30min One subscription. Unfortunately a few days ago when I bought it and tried it, a single frame was taking nearly an hour! Not the 17 minutes estimated... Of course I can't afford $240 for the upgrade that gives you an hour per frame, nor is that reasonable timing anyway for rendering this much footage, so I went back in to see how I could improve things and cut the time in half.

(Ignore the excessive floating dust, it's toned down now)

Over the last few days I've paused animating and been working hard to optimize the scene. This includes reducing ray trace bounces, clamping light contributions, disabling and faking caustics if necessary, reducing geometry... Lots of little things. Literally anything I could do to avoid using Eevee, because the Cycles lighting in this scene is so much better!

Unfortunately with all that, I was still coming in over 30 minutes a frame. So I did the biggest change that sucks, reducing samples. From 8192 down to 4096. In this particular scene, that's low enough that you can see loads of noise in the darker areas and the characters' hair from frame to frame, which isn't a good look for a video.

Fortunately temporal denoising has gotten quite good lately, and more easily accessible. Blender has its own methods for it, but it's not the simplest to use at the moment. However I do all my editing in DaVinci Resolve and that has its own temporal stabilizer/denoiser, so I gave that a test and after some tweaking, it works really well!

Another trick I'll be using is to render the background and the characters separately. This compositing is quite common anyway, and it'll help me to render both female and futa versions of Batgirl and Harley without having to needlessly waste time on background elements on both.

With all that prepared, it's finally rendering in a reasonable time! Now I can get back to animating :)