C4D to Renderman

[Srek]

To the best of my knowledge several studios already created simple renderman exporter for CINEMA 4D. Afaik none of them supports CINEMA 4D materials. The only RIB exporter with a very good support for CINEMA 4D materials is the one from MAXON.
Sadly it's currently only available to a few Studios but not via the normal sales channels.
Cheers
Björn

[andrewillingworth]

Also I need to point out I am using a MacPro 2 x 3ghz Xeon Dualcore and 10.4.9

[okazaky]

As far as I know (and in my personal opinion) Cinema's Renderer is one of the fastest on the market. Maybe that some of your settings are simply too high.
i don't know about a bridge to Renderman but there will be a vray integration soon I think ;)

http://vrayforc4d.com/

[andrewillingworth]

Sadly it's currently only available to a few Studios but not via the normal sales channels.
Cheers
Björn

Why not? and how do I get into an abnormal sales channel.

[andrewillingworth]

settings are simply too high.
i don't know about a bridge to Renderman but there will be a vray integration soon I think ;)

http://vrayforc4d.com/

Thanks but I don't think so - I have everything set to the minimum acceptable level. I have GI off, Caustics off, Ambient Occulsion off, Antialiassing set to Best Animation 10% 2x2; 4x4. 720X576 Pal. Frames in a 600 frame animation is taking 5 minutes per frame, It is a 60mb scene file.

[brammelo]

The RIB exporter is part of a larger package, and for that larger package you need a dedicated support team - think larger studio's. If you think your situation is different than others and that it justifies the use of the RIB exporter, then contact MAXON directly.

[andrewillingworth]

If you think your situation is different than others and that it justifies the use of the RIB exporter, then contact MAXON directly.

I find that strange - isn't it about money - if I am pepared to pay for it what more do I need.
Maya now comes with a plugin straight into Renderman

[Srek]

Why not?
I don't know, i'm not realy involved in business and sales decisions.
and how do I get into an abnormal sales channel.
You don't, because there are no abnormal sales channels.
To the best of my knowledge the exporter becomes available to studios under special contracts.
Hopefully this changes sometimes in the future since i would like to see it in wider use.
James MK made good use of it in his winning EON challenge entry.

Cheers
Björn

[Per-Anders]

Thanks but I don't think so - I have everything set to the minimum acceptable level. I have GI off, Caustics off, Ambient Occulsion off, Antialiassing set to Best Animation 10% 2x2; 4x4. 720X576 Pal. Frames in a 600 frame animation is taking 5 minutes per frame, It is a 60mb scene file.

You AA settings are rather high, 2x2 is now your minimum, i.e. everything will receive 2x supersampling (i.e. the equivalent of rendering the whole image at double the dimensions, four samples per pixel at minimum, and 16 samples at max with the 4x4), leave the base at 1x1 and instead make use of the threshold setting to control when and where aa occurs. You also don't mention your materials or lighting uses, blurry reflections and refraction will always be big hits, as will high reflection, refraction depths or ray depths (e.g. going through many placards). Area lights will take longer to render and aren't always required, they're the equivalent of many individual omni or spot lights, area shadows take even more time to render, and again must be optimized for the scene as they are a huge hit on the scene itself. SPD displacement will result in a large slowdown depending on the settings again and so will using high settings on things like HyperNurbs, particles and Metaballs/Metasurfaces. Effects like SSS and Chanlum will incur a significant speed hit too.

As a basic rule of thumb, if the slowness is in a huge delay in the setup of the scene, i.e. before a single pixel is rendered, then you will see little or no speedup with an external or alternative render engine, as generally speaking that comes form things like prerolling particle effects, subdividing geometry, generating the mesh data and so on. If you are seeing a slowdown during the render of the scene itself, then it's time to debug the scene or you may find some benefits with using another render engine. Every render engine has some strength or weakness, for instance the REYES based engines including most of the Renderman compliant engines will take no speed hit for displacement for instance, that's not the same thing as saying the rendering itself was originally all that fast before displacement was added, just that you wont notice much difference in render time between a scene with or without it, they do however suffer badly with any ray traced effect, slowing down hugely, and they do not take to polygonal geometry too well by and large. Final Render is the fastest out there for smooth GI and handles displacement pretty well, but is much slower than AR for general scanline rendering. VRay has excellent GI and blurry reflections that don't seem to take the same speed hit as the other render engines such as AR, however it isn't super speedy overall. Mental Ray has some great shaders, the superb MiSSS for instance as well as being overall very well balanced, if you tweak it a lot you can get it to be as fast and in some cases faster than AR, however without knowing it's settings most of the time you'll find it's a lot slower, Maxwell~Renderer produces the most physically accurate lighting and rendering (or so we're told), however it is exceptionally slow, so probably out of the question here as you're only interested in render speed.

Mainly what I'm saying is that you should try to find the engine that most fits your specific needs because none are a master of all situations, everything has it's Achiles heel unfortunately.

[andrewillingworth]

Mainly what I'm saying is that you should try to find the engine that most fits your specific needs because none are a master of all situations, everything has it's Achiles heel unfortunately.
This is terrific advice thanks for taking the time.

[vid2k2]

Just a sidenote, If you really need the sequence "NOW", and the work is billable,
consider using a render farm service like render king. They've already got the raw power
to reduce that 5 min per frame x many render machines.

As I understand it, Dann is up to date with software and hardware.
(no, I do not work for RK nor am i compensated in any way shape or form)

[andrewillingworth]

Just a sidenote, If you really need the sequence "NOW", and the work is billable,
consider using a render farm service like render king. They've already got the raw power
to reduce that 5 min per frame x many render machines.

I have thought of that, but confidentiality is a problem. Also I do have a number of machines I could throw into the fray - but I don't like fiddling with network settings - turning off DHCP and going manual on the ip addresses on a wireless network - but I can see that i might have too. Any settings below the minimum I currently set just too significantly reduces the quality.

[vibrunnica]

check this out ... http://savards.fuzehost.com/RibExporter.htm

[JamesMK]

http://savards.fuzehost.com/RibExporter.htm

While undoubtedly a noble effort, that exporter does not appear to be anywhere near a state where it would be useful in production. All the main reasons for using PRMan (or any other REYES-based renderer) are the very same things that the exporter in question does not yet support (listed under "future" ).

Aside from the infinite customization possibilities and SL, there's basically four main areas where this type of renderer excels, by design: true subdivision surfaces, true sub-pixel displacement (n.b. not sub-POLY), extremely fast and extremely accurate motion blur, and finally very good looking and accurate DOF calculated faster than you can say "z-buffer". All of this of course targeting animation needs, not really the odd still render, where it usually makes no sense at all to use renderman over our own AR.

With the aforementioned exporter supporting neither animation nor deformation, it would be pretty pointless, unless of course you're only in it for some general experimentation and playing around. But for production, it would only be a waste of time as far as I can see.




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[LucentDreams]

the renderman connection by maxon won't likely be a sales point until its really simple for anyone in the masses to use imo.

[andrewillingworth]

curate motion blur, and finally very good looking and accurate DOF calculated faster than you can say "z-buffer".
.
This is why i have a compelling interest in developing an animation environement - C4D is just not curently fast enough. Now the question is how to persuade Maxon to make a plug in available.

Also does it enable a complete transfer of everything? animation and materials

[JamesMK]

Also does it enable a complete transfer of everything? animation and materials
Due to the nature of the NDAs involved, I dare not say anything else than simply repeating what Srek said on page one - "The only RIB exporter with a very good support for CINEMA 4D materials is the one from MAXON."

EDIT: Also, it's important to keep in mind that there are still lots of things that AR actually does both faster and easier. So, since "animation environment" can mean wildly different things, it all depends on the exact needs and what type of animation if it's a worthwhile path or not.

Generally, I'd say setting up shots for any kind of renderman use is quite a bit more time-consuming than going the native route, and that might be a pretty important point depending on the production environment and available man power. I'm pretty certain that the majority of studios using a renderman pipeline have at least one rendering TD dedicated only to handle the technical bits, thus offloading the guys who do modeling/animation/layout etcetera. This is a very different situation from using AR out of the box, where pretty much anybody can set up anything in a very short time.

What I'm trying to say is that it's not all just green grass on the other side of the fence.



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[LemonNado]

RIB Exporter?! LOL... I did not even know such a thing exists from Maxon...
HA, I know someone very well who spend a LOT of money on a different package just BECAUSE C4D 'obviously' has no other render engine which makes sense than AR. Who knew that you have to walk down into the basement, knock at the door, have a password ready, walk up to the hatch which says 'beware of the Gator', open that and find a note with all the 'secret' products Maxon has. Of course, once read, it seems obvious that this note has to be eaten and after that one has to be shot for knowing to much.
THAT just made my weekend...
Rainer

[LucentDreams]

it was annnounced two or three years ago, even demonstrated in a very early state compared to what it is now.

Sadly we can't talk about it really more than what srek has said, but there are a few results out there.

Smart advise from james too, and do know that there are many different Renderman compliant renderers, I use Air more than 3Delight, but honestly 3Delight is a lot faster for several things, but anything raytraced, AIR is going to dominate in at it is a raytracer not a reyes renderer even though its built on the renderman specs.

[andrewillingworth]

I just find it strangley perverse, Maxon have a tool which could help me be a happier person but because I don't belong to an exclusive club nobody knows anything about I can't have it unless I can say why I need it in a form of words accepatble to Maxon I can't step up and taste the fruits. Let me put it this way rendering a large scene file in AR takes too long and I don't only mean the final product I mean the previews and test sequences - I need a render engine that will enable me to render exceptional quality complex animations without flickering crawling textures with volumetric lighting. At the moment sophisticated animations are a compromise and that is getting me thinking....

[JamesMK]

I just find it strangley perverse, Maxon have a tool which could help me be a happier person

I'm not too sure about that to be honest. If I've understood things correctly, you mainly do archvis, and I can say with 99% certainty that both FinalRender and the upcoming VRay would be more likely to make you a happier person.

but because I don't belong to an exclusive club nobody knows anything about I can't have it unless I can say why I need it in a form of words accepatble to Maxon I can't step up and taste the fruits. Let me put it this way rendering a large scene file in AR takes too long and I don't only mean the final product I mean the previews and test sequences

I never do previews and test sequences with renderman. The total time required is less when I simply use OpenGL/AR for that - it's not worth it.

- I need a render engine that will enable me to render exceptional quality complex animations without flickering crawling textures with volumetric lighting. At the moment sophisticated animations are a compromise and that is getting me thinking....

Volumetric lighting is faster, by orders of magnitude, in AR than 3Delight. I don't know how Air and PRMan compare, but I guess it's the same. AR has insanely fast volumetrics.


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[andrewillingworth]

Thanks jamesMK i take your points. I find that the only way I can avoid crawling textures is to up the AA (GI off and AO off) this does induce a slow down. We hook up all the machines to chug out frames. Look I don't want to complicate my life anymore then it is. But if there is a render engine that enables me to more quickly reach my visualisation objectives. Gone are the days of a clunky animated flying camera of a clients previous project - we are drifting into highly polished professional cinematic productions using broadcast quality video, FCP, Shake and so on. Iam looking for speed, excellent depth of field, and hazy effects. For the rest C4D is okay. The clincher has to be how easy do large C4D scenes export to that render engine.

[Simon Wicker]

because I don't belong to an exclusive club.

exclusive club in this situation just means maxon's beta-testers so it is hardly suprising that they have access to developmental code.

cheers, simon w.

[Simon Wicker]

oh, and i should mention that if you are getting crawling textures you should post your settings because there are numerous ways of defeating this within cinema and perhaps someone could come up with something to help you out there.

however without knowing a little more detail in how your scenes are being set up and textured then no-one will be able to help.

cheers, simon w.

[andrewillingworth]

exclusive club in this situation just means maxon's beta-testers so it is hardly suprising that they have access to developmental code.

cheers, simon w.

I understand that the RIB plugin is made available to studio's who have a dedicated service contract with Maxon. That suggests it is a channel other then Beta testers.

[andrewillingworth]

oh, and i should mention that if you are getting crawling textures you should post your settings because there are numerous ways of defeating this within cinema and perhaps someone could come up with something to help you out there.

however without knowing a little more detail in how your scenes are being set up and textured then no-one will be able to help.

cheers, simon w.

I am able to get crawl free ultra smooth animations, but the point is the render time premium that comes with that. (Iam happy to discuss the optimum setting range with anyone who has knowledge of this). With any render engine and render farm solution it is a matter of compromise - faster render times lower quality - I want to investigate how I can get higher quality results at lower render times - It seems to me that most serious CG artists who use C4D appear to be using an external renderer, but that to my mind introducers another level of compromise how to get everything out of C4D into that external render engine. Which way to invest - build a massive render farm with 20 plus Quads - smash the nut with a sledge hammer -or build a smaller render farm with a render engine like RenderMan handling the workload - potentially lower investment and certainly lower investment point (Lower energy consumption). But first it needs to be tested and that starts with getting usable comparable data out of C4D. On the other hand maybe C4D goes out the window in favour of something else entirely.

[Simon Wicker]

well there are certain optimisation procedures you can go through but once again we can't really help if we don't know your current settings and how they are not working for you - anyone can set AA to 2x2 4x4 threshold 0 and get perfect results but perhaps the same will be possible using different settings (such as mixing lower quality sampling with smb, etc).

i'm trying to work out where renderman would be faster than AR, in my experience with renderman it was actually pretty slow but this was offset by having a large renderfarm (this being in the vfx companies i've worked for previously). yes the motion blur, displacements and texture sampling were top notch but there were still problems (such as the closer an object appears to camera the longer it takes to render).

i would have thought that if you wish to use exciting effects like gi and glossy reflections in an animation then the only render engines that might work would be either vray or final render which are targeting the arch viz crowd and have optimised these effects.

cheers, simon w.

[andrewillingworth]

anyone can set AA to 2x2 4x4 threshold 0 and get perfect results but perhaps the same will be possible using different settings (such as mixing lower quality sampling with smb, etc).

cheers, simon w.
Thanks for your comments these are what i consider my min settings

AA Best / Animation
10%
2x2 4x4 (1X1 even at 1% and textures start to shimmer. 0 particularly brickwork -proceedual not texture maps they are worse and timber siding)
Use object properties
Mip scale 50%
GI off
Caustics off
AO off

Effects
lens effects
DOP

Options
textures
Blurry effects
Vol lighting
Cache Shadow Maps

Multi Pass off


I have a sky shader object - no volumetric clouds
13 lights set down to 20% no shadows for in fill
I use a light ground fog for extra depth and atmosphere

I also use a very light evironment fog too.

Any comments would be welcome

I want to render flicker and crawl free 768 x 576 Pal sequencial tiff files. in less then 5 minutes on a MP 3ghz Quad.

Thanks for all you comments....

[RickBarrett]

I understand that the RIB plugin is made available to studio's who have a dedicated service contract with Maxon. That suggests it is a channel other then Beta testers.

The "dedicated service contract" with MAXON basically gives some studios access to features that are still in beta. The RIB connection is still in active development. While some studios may be using it, there's a big difference between the specific environment and workflow of a major studio and the variety of situations in the overall user base.

We're really not out to create a secret network - MAXON is and always has been committed to providing 3D solutions for the real world, the everyday 3D artist in small and moderate sized production houses. I think everyone's aware that sometimes features are developed initially so studios can utilize CINEMA 4D in specific aspects of production (so you guys can see more of the film credits you're always looking for). When those features are ready for the general user base, we make them available. You've all already benefitted from a lot of these features.

The situation is a bit confused because it was previously announced that this would be part of a production bundle with other advanced features. One of those features, 32-bit painting, is now a part of the core application, so obviously that plan has changed. I can't really tell you what the current plan is because honestly I don't know.

I'm sorry if Bjorn's initial post caused some confusion. Hopefully this helps clear things up.

- Rick -

[leed]

Out of curiosity do you have a bump map on the bricks timber siding, do you need it.?

I just might say though that I have rendered a lot of large animations, big files, and if I can get the animation down to under 7 mins a frame I am Happy....
I use Dann Stubbs RenderKing, and confidentiality is not a problem.... I would look at this as an option..

Lee

[andrewillingworth]

The RIB connection is still in active development. - Rick -

Thanks for clearing that up - I was a bit confused, in the end as I have said I am just looking to spped up quality output and this thread has contributed enormously to both technique and the validity of looking for other third party render engines. Thanks to all.

[andrewillingworth]

a bump map on the bricks timber siding, do you need it.?

Lee

I do have bump maps on the siding and the brickwork. The camera flies particularly close to a section on brickwork and without it looks too flat. But it is a good point - I will try turning it down a few clicks.

[Per-Anders]

Typically the biggest factor in crawling textures is your MIP/SAT settings rather than your AA settings, the function of the MIP and SAT methods of texture sampling is in fact to remove crawling textures without having to resort to using higher AA settings. You will also find that not all procedurals fully support them, ad you cn overide them for instance by making your delta too small in a noise shader. Typically the global preference for MIP radius is -50% which is good for still images, however for animatinos you would want to raise that to 0% to start off with, then work from there. The larger your radius and blur amounts the less crawl you will get, of course it's a balance because at a certain point you will loose too much texture sharpness, however when you're dealing with animation it's important to remember that you're not looking at individual frames for any length of time, you need only have total crispness where things are going to be basically static for a signifigant length of time.

With regards blurry effects, work with controlling their sampling settings, you should be able to speed them up signifigantly without too nasty a grain occuring, especially if you've got scene motion blur you will find that you can reduce the AA etc settings a great deal and it will help smooth out area sampling effects (though the "grain" option in the smb can sometimes counteract this).

If you are at all able to, then please post an example scene, even just a single material on a primitive object with a camera motion showing your problem would be enough (in fact that would be better if you could provide such a thing), as then people would be able to help you with scene optimisation.

[basilisk]

You can set your AA levels on a per-object basis. Use the compositing tag on your troublesome objects and use the force AA setting. A lot of scenes you can get away with 1x1 min and 2x2 max for most things.
Also agree about looking into SMB - puts your render times up but probably solves AA problems. Even using SMB at 33% (not the default 50%) gives smoother motion to animation. You have to balance crispness of detail against smoothness of motion - you can't really get 100% of both.

[andrewillingworth]

s. Even using SMB at 33% (not the default 50%) gives smoother motion to animation. You have to balance crispness of detail against smoothness of motion - you can't really get 100% of both.

Exposing my ignorance - what is SMB?

[andrewillingworth]

If you are at all able to, then please post an example scene, even just a single material on a primitive object with a camera motion showing your problem would be enough (in fact that would be better if you could provide such a thing), as then people would be able to help you with scene optimisation.

How do I upload to a forum - rediculous question I know.

Also the fantastic clip of a bi-plane flying past a building. Did you render that in AR? its is such an emotive scene.

Thanks for your help

[Simon Wicker]

smb = scene motion blur.

if you use 25 times scene motion blur you can switch off anti-aliasing completely as the subframes calculated for the motion blur are slightly offset from each other (so when they are merged at the end the image automatically gets blended/AA'd).

cheers, simon w.

[andrewillingworth]

/SeqB3.mov

Note the bricks on the wall behind the one in the front. The edge of the roof just above the gutter. And finally the timber cladding.

[Per-Anders]

Hi, to upload to the forum you either have to zip yoru file and try using the "Manage Attachments" button in the "Additional Options" area when you post, the problem being that it can only take really small files, or you have to host your file on a server somewhere and post a link to the download.

The "link" you just posted is just a relative link, it doesn't go anywhere, you need a full URL (and it mustn't be to your own hard drive as no-one but you can access that).

All the shots in my reel were rendered using AR including the plane one (glad you like it), I experimented with Final Render and Mental Ray via XSI and Maya but in the end found it must easier and quicker to just use AR and bake the AO/GI effects on the very basic geometry for what I needed.

[andrewillingworth]

Pers

Even when zipped the file is too large to simply upload.

Baking now there is a whole new thread - does it have any relevance to creeping textures??

[Per-Anders]

You'll have to upload it to a web host then, there are a few free filehosts out there that will allow you to do this, you'll have to google search to find them, then you can use a url link to the file. It's even possible to use a free webhost like geocities or tripod to upload the file and then give post a link to.

Baking can help get rid of texture crawl if your textures are procedural and the procedural shader doesn't fully support MIP/SAT sampling, as bitmaps of course do, but that's all. If there are other reasons for the crawl then it wont necesarily help.

[sacslacker]

Just out of curiousity, is the general consensus that 5 minutes per frame is a long time? I mean I have c4d and renderman for Maya and the render times see to be similar when doing similar things. There are definitely instances where Renderman is much faster (displacements) but there are places that c4d seems faster too.

I guess I'm just used to longer rendertimes. Five minutes doesn't seem all that bad really.

[JamesMK]

Nah, I'd agree 100%. Five minutes per frame is pretty fast as far as I'm concerned. I rarely get below 10 mins/frame on full RGB passes.

But it's sort of a "how long is a piece of string?" issue to be honest.

[Simon Wicker]

i'm currently working on a flythrough of a city using smb, stochastic mode gi, glossy reflections and transparency and i'm aiming to have a render time of around an hour per frame. doesn't bother me because we have the easter bank holiday coming up next week and i aim to have everything ready for the long weekend. i will hit the render button as i leave work on thursday - the animation will be ready when we get back to work on tuesday.

cheers, simon w.

[LucentDreams]

ha I've done a few animations at 40 min per frame 5 is a dream I rarely see other then a simple character in little or no environment. Like Per, best advice is change that mip setting used to be full by default, but it was slowing down all still image renders and such as many didn't know about it or what it does. by reducing it, now occasionally animation renders are what suffer as they don't know that this setting is the main thing causing the flikering.

[williamsburroughs]

I've been following this thread for a day or two now, and I just can't fathom the problem. Having moved from several packages to end up with C4D, I find that the end results tend to exceed my expectations.

I guess since I am a firm believer in fixing everything in post, I know what shortcuts I can take, and what sort of optimizations I need to do in order to get things to render in a timely fashion.

One of my last projects what to animate a diamond for 20 seconds with full caustics, reflections, refractions, etc...the 15 minute per frame at HD res was killing me, so I took it upon myself to break up the scene using Multipass features to get things down to about 6 minutes per frame @ HD.

Regardless of how fast a render engine is, it is still crippled by the speed of the CPU (at the time I was rendering on a Dual Xeon 2.0 machine with only 2GB of RAM).

I dunno...I think that the more we tinker with our tools as artists, the more we learn to exploit them in order to get our end result needs.

In the end, it's not the render engine that matters, it is the image output.

Learn your tools.
Exploit their resources.
Rule your craft.

That's all I got.

"There are no solutions, because there are no problems." - marcel duchamp.

[JoelOtron]

Not to be redundant here--just supporting the consensus--but 5 minutes/frame is not an unreasonable render time for broadcast quality animation. If its a heavy scene with many of the effects activated, that you mention, 5 minutes might actually be on the low-end, time wise. Its not hard to end up with 5, 10, 20+ minute frames if you're not careful. As stated earlier, its up to you what elements need to be in there, and if you cant scale back, then there are some great renderfarms availble (I'd also highly reccomend Renderking).

If you are getting crawling textures with the noise shaders, then you can also play with the Detail Attenuation and Delta. The defaults are 100/100. I usually increase the Detail to ~300
and lower the delta to ~50 (it MIGHT be the reverse of that--I always get them mixed up!)
Along with AA settings and bump map settings, this usually helps smooth out noise flickering.

[andrewillingworth]

That really puts it into perspective. I can see that it is probably naive to think that the RenderMan or anything else would be that much quicker. Not only has this thread answered the original question but has increased the quality of my renders at reduced render times. I have seen the error in my thinking, I will now take up the mantra of render farm, render farm render farm......

[JamesMK]

That really puts it into perspective. I can see that it is probably naive to think that the RenderMan or anything else would be that much quicker. Not only has this thread answered the original question but has increased the quality of my renders at reduced render times.

Makes me really happy to see posts like this in this particular type of thread :)

The key simply is just to know your tools, points of optimization, and last but not least their respective limitations (which every tool has truckloads of, no matter which one you're using for any part of the full pipeline) and then be upfront about this both to yourself and to your clients (most importantly).

Everything often seems to boil down to client pressure, and there seems to be an abundance of unreasonable pressure in the arch-vis arena in particular from what I can tell (I'm not in that sector myself).

But I think it can be alleviated... to illustrate: the project I'm currently assigned to involves three shots around three seconds each. As soon as I was done building the assets, I set up a quick test scene at the target resolution using all the particular rendering features I knew I was going to use for the final output. I rendered out three stills for each shot; one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end, optimized whatever I could. Checked the render time, did the math, and instantly reported this back to the client in a very explicit fashion, saying: "OK, each shot will take 18 hours to render. This also means that any revisions that cannot be done in post, will need another 18 hours, every time. The render time will also increase if you want to add more stuff or more advanced rendering features. If you need to get shots finished faster, we have to buy time on a render farm which will increase the total cost, approximately X dollars per hour."

This makes sure that everyone involved is in the loop, and know exactly what's going on, and among other positive effects tends to make the client representatives more careful when looking at the initial OpenGL previews and thus provide better feedback, since they know that any oversights will cost more or less one day in terms of lost time. And this is really important because there's usually no reason to assume that the typical client actually knows what it means to make 3D-stuff and render hundreds or thousands of frames, and how increased complexity affects this process.

Maintaining this kind of open communication with your clients takes a lot of potential stress out of the equation, since everyone (yourself included) know that you're not some sort of Space Guild navigator capable of folding space and time.



.

[andrewillingworth]

Maintaining this kind of open communication with your clients takes a lot of potential stress out of the equation, since everyone (yourself included) know that you're not some sort of Space Guild navigator capable of folding space and time.



.

I absolutely agree, and I also appreciate the time and effort that has been taken in contributing to this thread. Arch Vis is becoming increasingly sophisticated and the market is being driven to extraordinary lengths. We need to have animations of exception quality in place in days, from scratch. The biggest two problems have been shimmering textures and render times, both have been improved by way of this forum. Thanks Guys. Not only that my wallet has gone back into my pocket, so it has also saved me money.

[leed]

This makes sure that everyone involved is in the loop, and know exactly what's going on, and among other positive effects tends to make the client representatives more careful when looking at the initial OpenGL previews and thus provide better feedback, since they know that any oversights will cost more or less one day in terms of lost time. And this is really important because there's usually no reason to assume that the typical client actually knows what it means to make 3D-stuff and render hundreds or thousands of frames, and how increased complexity affects this process.

Maintaining this kind of open communication with your clients takes a lot of potential stress out of the equation, since everyone (yourself included) know that you're not some sort of Space Guild navigator capable of folding space and time.



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Quoted in agreement

keep everybody informed and try and educate those clients who do not know about the process.

Lee

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