How to render?

[Ze_Jeff]

I usually just click export poster 1920 pixels and default setings.it takes about 5 seconds to render.

Then i see all these posters whoose description says it took 8 hours to render, also all these photo realistic renders and phrases like "yeah cycles render is amazing way better then blender render"

So is there more to rendering and how do i even get a render to last 8 hours?

[Zappy]

...First of all, is this about Source FilmMaker or Blender? Blender has both the Blender renderer and the Cycles renderer, and Source FilmMaker only has a single kind of un-named(?) renderer.

[Ze_Jeff]

Originally posted by Zappy:

...First of all, is this about Source FilmMaker or Blender? Blender has both the Blender renderer and the Cycles renderer, and Source FilmMaker only has a single kind of un-named(?) renderer.

Yeah i know.Its about sfm, i was saying that as in i thought rendering is just pressing a button, but it seems like its this complex procces for even the user, and that theres all kinds of renders some better for some things and some better for others.

[Zappy]

Alright. So first of all, I'd recommend ditching "poster" exports, but if you don't really have problems with them, I guess you can use them. Secondly, you can "override" the amount of samples used for depth of field and motion blur, which will also smooth out the grainy appearance of ambient occlusion. (I'm not sure if you're asked to "override" that in the poster export dialogue, but if you can set them there, set them to 1024 and 256 respectively, for single images, but of course less for videos/animations.)

[Marco Skoll]

Although SFM is definitely pushing the Source graphics harder than other games, the graphics of the engine were (originally, at least) trying to be efficient enough to render games in real time.

Things like Blender aren't built on a principle of efficiency. They're trying to look as good as possible. They can be told to carefully and painstakingly calculate how light bounces off six surfaces in succession, enters the surface of the skin, gets tinted by the underlying layers of the flesh and then reflects out again.
And then they can be told to calculate that twenty thousand times to make sure they get the smoothest and most realistic result possible.

That is why Blender can take hours to render and SFM will churn something out in (mostly) seconds.

There is a *lot* more to rendering, but you're not going to get those results out of any game engine - not for a great many years.

[Pte Jack]

If you really want to see SLOW render times, try the IRay Render included in Substance Painter.

A 1920x1080 still picture took almost 10 hours for the render before it was complete and ready for exporting on something I was working on once because I had tweaked the render settings a little too high for my 2 gig video card.

But I will say this, the cartoon character almost looked like a real person when it was finished... (which wasn't the look I was going for)

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

If you really want to see SLOW render times, - A 1920x1080 still picture took almost 10 hours -

I've seen several pieces of artwork where the author has stated it took over 48 hours to render, though. Definitely over 24. I'm not saying 10 hours is fast, but it's not super slow.

[Pte Jack]

Originally posted by Zappy:

I've seen several pieces of artwork where the author has stated it took over 48 hours to render, though. Definitely over 24. I'm not saying 10 hours is fast, but it's not super slow.

I've heard this too, especially when rending 4k pictures or image sequences and they have the render settings set ridiculously high...

[episoder]

render hours for a poster? *shudders*

i did a character in cycles with cuda and final preset. took 15 minutes tho. it was a simple scene. if they'd get better shadows and ao i'd have done it on the glsl renderer. seconds to render.

[Ze_Jeff]

Originally posted by Zappy:

Alright. So first of all, I'd recommend ditching "poster" exports, but if you don't really have problems with them, I guess you can use them. Secondly, you can "override" the amount of samples used for depth of field and motion blur, which will also smooth out the grainy appearance of ambient occlusion. (I'm not sure if you're asked to "override" that in the poster export dialogue, but if you can set them there, set them to 1024 and 256 respectively, for single images, but of course less for videos/animations.)

Thanks for the help!I dont render with images because there is no "export dialogue" i click export image, it instantly exports it.I assumed it doesnt render it at all and simply takes a screen shot of the view port or something.

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Ze_Jeff:

I assumed [export image] doesnt render it at all and simply takes a screen shot of the view port or something.

That's correct, meaning you know what it's going to look like and won't have to deal with issues like decaying flexes not settling in or bloom not being applied, if you just right-click the viewport, click Render Settings, set it up as you want, and then stay on the same frame with the scene (non-work) camera active in the Clip Editor until the sample counter loops back to 1 / X in the bottom right, before exporting the image.

[Pte Jack]

Everything Zappy said with one added point. When you export and give your render a name, you must include an image type file extension to the filename (like .png, .jpg, .tga) or the picture will not render. SFM doesn't have a default image type for this function and doesn't know what type of image you want to save if you don't.

[Zappy]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

-Stuff about adding the filetype manually-

Really? I thought it just always exported PNGs, but I guess I'm just too used to exporting the image to the clipboard, pasting it into something, and then saving it from an image editor. In that case, my bad, should've mentioned that.

[Pte Jack]

That has always been when exporting an image. SFM doesn't have a default export type for that. You have no idea how many times I've exported something to my desktop, forgot to addd that extension type and found nothing after it "supposedly" exported the image.