Greetings!

Welcome to Scifi-Meshes.com! Click one of these buttons to join in on the fun.

3DAge of Warp - Cartoon

2»

Posts

  • Mustang13Camaro68Mustang13Camaro68328 DetroitPosts: 156Member
    mavek wrote: »
    ...but rendered in cycles, which took over 8 hours to render...

    8 HOURS TO RENDER? Oh Buddy - No. You post a screengrab of your Cycles settings and let Uncle SciFiMeshes help you with that. 8 hours is too long for a single image! We've gotta get that time down.
    MustangCamaro's Other Projects: TaelonMothership MarsAttacks SeaQuestDSV
  • publiusrpubliusr550 Posts: 1,746Member
    That is sweet.

    If only this had been around for the 80’s DC Trek comics...
  • mavekmavek393 Dublin, IrelandPosts: 24Member
    8 HOURS TO RENDER? Oh Buddy - No. You post a screengrab of your Cycles settings and let Uncle SciFiMeshes help you with that. 8 hours is too long for a single image! We've gotta get that time down.

    I suppose I have to admit I am being a bit flippant here. This was the time it took to run the render with the settings that came with the blend that I downloaded. I made no attempt to speed it up. Chris Khun's work has been an amazing resource for me to learn a lot of things from. Also the image render size is 400 % the one that came with it, so it is an 8K render, so it should take a smidge longer. The oringal work was done in 2.79 and this is 2.91, I don't know if there have been setting introduced or removed since then. I have had some issue with older blends just not working right and I have to append an older mesh into a newer blend.

    My point is that moving to a reduced toon style takes a lot of the pressure off the work required for photo real, which is where I burn a lot of time. I want to produce 5-20 minutes of content, I am looking for speed ups all over the place.

    However I won't look a gift horse in the mouth, I am a bit clueless on what is and isn't important for improving render times. Here are I think are the relevant settings from the blend. What would you suggest? except denoise, I hear it does not work well temporally, image to image, which I believe would show itself in a video, which is what I am working towards, though maybe I am wrong about that?

    u08exyg1yoqe.png
  • ChiefBrexChiefBrex256 North CarolinaPosts: 110Member
    Really love your cartoon work!
  • Mustang13Camaro68Mustang13Camaro68328 DetroitPosts: 156Member
    So, I downloaded the Chris Kuhn Ambassador class, fiddled with the shaders and lighting a bit to get close to what you have and then did a baseline render with your settings. Result on my machine = 29 min 11 sec.

    I then fiddled with the settings some more and got it down to 9 min 37 sec with the caveat being my settings probably give you more noise in the shadows, but at your resolution I felt it wasn't too bad.

    ozwswo9gge0v.png

    z1g7gp9m6rrw.png

    The diffuse and glossy seem fine where they are. Increasing them didn't result in better image quality for me.
    Transparency when lowered, made the decals look bad, so I kept this setting.
    Transmission seemed way too high. This might have been needed for your Bussard shader (which I was unable to get to cast a red shadow).
    You don't seem to have any volume materials in the scene, so I set this to 0.

    Then I kept upping the Render samples (in multiples of 128) until I got something decent. Your tastes may vary. Increase for less noise or try an animation test with the denoiser to see if its really that bad on animations.

    You'll see I also changed the render tiles to the standard 64x64. This seemed to help a lot. I don't think Cycles likes tiles that aren't a multiple of 2.

    Some other things I did were decreasing the resolution of the textures, the two 6k images seemed overkill so I put them down to 2048x2048. Same with the deflector. It wasn't closeup so I put it down to 512x512. I think this only helps with ram, not render time, but...

    I made the backdrop sky sphere an emission shader (set to black & 0.0) and also changed its Ray Visibility (in the Object Properties Tab) to just have Camera checked. Anything not to waste render time on a background that doesn't need it. There might still be a better way to do this because I noticed the render buckets spent time on the background.

    I notice that there's a displacement texture for the phaser strips. I didn't set up displacement, so that might have saved me render time as well. At this distance, I think you could just set it to be a bump map.

    I'm not an expert at Cycles or anything, but hopefully some of this helps get your render times down.
    MustangCamaro's Other Projects: TaelonMothership MarsAttacks SeaQuestDSV
  • RekkertRekkert4037 Buenos Aires, ArgentinaPosts: 2,302Member
    edited February 2021 #37
    Render tiles are dependent on CPU/GPU rendering, if you're using your CPU have them very small (64x64 or even 32x32) for best results. If you're using your GPU then 256x256 is the sweetspot given the PCI bandwidth.

    2000 samples is an overkill, I use 500 on most of my renders and 1500 on my finished HD stuff. Be sure to enable Denoising Data on the passes setting and use a denoise node on the compositor, that'll get you the same result as a higher sample size in 99% of cases, in a fraction of the time. See here for how to do it: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/173760/how-to-properly-connect-the-denoise-node-in-compositor

    As far as bounces go, FWIW I use 5 on Diffuse, Glossy and Transparency, with 10 on Transmission (and logically 10 on Total as that's the highest value I've got going).
    Post edited by Rekkert on
    For all my finished Trek fan art, please visit my portfolio
  • mavekmavek393 Dublin, IrelandPosts: 24Member
    Time for an update. I don't know about you, but my year has been busy. Any way, inspired by the UK release of the Ships of the Line calendar January 2021, I tried to recreate a scene of the Cassiopeia leaving Spacedock in the Cartoon style:

    w7gwotquzzvf.jpg

    I was convinced to complete this image because I wanted to test out the halftoning shader released last week to see if I could make the scene look like a page from a 80s-ish comic books:

    dsg6z33qoudc.jpg

    All models by me.
    RekkertLizzy777srspicerMustang13Camaro68
  • StarshipStarship464 São Paulo - BrasilPosts: 1,976Member
    Looks very good Dave!
    Welcome back. ;)
    mavek
  • ashleytingerashleytinger1989 Central OhioPosts: 1,225Member
    Nice job. Having just plowed through my DC 90's Trek comics run, that halftone looks fantastic. ;)
  • mavekmavek393 Dublin, IrelandPosts: 24Member
    A small update, these is a video of the viewscreen at warp. It will be used in a full bridge, but getting the screen ready first:


    Rekkertsrspicer
  • mavekmavek393 Dublin, IrelandPosts: 24Member
    I wanted to redo the Cassiopeia as a cartoon at warp. This is all done in blender. The stars and streaks were done via a particle system, I am very happy with how it turned out

    RekkertLizzy777rojrenMustang13Camaro68wibble
  • srspicersrspicer390 Posts: 335Member
    Lots to like here;
    The layering of the stars, the shadow across the hull, and of course the overall look! B)
  • publiusrpubliusr550 Posts: 1,746Member
    I love it!
  • wibblewibble1120 Weimar, GermanyPosts: 488Member
    Simple shot, yet impressive.
Sign In or Register to comment.