Hi guys, I’m currently exporting my first animation render using V-Ray. I have 11 scenes with 3s transition and 0s stills. That will make the final animation 33 seconds long. I am guessing Sketchup animates at 30fps. That’s 990 frames. At present, each frame in the sequence is taking 4m30. It’s excruciating to wait, but the images are amazing. Zero noise, great lighting, textures and reflection.
My project is 100km diameter. At the beginning of the animation the scenes are zoomed into a 10x10m apartment interior, but will zoom out fully to show all the buildings by the end. Will this require longer image renders due to scale? 4m30 is long enough, and given the images are perfect, I wonder if I have set the quality too high. If 4m30 remains constant, this animation will take 270s x 990f = 267,300s = 74.25 hours !!!
I do a lot of video and music editing so I need my computer. 3 days for a 33s animation is ridiculous, but I don’t want to start this all again after investing 12 hours so far if there’s no point. So can someone please tell me if my settings are too high? I will attach my Sketchup Project so you can see the level of detail in each scene.
My PC:
Intel(R) Core™ i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz 3.70 GHz
32GB RAM
64-bit Win10 Pro
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPU
30TB storage (5TB SSD with good read/write speeds used for this process)
I would love to know how long a good quality 33 second animation is supposed to take to render. Even after this is complete, I will have 990 images on my computer, NOT a completed animation - I’ll still need to make that afterwards. I hope that part is quick…
I recommend you to do animations with a real time rendering engine, I use enscape and Twinmotion for animations, enscape is great and works inside sketchup Twinmotion is a different program. In this case enscape suits you better cause it belongs to Chaos, the owners of Vray, and all the assets(proxy’s) and materials you’ve configured with vray will be shown in enscape, a 33 seconds animation could take an hour with your hardware maybe a bit more, enscape is incredibly fast. The only “negative” could be that with vray you get more realistic results but in my opinion enscape get great renders as well. Enscape gives you 30 days free trial period.
Given the simplicity of your render and model , using v-ray to render is probably overkill.
You could output this in enscape in 5minutes.
If you have to use V-ray . I would just turn the quality to low - turn on the v-ray denoiser and change the resolution to 1280*720 and the frame rate to 24fps.
Turn on motion blur and that will smooth out the animation also and give a more cinematic look.
If you ar worried about the long render time I would also make sure you have the resume-able rendering on also.
You could even get chaos to render it via chaos cloud if you are short on time and need to keep your machine free - It may simply be lower cost to buy enscape.
That will save you a lot of time over what you are using now and give enough to work with in a video editor.
I’ve never hear of a ‘real time rendering engine’, and I feel like that’s a pre-requisite for understanding your comment. Let’s see…
New Term: Enscape.
Never heard of it. Brain already fried. Got a link that sums it up in under 3 minutes? Is this instead of Sketchup? More foreign words coming…
New Term: Twinmotion.
No idea. Is this a type of two seater bicycle?
New Term: Chaos
I see, owner of the V-Ray plugin. And Enscape?
New Term: Assets (proxies / proxy’s)
No idea. Not researching that. Its already lookng like at least ten hours of research looking into the new terms listed above.
Getting clues about what Enscape is, maybe. Its not a different program but a sketchup plugin? Not included in the Sketchup Studio trial?
About an hour instead of 74 hours?!!! What? Are you saying that V-Ray is completely unnecessary? Thats a huge difference, but you threw me in the middle of the ocean without a life jacket with all these new terms and references.
You’re talking about this Enscape as well. I… I was kind of relying on the Sketchup Studio package that costs AU$1,200 per year. Are you saying I can bypass this massive expense? There are still a few days in my trial. A program that can get the job done in 1/74 of the time?
The settings you listed for V-ray include a low resolution. This is no good for use in promotional videos. 24fps is incompatible with most video projects. I don’t understand why you would recommend that. Motion blur is faster processing? It will prevent access to nice still frames.
Chaos Cloud is a paid service that renders your project in other people’s computers (servers) for a fee? Okay, that was completely unclear in the V-Ray million-page encyclopedia. Now I have some clue. Until this project I didn’t even know what ‘rendering’ meant. Sketchup works instantly, so ‘adding materials’ seemed like it would be instant as well. I didn’t know it was going to be such a major inconvenience to add pretty colours to my Sketchup images. Looks like there’s a whole other community who deal specifically with the topic of ‘nicely rendered images’ as opposed to ‘3D drawings’.
Resumable Rendering? Can I turn that on midway through? Its not greyed out. In fact, most V-ray buttons can be changed right now, even while the rendering is happening. This is utterly confusing. Will this cancel my export? Will it restart? Will it make things change from this point forward? Will it only affect new projects after this one? I can’t risk it. Its already 27 hours investment so far.
This is no way to work. Of course I would prefer to have lower quality with ‘Enscape’ than wait 3 days if the quality is passable. I ALWAYS make thousands of micro tweaks to my edits, but that would take years using V-Ray.
If I can dump V-Ray for something lightning fast, I’ll do it. Blender and Unity have shockingly bad interfaces and controls so I would rather use Sketchup, unless there’s a program that natively prevents clipping - Sketchup is known to be broken software due to the clipping, but when I created scenes for V-Ray, the native image inside Sketchup was inside walls etc, but looked perfect inside the V-Ray preview window. Sketchup just has really bad coding. Maybe some of these plugins override Sketchup’s bugs - The information that’s being clipped obviously still exists but Sketchup simply can’t show it due to the bad code.
I just learned what Chaos Cloud mean - a server that cooks your project for you. Seems amazing, but I’m not ready to buy the full hectic package just yet. I only just discovered what ‘rendering’ meant. It seems like a slooooow process. An impatient man’s nightmare.
So a ‘proxy’ is simply a cube that becomes a tree when its exported? So the user can’t see the image he’s making until afterwards? Jesus. Whatever. Thanks for telling me, but this is new information that seems completely irrelevant here. I won’t be googling every term people drop into a conversation. A google search for one topic leads down a rabbit hole of weeks, even years. So no, I won’t ‘Google it!’ - the two most offensive words in the English language. My question was about V-Ray settings, but everyone is telling me to dump V-Ray and use a different program. Having just come from thousands of exhausting hours of trying to learn Unity and Blender before coming back to my old 3D printing software, Sketchup, to make a Television Series world map, only to be told about all these plugins and/or/maybe different software options that were NEVER mentioned to me in the tens of thousands of conversations I had about the fastest ways to get things done, and certainly not included in the very, VERY expensive Sketchup Studio package, you will forgive me in not trusting or researching every comment I read. Never heard of Enscape. Is it a poor man’s version of these other drawing programs? IS it reputable? Do I need to look at it or is it ranked 57 on the list of exhausting, counter-intuitive programs out there? And what about these other things - programs, extensions, plugins or whatever - VRay comes with Sketchup Studio, but I now understand it is not part of Trimble. See, in this forum, I don’t know if people openly discuss other software or if this is a Sketchup-owned propaganda forum. See? In that case, I can’t trust anyone’s software advice. But if you are truly honest, please tell me what software you use yourself, and what level of knowledge you have in terms of all the big 3D world building programs. Clearly 74 hours to export a 30 second animation is just stupid, so if my V-Ray settings are not incorrect, then V-Ray is useless to me and I don’t want it. I will look at the program/plugin Enscape. But maybe after a cup of tea or something. I’ve already spent a lot of time on…if you can’t relate to years of your life destroyed through dead-end google searches then you can’t be trusted to give realistic advice. I’ve been building computers since the 80s and I just don’t have the patience to research 100 things for each step I take. And people who are fresh and alert with confidence about a product are mere salespeople and not trustworthy. Wise people are tired, and don’t send people who need directions to the map store. So I really hope any alternatives to VRay settings in this thread are EXTREMELY USEFUL alternatives. ‘Enscape’ had the most mentions so I’ll drag my feet towards that horizon next, I guess.
Export an animation from Sketchup? That would be practically instant, right?
The thing is, I used the VRay window to see what was happening. Sketchup clips the image severely whereas Vray allows it to be seen. So the animation simply cannot be made in sketchup. It requires some kind of addon.
Just look at the Sketchup Window vs the Vray window below. This is the same model at the same level of zoom. Sketchup clipping is shocking. VRay allows me to see what I drew.
You appear to be unaware of the well-known clipping errors in Sketchup. I just showed you a side by side comparison, plus the actual project file. There is no evidence missing, only eyes to see.
No, I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve never rendered with VRay, and I haven’t exported an animation with SketchUp.
It’s Saturday evening. It is late where I am and I am replying from my phone. I haven’t loaded your file because I don’t want to walk down to the office. But I was trying to help.
If you think you have having clipping issues then you need to fix that as well.
Edit - and SketchUp will likely struggle if you want to zoom from the head of a pin to the orbit of a planet. Just the way the software works. So you might have to think about how to setup your scenes to make it work. Think of each scene as an image on a story board.
You need more scenes, and you might want to think about how jerky the camera movement is. And you might want to consider 2 separate animations - 1 for the close in work, where you do a better job of passing through the structure / walls / windows whatever they are - and a second one showing the outside. You can edit these together with a nice transition (or maybe you have 3-4 that you edit together).
But you need to think about that - as the story teller. Right now it’s pretty janky and I wouldn’t waste time rendering this in VRay until you are ready to put on real materials, light sources, atmospherics, etc.
You could also consider this plugin:
And perhaps using Advanced Camera tools to make it more like ‘cinema’: (old article)
To make it appear like this in VRay (I tried to make a clipchamp video for the first time to animate the 500/990 completed VRay images but clipchamp is causing major issues. At any rate, this image can be a placeholder for the purposes of teaching you about Sketchup’s clipping issues. I’ve had many discussions about it on this website.) Sketchup does not let you zoom beyond 0.01% of your total project extremities.
In my attempt to make a quick sequence animation, my computer crashed. I have restarted now. Here’s the VRay comparison video I made to teach you about why Sketchup clipping limits visibility. I really hope you appreciate it.
These addons allow the camera to be controlled smoothly? Thank you. And no, I’m not reducing the size of my project for you - follow the development of the excruciating work I’ve done to achieve a basic sky in this faulty software before that kind of talk. Operator error.
So you’ll continue to use ‘faulty’ software to bring this work to life? Sounds self defeating to me.
Don’t reduce the size of your project for me - I’m suggesting you break it apart to achieve your goals - think about what story you want to tell, then think about the tools you are using to tell them, then think about how to best tell that story.
