Introduction
This week I continued rendering my animation shots. As, I am unable to use render farm I am having a very difficult time rendering all the shots on my laptop. So, I dedicated some time this week to do some RnD to find out an efficient and fast way to render on my laptop.
Research to find a better solution to Render
As mentioned in the previous blog, we cannot render pro rigs on render farm. This left us with only one way to render the animation and that was on the laptop. Upon rendering the sequence on our laptop I came to know that it was taking approximately 16-20 minutes to render one frame on the laptop. This time was unreasonable for us because if I render on just one laptop I will not be able to render on time. Me and my classmate Veronica then collaborated to find a solution for rendering as we both were using Pro Rigs.
Alembic Export
Upon further RnD, I came up with a solution to bake the alembic cache and then render it on renderfarm. The alembic export was working perfectly fine on the university computers but we failed to render it on render farm. I then tried baking the animation in maya and then exporting it but it was also not successfull.
We discussed this with the technical department but they informed us that the university renderfarm does not support alembic export.
We then thought to render our animations on university CPUs and it was also very difficult to come to university everyday and spend so much time exporting our alembic scenes and then setting up the scene on every computer.
GPU Rendering
While I was rendering, I realized the my personal laptop has a very strong GPU and I can use it to render. I researched and came to know that Maya uses CPU to render by default and how CPU rendering is different from GPU.
CPU rendering is more precise and efficient than GPU rendering. I test rendered one scene in GPU and it was pretty fast but when I played it in a video form it was very jittery.
You can see the difference between GPU and CPU rendering using same render settings in the image below
Conclusion
After the week full of research, I have decided to render my animation on multiple computers. I will render some less detail intensive scenes on GPU and rest of the scenes will render using CPU.