Think I’m a masochist for choosing to invest the majority of my waking hours into optimizing Vue for big productions like TV shows and movies? You’re probably right, but the results I’ve been getting have been worth the blood and sweat.
This frame (shown at actual size) is grabbed from the middle of an animation. The per-frame render time averaged to about 2m 35s on a Core i7 980X with 16GB of RAM. Your average render farm uses more power. At 720p these increase somewhat exponentially, but still stay under 6 to 7 minutes per frame.
Vue is a completely different kind of animal. Familiarizing myself with its quirks and quirky under-the-hood processing have helped identify certain areas – especially for animation – where a lot of unnecessary baggage can be removed to drastically increase render time.
The process needs to be kept in mind while designing the scene itself. A large part of what Vue does is geared towards still images. The amount of detail it can create can be staggering. But animation works differently. Additionally, combining some tricks learned from the game industry can help improve performance too.
I’m currently still locking down some parts of this process, but hopefully over the next few weeks the complete concept will be ready. It is going to be one of the primary focuses in QuadSpinner’s live workshop in Los Angeles.