Or ‘Eating your own dogfood’
In my past life in the technology industry, we threw around the term ‘dogfooding’. Essentially, it means using your own product.
The Master Class trailer was a formal dogfooding project for us. Last month I was in Los Angeles, visiting the amazing Doug Drexler (of Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica fame). We have embarked on some Vue adventures where we were able to do something great, but as always rendering the result took too much time. So I made a bold statement: “I can get HD per-frame times down to 2 minutes.”
Anyone who has worked with Vue will gladly agree that it was a bold and somewhat suicidal thing to claim. But back in our secret volcano lair, surrounded by sharks with laser beams on their heads, a simple i7 980X w/ 16GB RAM was churning out frames at exactly that time. Granted they were 480p not 720 or 1080, but hey, 2 minutes is pretty darned awesome! Especially considering that previously those same frames were coming out 25 to 40 minutes per frame.
The challenge is not in simply lowering the per-frame render time, but in maintaining the quality while doing so.
I am fortunate to enjoy a good friendship with the folks who created Vue and they’ve been kind enough to share their knowledge of Vue’s inner workings – and even add some crazy features I’ve come up with. Or sometimes they found new features for Vue because I created a hugely complicated scene. (Complicated enough to require new code to be written.) One case in point is the Subray Quality Drop you find in materials.
The ‘Glory’ scene (below) was an experiment I did with the beta of Vue 7.5. The result of the new Godrays optimizations they did were fantastic, but the water took hideously long to render. They took the scene and ran some tests. Apparently the water took longer to process because the Subrays were working overtime under the water where they didn’t really need to. They can’t explicitly program Vue to exclude those Subrays because you may lose quality in scenes. So they added the Subray Quality Drop for such scenarios where you don’t want underwater overkill.
Vue’s simplicity in both UI and how you get things done in the software can distract us from the complex nature of the monster that is its renderer.
My natural masochistic tendencies have helped me over the past 5 years since I decided “No, Vue can do greater things than what we have seen”. Since then I’ve been working almost constantly on finding ‘better’ ways of doing things inside Vue. Methods that give both quality and speed, and sometimes even ease-of-use. I won’t lie to you, getting both quality and speed can be hard work.
These optimizations are loosely grouped together in what I call ‘Super Settings’. They’re nothing fantastic or monolithic. They’re small tweaks and budget cuts across the planes of Light/Atmosphere, Materials, Objects/Terrains/HyperTerrains, and the Renderer.
So back to the trailer. We had a VERY small window to work in before we announced the class. I needed a minute-long animation in 2 weeks. To ensure I could back up my statement of fast HD renders, I had to dogfood. It was a matter of pride (because I’ll be demonstrating this in front of a live audience at the Master Class in September). Everything had to be rendered in full Global Radiosity – the toughest, meanest lighting model available in Vue.
I wanted to further prove that all this could be done on individual machines – not needing giant render farms. But I did make the good decision of enlisting the help of my friend Marek Mihok – the ‘Render Lord of Slovakia’. As I worked on new scenes, he used his computers (we used a dual XEON and an i7 980X, but most of the time they processed different scenes simultaneously) to render the animations.
The first animation we tried was the Montaña Sunrise opening shot (below).
The volumetric lighting was intense and the clouds needed to be of high quality as they used a new coloring mechanism for the soft morning hues.
After just two optimization sessions, we experienced ~10 minute per frame render times for this animation. The frames were 1920 x 817 in size. Well over 720p!
The same scene, if sent to a proper render farm, would get this done in less than a minute or two. The joy of getting great quality renders at large frame sizes is eclipsed only by the time (and money!) you save.
That, of course, is the point of the entire Master Class. Let’s look at the this:
- Faster renders, without quality loss, can help meet deadlines faster
- Comp animations, pre-viz, and mockups of any form get a good boost of broader realism as artists can render such lower-significance items at greater speed (with more sophisticated visuals, no less!)
- Faster renders help lower costs when something needs to be re-rendered.
- Total man-hours and total render farm uptime goes lower, saving the facility a good chunk of money
- And we all know how helpful it is to have some extra space left in the budget to apply to other needs in the production
Here is the unspoken truth about Vue: it requires some special considerations when using it for animations, and practically everything out there available in the Vue community – products, tutorials, or any form of learning – is about still images.
Vue is used more for giant still images with extreme detail. The creation techniques for that are very different than using them for animation. A giant chunk of the difference is found in the Function Editor and the Renderer.
The dogfooding focus was specifically on such differences:
- Avoid flickering in materials by recreating them for animation
- Restructure certain material properties for better multi-frame antialiasing
- Find very specific settings for antialiasing for each scene to avoid excess rendering time and memory load
- Modify plants for flicker compensation without having to use insane texture filtering
- Alter Vue’s default lighting and cloud coloration systems for a more realistic sunrise/sunset animation
- Remove, disable, or bypass every setting or generator that you can do without (you’d be surprised just how many there are!)
- What is better done in Vue and what is better done in post by using multi-pass renders
- Use the diagnostic tools in Vue for animation bottlenecks
- etc. etc. etc.
These differences were the original inspiration for a running segment we will have in the Master Class entitled ‘What you can get away with’ which create the stepping stones for the final session of the class called ‘The Economy of Nature’.
Here’s a practical example you can try right now:
If you have a bright open scene, disable Indirect Skylighting. Compensate with the Skydome Lighting Gain. Render a before and after and see how much it improves your render time.
Of course, there are other related changes you need to make, but if I tell you that, you won’t come to the class. 
The list of such tiny tweaks currently runs at a few dozen (about 60+, I believe) but it will increase in the two months between now and the Master Class as we further optimize the Super Settings for even better results.
The great thing was, by keeping all these things in mind and planning it all properly, not only did we render everything in time, at proper quality, but we also rendered a few other shots that we decided to use elsewhere in the class.
The dogfooding worked. We rendered well over 2000 HD frames with decent quality, all within time and surprisingly under the budget.
If you still haven’t seen the video, head on over to official Master Class page. And if you’re in the LA area, come join us at the Master Class on 9.10.11. Seats are limited, so grab them before you lose your chance. 
Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting more about the Master Class and the new creation techniques we will be showing exclusively at the event.