This took 36 hours to render for 105 frames (about 20 minutes per frame). That might seem a lot, but I can explain.
If you were not already aware, I’ve been using a more pleasant looking shader for the ponies lately. It’s called sub-surface scattering. I won’t go too in depth what it is, but if you’ve ever held you hand up to a light with all your fingers touching each other and you see sort of a red glow as the light es through your skin, that’s sub surfacing.
But anyway, that’s the main reason the renders are taking a while longer to render. It’s a much better looking material, but it requires a significant amount more samples than a normal material to not come out looking noisy. For Pear Butter, I would have to use an insane amount of samples to accomplish that normally (about 16384 samples per frame), but thankfully a beta version of Blender exists where there’s a tool called a “denoiser”.
It does exactly what it implies, it smooths out the noisiness of the image that would come with a slightly undersampled render. Now I can’t just render reach image with 16 samples or something and denoise that. It’ll still smooth it out, but there would still be a lot of artifacting because the low sample count doesn’t allow the render to gather enough detail to get anywhere close to a good looking image with or without denoising.
This animation had 4096 samples per frame, exactly 4 times less than I normally would need without denoising. If I didn’t have that tool from this beta version, It would have taken 144 hours (6 days) to render everything. And if it weren’t for my generous donators (you all know who you are), I wouldn’t have had 2 GPUs to render all of this on, so in that case it would’ve been a 288 hour render. All in all, 36 hours is not bad at all with these new materials.
Now for the animation itself… I spent a few days on it. No precise hour count again this time. Honestly I spent a lot more of my time tinkering with the lighting, something that wouldn’t have looked that great before without sub surface scattering. Hopefully it looks fairly nice. Only real regret is the rim lighting, which might be just a touch too much. But other than that I’m pretty happy with how it looks.
Kind of incredible how far technology has come even since 2017. 36 hours for this render is insane to imagine nowadays when this could be done almost in real time.
You probably know this already, but rendering in layers/es allows you to composit and blend together in post.
And it would allow you to vary the rim light in intensity or even re-render that part if needed.
You can also do the subsurface at lower resolution (half should be fine) as it is inherently diffuse. And if it bleeds too much outside just add a stencil mask for that.
For post work I recommend Blackmagic Fusion. Free version is ridiculously nice.
However gorgeous the walk and the bow are, my favorite part is that initial happy/surprised expression with slightly dilating pupils. This detail makes the animation absolutely stunning.
@Chicago Ted
I might recommend do more than just only allowing my 3d works in the complex filter. If you ask me, there’s a lot less uncanny stuff with Blender in general, since most Blender s use CreatorOfPony’s models, which in my opinion are way better than the SFM models. But that’s just my opinion.
You’re one of very few reasons I don’t have 3D tag blacklisted yet.
Shit-ton of absolutely uncanny GMOD/SFM imagery, and then there’s this guy, holy shit. Cute lighting algorithms aside (fwiw you managed to make it worse with that crappy GIF quantization), but I really like your models.
I have been working on some nice cycle shaders as well. My experience with subsurface scattering, in a scene where the pony is mostly illuminated by global light. It doesnt make much of a difference. Only in up close situations like a desk lamp or illumination from behind(creating a siluhette) its noticable..
RIP death by adorabetes
Why the fuck do all the good people have to die so early
And it would allow you to vary the rim light in intensity or even re-render that part if needed.
You can also do the subsurface at lower resolution (half should be fine) as it is inherently diffuse. And if it bleeds too much outside just add a stencil mask for that.
For post work I recommend Blackmagic Fusion. Free version is ridiculously nice.
I might recommend do more than just only allowing my 3d works in the complex filter. If you ask me, there’s a lot less uncanny stuff with Blender in general, since most Blender s use CreatorOfPony’s models, which in my opinion are way better than the SFM models. But that’s just my opinion.
You can still blacklist
3dwhile exemptingartist:therealdjthedusing the complex filters.Shit-ton of absolutely uncanny GMOD/SFM imagery, and then there’s this guy, holy shit. Cute lighting algorithms aside (fwiw you managed to make it worse with that crappy GIF quantization), but I really like your models.
I completely agree. It makes me very sad every time I think of that episode, and the song.
Same! 💜💜💜