8 Render Buckets on a Quad Core Hyperthreading CPU
Release 11.5 sees significant enhancements to rendering. The old render line system has been replaced by a Bucket Rendering system as shown above. Bucket rendering is more memory efficient than the previous system. What would often cause an Out of memory error can be rendered easily now in R11.5. Similar to the old render line system you get one render bucket per CPU core or if you are running a CPU that supports Hyper-threading like the new Intel I7 and I5 CPU's you will get 2 buckets per processor core. Bucket Rendering is how other top of the line render engines work e.g. V-Ray.
There are a couple of options for Bucket Rendering in the Preferences. There is a drop-down selection box where you can specify how the buckets are drawn, the default being drawn from the centre outwards. This is quite handy as you can often pick up a mistake early on without having to do a full render as the object being rendered is usually in the middle of view.
By default, Bucket size is set to Automatic but by un-checking the Automatic Size option you can specify smaller or larger buckets. Larger buckets can make rendering quicker but they also use up more memory. Smaller buckets on the hand can allow more complex scenes to be rendered without receiving the Out of Memory error message. Generally you will want to keep things at their default settings.
Bucket Rendering Options
One of the best enhancements in Release 11.5 has got to be Render Instances. Render Instance are similar in function to V-Ray Proxies and modo's Replicator objects as they allow you render tens of thousands (and more) of instances / clones of an object i.e. millions of polygons. Here's a render that Cafe members may have seen before where I created a scene with 22,500 clones and around 420 Million polygons. Render time was 4 minutes 49 seconds on my Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz and 3GB memory running Vista 32 bit. AA 2x Best. Hard shadows. In R11.0 I received an out of memory error with just 400 clones.
Click on the image for a larger version.
In addition to being able render out scenes with thousands of instances, clones etc when you use Render Instances, Viewport playback speed and responsiveness is significantly improved.
MAXON's Cineversity site has a very useful video on both Bucket Rendering and Render Instances.
The following now support Render Instances:
The following is a fun animation using Render Instances. This previously would have been virtually impossible to render without running out of memory.
Click here or on the image to download and play the animation (QT 5.6mb)
In addition to the major enhancements discussed above CINEMA 4D now supports rendering in DPX format and native rendering to the PNG format. Previously to render to PNG you had to have Quicktime installed and that was only 32 bit as there was no 64 bit version of Quicktime. So if you are running the 64 bit version of CINEMA 4D you can render out to PNG format without any issues. The PNG enhancement is a useful one as wherever possible I use PNG format images on the Internet because the quality is superior to jpeg plus it also supports transparency. My 3DKiwi avatar for example was rendered out in PNG format with a transparent background.
The Anti-Aliasing settings in the Render settings have 2 new options. Consider Multi-Passes is used to counter Anti-Aliasing problems that sometime occur in Alpha Channels and Multi-Pass rendering. An example is rendering where there are refractive objects.
New Anti-Aliasing settings
The Small Fragments parameter is a drop-down box with 3 options: The default Hybrid, Scanline Only and Ray Trace only. The documentation describes the new parameter as:
Since the introduction of Render Instances it is possible to render an innumerable number of complex objects. Let's say you have a complete house consisting of thousands of polygons located at your scene's horizon, which is so far away from the camera that it would only be about one pixel in size when rendered. The Small Fragments functionality is designed to render just such regions more effectively (as well as regions with high levels of Subsurface Scattering).
In most cases you will want to leave Small Fragments set to Hybrid. Scanline Only was the method used in C4D versions prior to R11.5. This video at Cineversity explains the options better than I can in writing. The net result should be faster rendering.
I should mention that all of the above the render enhancements are in the Core Version.
The new Render Region options in the Render Settings allow you to render a region of scene and save the image to file. Say you have just waited 2 hours for an image to render only to notice a small mistake. Rather than rendering the scene again you can define a Render Region and render just that part again. It's then an easy matter of using a 2D editor to composite the 2 renders together. Rather than try to explain how it works here is a short video of me using the new Render Region options to edit an image.
Click here to view video tutorial (6min 11mb)
Render Region can be used to render and replace one region
The AR Module (Advanced Render) has received a handful of enhancements. The version number of the module remains at 3 and this means that there is no upgrade cost. So if you have the core version of R11.0 plus the AR module then you only pay for the core upgrade. The enhancements are:
Displacement Rendering in R11.5 renders much quicker on multi core systems. Sub-Polygon Displacement takes advantage of this and according to MAXON is up to 7 times faster to render although in practice this depends on the scene and how many cores your CPU has. If your multi core CPU supports Hyperthreading then the speed is even more. The following image utilizes Sub-Polygon Displacement. Render time on my dual core CPU was R11.5: 2min 42sec R11.0 5min 14sec
Click on the image for a larger version.
I should also mention that if you are using Render Instances then Sub Polygon Displacement only needs to be calculated for the original object. The result would then be a massive increase in render speed compared to earlier versions without Render Instances.
So all in all some excellent enhancements especially when you add in the Picture Viewer enhancements. Bucket Rendering is more memory efficient and usually quicker that than the old render line method of rendering. Render Instances are seriously cool and make many things that were impossible before now possible. The bonus of quicker viewport navigation when using Render Instances and quicker rendering when using them is just icing on the cake.
Still on the To Do list is Depth of Field enhancements as well as Motion Blur enhancements. Net Render could do with an upgrade as it's still not easily possible to render a still image on your network.
Review by C4D Cafe © 2009