300% FASTER Renders in Blender Cycles with AI

so here's an environment animation I did it's 240 frames long or 8 seconds at 30 FPS and it took me roughly three and a half hours to completely render now here's that same animation rendered in blender but with the help of AI looks identical right and guess what this only took me about one and a half hours to fully render in this video I'll explain how you can harness the power of AI to improve on your render speeds this video is sponsored by Squarespace more on that later I have this environment seen in blender and it has a lot of the typical aspects that make your renders go slowly it's got quite a few tries roughly 900 000 it's got a lot of animated objects roughly 18 000 high quality textures and lighting and it also has some compositing now I'm fortunate enough to have a decent PC which you can check out the specs down here but even with that rendering a single frame for this animation took roughly 50 seconds meaning that the entire entire animation will take approximately three and a half hours to finish that's no small amount of time for just eight seconds of animation and you can imagine how much larger this number becomes when you render out an entire animation or even a full-fledged short film so let's harness the power of AI to make this goal a lot faster now how's that possible you say well it's done with a free AI video interpolator tool called flow frames it's been out for some time now but I think it deserves a little more attention because it's a major help when it comes to saving you time on your renders and that's something I know a lot of you still have issues with seeing the reactions I got on my previous video about improving your render speed so let's get back into blender and specifically in the output properties tab right under your Project's frame range frame start and frame end you'll find an option called Step this is the number of frames blender skips forward while rendering or playing back your frames now that sounds a bit fake so what does this actually mean by default this is set to 1 meaning that blender renders every frame so one two three four and so forth until it reaches your frame range and by setting the value to 2 for example blender will now render your frames as follows one three five seven this effectively Cuts your total rendered frames in half but in a different way than just setting your Project's frame range to 120 instead of 240 as the end point of your animation Remains the Same as with a step 1 render effectively it just removes every in-between frame now this is exactly what we want as flow frames has an AI algorithm that will let us interpolate these missing frames very very quickly speaking about very quickly that's what she said getting a professional portfolio website these days is easier than ever with Squarespace not only can you create a stunning website in no time but Squarespace also makes sure that your images look amazing on any device from the tiniest phone to the biggest monitor so you can say goodbye to wonky pixelated photos and hello to Picture Perfect Pages squarespace's intuitive design tools offer flexible layouts custom color palettes great looking Google and type kit phones free high quality images through unsplash and even has built-in photo editing capabilities but wait there's war with squarespace's print-on-demand feature you can turn your Creations into high quality products without lifting a finger let them handle the printing and shipping so you can focus on what you do best being a creative genius and the best part you can head to squarespace.com Kaizen tutorials and use code Kaizen tutorials to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain a quick heads up doing this method you're best off rendering your animations in frames generally this is the case for rendering animations so you can just consider this a best case practice by any means for rendering okay so with that said let's set our step rate to 2 and render out our animation as frames now it's done and like expected this took roughly 100 minutes of rendering now we have all of these loose frames and we need to convert them to a video with the proper fps to convert it let's open up a new project inside a blender and use blender's default video editing template then in your timeline click on ADD image slash sequence and select all the images you rendered out now let's make sure to set the frame range to match the amount of frames that we actually rendered which in this case is 120. also make sure the resolution is set to whatever you used which in my case was 2560 times 1080. finally you want to set the fps to match the stepped down version of your original animation to use this project as an example the original animation was at 30 FPS for 8 seconds or a total of 240 frames but was cut in half using the Step 2 render meaning this video should now be 15 FPS for 8 seconds or a total of 120 frames make sure to change the frame rate to custom and set the fps to this custom range of 15. choose a safe location and render out your video okay so with our video rendered let's use our magical AI tool to turn this video into a 240 frame 30 FPS video in a matter of seconds for first of all download the flow frames which you can do via the link in the description and install it on your PC in my case my PC couldn't actually find the application after installing which was a bit weird so if this happens to you you can find it in the following location on your PC which I'll show on screen right here alright so after installing open up the app and let it load the AI algorithm for a bit go through the interpolation Tab and click on browse video choose your 15 FPS video that you just rendered and you can now choose your desired output FPS in this case I want 30 so times 2 is perfect and I want the speed to stay on normal speed maintaining the original video speed you can change the interpolation Ai and AI model but leaving it on default works best in my case depending on your GPU you might need a different interpolation AI optionally you can also change the output format but I prefer MP4 as it works on almost any device and in any software all set let's hit the interpolate button button and let it do its thing for me it finished in 39 seconds which is absolutely crazy so let's check out the end result [Music] it looks amazing to me and if I put it side by side with the original 30fps video I can't really tell the difference now this absolutely blows my mind and just shows how AI can really help us here [Music] so can we push this even further well yes here's a version of the animation using a step 3 render with a total render time of roughly 66 minutes and the AI interpolating two frames between every frame rendered in blender again it's crazy to me how well this works but you can now start to see a difference with the depth of field losing a bit of quality and the Planned animations looking a little bit more janky overall though it's still very passable and here's another version with an even higher step 4 render Bringing Down the total render time to about 15 minutes in total you can tell this one is starting to fall apart though as the animations are now looking very stuttery and the depth of field transition is not good at all so there is this point where setting the step value higher and letting flow frames interpolate more frames in between every frame start quality so for me the best gains roughly cutting my render times in half was with setting it to 15 FPS instead of 30 FPS and letting flow frames interplay one frame between every frame resulting in a nearly identical result but still saving me a bunch of time now there's a bunch of other use cases for flow frames as well so you can use it to do different things with your renders now this is obviously similar but here's a 60 FPS video I created from the original 30fps this makes it look a lot smoother and because it already has 30 frames to work with the interpolation works even better making the 60fps look perfect and buttery smooth so if you have some old low FPS animations lying about you can quickly Spruce them up using flow frames interpolation without having to re-render anything another thing you could do is you could double your FPS and then play it back at the original FPS speed meaning that you have now created a sort of slow-mo effect effectively doubling the length of your entire animation you could also do this partially just to create a part partial slo-mo between two normal speed segments flow frames is also great for when you have some janky character animation just to make it look smoother and make it look better by quickly adding some more frames between every frame in your animation so my hope for this video is that it will save you a lot of time rendering without costing you anything and how things look but if this isn't enough for you I have another video with the best render settings for rendering in Cycles saving you even more time as always a big thanks to the following patrons for supporting the channel [Music]

Channel: Kaizen

Views: 224,273

Keywords: blender ai render, blender render animation, blender rendering tutorial, blender render settings, blender cycles x, blender cycles render settings, blender faster render cycles, blender faster render animation, blender cycles faster render, blender cycles faster render settings, blender ai render animation, blender ai render tutorial

Id: 86DEWl2Rb1Y

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023