Render HUGE Scenes in Blender for FREE

so you've watched dozens of videos about optimizing your scenes but your animation still wouldn't even start rendering if that's the case you're at the right place because in this video i'll be sharing my top three ways to render huge scenes in blender for absolutely free of cost and the cool part is that it doesn't matter how crappy your pc is you can still manage to render your favorite scene out now with that said let's get into the video method one render layers a lot of people overlook how powerful render layers can be including me but after my most recent animation i really understood the importance of them for rendering as well as for how handy they can be in the compositing stage if you don't have any idea what i'm talking about think of them as separate renders of parts of your scene which you can later overlay on top of one another to get the same result as rendering the whole scene at once for example i rendered my last animation using render layers as well i separated the ground part the main character the houses the background elements and the extra background characters and foreground characters this reduced the load on my computer by a lot and actually made rendering this animation possible otherwise if i just try to render the whole thing at once my pc would just run out of memory and in the worst case scenario it would just crash now this is where your render layers will appear on the blender ui by default it will just say view layer but if you click on this icon next to it and choose one of these three options depending on your preference it'll add a new view layer now you can disable the collections that you don't want to include in this render layer and enable the ones that you do sometimes you might have models which are both in the foreground and in the background with something else sandwiched in between them that you want to render in a separate layer and in that case you just want to keep the collection turned on and then go over here to this filter icon and then turn these two on for the effect that we want in this case we need to turn this hold out option on after you do that if anything in this collection obstructs some other object whose visibility is turned on that obstructed part will become transparent in the render this other option right here is when you only want to calculate the indirect lighting of the object but not the object itself so let's say in this ground render layer i want to have the shadow of the character still appear properly but not the character itself in that case i can just turn on this indirect lighting option and it will only calculate the light bounces of the character on other objects that are turned on and disable the direct lighting that goes into the camera after you're done setting your layers up you can go to the view layer properties and turn this render single layer option on this means that when you hit render only the render layer that you currently have selected will be rendered and the rest of them will be ignored unless you have set up the compositor tab to include more than one this can be done by creating multiple render layers nodes each set to a different view layer and then multiple file output nodes with different output names or directories this technique is commonly used so it's important that you try it out and make use of it if you haven't already now if you're a beginner and you're just getting started in blender i know that all of this can be a bit overwhelming which is why the sponsor of this video is skillshare if you don't already know skillshare is an online learning platform which offers thousands of classes on a wide variety of topics ranging from freelance and entrepreneurship to videography animation and fine art just to name a few now i've used skillshare myself and i'd highly recommend that you check out this tutorial by remington markham aka rd or southern shoddy about creating your first 3d character in blender i've watched this tutorial myself and even i learned a lot of stuff from it and i think it's incredibly well made especially for beginners who might feel intimidated to take on a challenging project it goes over everything from the basics of the user interface moving on to the character design modeling texturing lighting and rendering it'll get you started with a proper professional workflow which in my opinion is very important when you're starting out as you need to build the right habits from the beginning we also have a tutorial on bringing illustrations to life with blender and i think this one it will be particularly useful for my sister who is a 2d artist and has been meaning to use blender's 3d capabilities to make her artworks even better the great thing about skillshare is that it has classes to fit your schedule and your current skill level you can also join live classes to connect with the teachers and also get feedback on your work from the community and also get inspiration also i have a special link for you guys in the description and the comment section so the first 1000 people to join from the given link will get a free one-month trial of skillshare premium membership so this is a great opportunity to start learning that skill you've always wanted to learn method number two sheep at render farm now if your pc is just absolute garbage the second option you'd have is to just use a render farm and i want to make this video accessible to everyone so i'll only be talking about the free stuff here so if you don't know already render farms are basically just multiple interconnected computers that can be used to render a single animation and there are a lot of render farms out there which you can choose from i've personally only tried concierge render and sheepit concierge gender is paid which means that you have to buy credits using actual money whereas sheepit is totally free the way you can get credits or points and ship it is by actually rendering for someone else first there's a certain threshold of points that you need to accumulate and 10 frames that you need to render for someone else before you can render your stuff i suggest just running the render overnight and by the time you wake up you'll have enough to render your own animation of course this method isn't going to work if you need something super urgently and in that case you just have to rely on a paid render farm i've also realized that your projects need to be less than 500 megabytes in order to use this platform because you know if it is anything above that it will have reduced accessibility to users as not everybody can work with something that large so they put this limit on it apparently my project was around 2.5 gigabytes so i couldn't use sheepit for this one method number three google cool app this method is a little bit jankier than the other two because you need to run some code to get it up and running basically it's a cloud computing service that lets you run python scripts in your browser it gives you free access to gpus and hence you can also set it up to render your blender projects with it i guess in a way that's kind of exploiting it but i've seen a lot of people do this without any problems so i guess it's fine now instead of showing you how to set it up in this video you should just check out this awesome video by damien matthew a fellow blender creator i followed this video step by step to set up my notebook as they call it here and it seemed to work fine just that my project was a bit too much to handle for the gpus that they use here but it really was worth the shot so those were the three ways you can render your scenes and blender for free i didn't go over any optimization tricks because there are plenty of other videos that go over that but if these still didn't work then i have some tips that could help optimize your scenes so think of these as some bonus methods firstly if your scene has a massive poly count which could be anything from 3 million to 20 million based on your pc you should try to figure out what assets will actually need that much of detail and which ones won't so let's say you have a lot of background assets with a lot of details you can try deleting some of the minor details or remove any subsurface modifiers that you might have on them if they are models that you can't edit very easily such as high poly sculpts or 3d scans you can drop in a decimate modifier on them to reduce their poly count by a lot now if that's not an issue with your scene you might also have a lot of high resolution textures which increases the texture streaming load on your hardware so if you have a bunch of 4k textures on random objects it would definitely help to just use 2k or even 1k textures instead depending on how far the objects are from the camera or how big or small they are you could also have multiple objects use the same material and make that material use a 4k or sometimes even an 8k texture this is called a texture atlas this is a common technique used in games to reduce the texture streaming processes as it is easier to load in one larger image than multiple smaller images at once there are also ways in which you can make cycles work faster by adjusting some settings and you can find multiple youtube videos on this topic by some great creators that i follow myself i'd also suggest that you try out cycles x if you haven't already it is still in the alpha state and doesn't support volumetrics during the time when i'm recording this video but the developers will hopefully figure that out soon it's a massive boost in terms of speed especially when you consider animations as with a few seconds shut off the render time for each frame it can go a long way when it just adds up so yeah that's everything that i wanted to share in this video there are a lot many topics which i may or may not know about which i didn't cover in this video so if you happen to know any feel free to share them with everyone in the comment section and let's all help each other out i hope you learned something from this video and enjoyed watching it make sure to drop a like and share with your friends who you think would benefit from the things that i talked about in this video also if you'd like to see more of the future videos just like this one be sure to subscribe and hit that notification button otherwise this subscribe button is practically useless oh and if you have anything that you'd want to see a separate video on be sure to let me know in the comments down below as i read every one of them i want to include some more shameless plugs here mainly about my patreon page where you can get access to behind the scenes content sneak peeks early access to videos such as these heavy discount on products and even exclusive tutorials we also have a render eyes discord server where we're planning to host some more events soon so be sure to join as soon as possible so that you can participate in them and yeah with all of that said thanks for watching this video and i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: RenderRides

Views: 19,627

Rating: 4.9522548 out of 5

Keywords: blender, blender 3.0, blender 2.93, how to render in blender, how to speed up cycles, how to speed up cycles render in blender 2.8, how to speed up cycles render in blender 2.9, cycles render settings blender 2.9, cycles render faster, cycles render blender, cycles render animation, how to render animation faster in blender, faster rendering blender, faster render blender, free render farm blender, cycles x, cycles x blender, Render HUGE Scenes in Blender for FREE

Id: CavlKsnLwkE

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Catnip4Pedos]

TLDW:

1. Use Render layers and comp non moving parts of animations or use it to reduce memory usage in complex scenes

2. Sheepit render farm

3. Google Colab