What is the best system for Keyshot? (help needed!)

[Jermaine87]

Hi everyone!

I have bin using Keyshot for a long time now and even though I like it there are some things that don't work well for me.
But to start of i know that keyshot uses the CPU instead of the GPU to render but it takes a long time to make animations.
I have i7 (3,6 ghz) yet it takes me about 140 hours to make a video like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jw19QpNNDgk
so a very long time!
Is there anyway i can improve quality yet also rendering time itself? Because right now that is a lot of hours!!! Or do any of you have a good system I can use other then keyshot?

Also a problem is when I use metal and i ad some roughness somehow the metal flicks move instead of it staying on 1 point, best moment to see it pretty clear is around 0:42 on the video

Hope you guys can help me out here!

[andy.engelkemier]

2.5 minutes per frame is pretty good for most things, but this probably could be much faster.
Do you have GI turned on? You don't need it. That will slow things down quite a bit.
Also, don't forget that quality is only as strong as it's weakest link. Your tessellation isn't high enough. The rounded corners are often noticeably sharp. Most modern renderers don't really slow down much with higher polygon count unless your talking something complex like an entire car assembly with all the screws and nuts.

Car paint materials are a Killer on time, regardless of your render engine. The more samples it needs, the slower. That even includes textures. Smooth surfaces that aren't that reflective are fast. Glossy materials like your glass should be pretty fast as well. But the paints are likely slowing it down quite a bit.

Are you using the real-time render, or the advanced? The advanced render doesn't matter as much for this, but the real-time render is optimized for newer processors. I did a test this morning out of curiosity. We have some older machines and I checked out the area-light.bip with 128 samples. One at 3.2Ghz rendered at 2:34. One at 3.3Ghz 6 core, rendered at 2:17. A new Laptop from Costco with a brand new i7 quad core 2.2Ghz did it in 1:54. So you can see that math doesn't add up. The newer processor instructions are faster, even though it's slower by quite a bit on paper.
That doesn't scale though. If you use advanced settings and it's a fast render, then it's pretty much linear. The same scene was 13 seconds, 9 seconds, and 14 seconds respectively. So that pretty much lines up to speed directly. Short renders are Really hard to predict.

If you can, cycle your computers every 2 years. I don't have that luxury.

If you want this and Really fast, this would work well on Showcase. But that software is Not for everything. It would work great for this particular project though. And you could render the entire thing in real-time. It precalculates GI, and lets you have a different environment for each material if you want. Keyshot only lets you have one environment at a time, so it's a pain to keep track of.

So.....Which computer? No idea, but hopefully that sheds some light on the situation. Some of my more complex renders with vray end up being about 15-30 minutes per frame just to put some things in perspective. If I had dual processor machines I could get that down by about 30-40% but I just render on a bunch of machines at once to get it done. One machine per frame, not distributed rendering. Dual processor machines are overpriced.

[Jermaine87]

Great feedback thank you! I try to see what i can do with these changes. And yes in the video i showed the model was pretty basic xD Not ment for hi end moddeling.

But the part of moving metal? What can I do with that? because metal flicks are moving over it like there is a metal plate set now while the model is moving the metal keeps still therefore the metal looks to be moving yet not?
It's really ugly xD

[andy.engelkemier]

Oh the noise. Sorry.
I am actually not sure. In Vray you have option to make the sampler time dependent or not. Renders might choose to sample noise repeatedly the same. There are no such settings in Keyshot. Their settings are somewhat limiting as far as troubleshooting render errors, but I'm not certain it's that.

This is pretty strong noise, so I'm wondering if it's actually a bump map? I haven't animated in Keyshot since I usually have to animate with specific pivot points, which is very time consuming to do in keyshot. But it almost looks like the object is moving, but not the map. Just as a test, you could make sure you are using a non-procedural map and using UV map instead of box/planar/similar. Be sure to use the object's UV's instead, even if it doesn't look good. If the noise moves With the object this time, then you know there is a problem with how they are treating their mapping.
If you don't have any bump map ,and that's all glossy noise, then that's harder to say.
What type of material is it, and what kind of features did you change/add? If this is car paint, then it might just be how they made the shader. Be sure you use lower numbers so it's not supersampling the material which might also cause that.

[Jermaine87]

Sorry for the late respond! RIght now i am using the standard materials of Keyshot.
I am trying different things in the hope to find a fix. It's really bad.. :O
https://youtu.be/IgIMNAYBr10

If i ever find a good fix i'll get back here

[LayC42]

Your animation is good - but - still got some things to fix.
What would I do?
- I would render the several sequences as different files with different options.
- I would use "fast materials" with a low value of samples on lil parts
- Increase the samples on the metal parts that have flakes
- Decrease the ray bounces to 4 or 6
- blurring the office desk environment
- ...
- use background rendering option and keep KeyShot paused
- create test renderings with advanced render option and max samples mode, to balance the quality and rendertime - before starting the final shots

Your work is very good. Keep going and render a view images. If you're happy with them, render the frames and stitch them with a video creation tool.


maybe you would share your final video with us?

[Jermaine87]

Hi first of all thank you! I will look in to this all! Right now I have done some testing and it might be fixed but i am not sure yet!
Also about sharing yes I will share it when done. It will take a bit of time but i have some cool things going on with it.
It's for a company and i might have to be done by wednesday (I finished a video on saturday for them and then after this one i might have like a week again to finish one again xD, so i keep learning new things and of course walking in to problems also)