You are bloody amazing. I have a month to finish an animation for my final graphics project for my portfolio for university and the render times were giving me night terrors. This video turned a calculated 60 hour render into a 9 hours on top of doing the animating. No one has been better than you at making interesting videos explaining blender.
3:55 #1 - Reduce Light Bounces 6:40 #2 - Use Portals 8:50 #3 - Use GPU 11:15 #4 - Change the Tile Size 13:12 #5 - Reduce Samples 15:25 #6 - Denoising 17:33 #7 - Use the Latest Blender Version 18:58 #8 - Use a different OS 20:48 #9 - Clamp it 23:23 #10 - Turn off Caustics 25:02 #11 - Object Instancing 27:49 #12 - Adaptive Subdivision 29:20 #13 - Remove Alpha Transparency 31:09 #14 - Reduce the Strand Count 32:15 #15 - Remove Volumetrics 33:27 #16 - Cut SSS 35:03 #17 - Enable MIS 36:45 #18 - Small Performance Improvements (No, im not trying to improve my english vocabulary lol. I just had to restart video 3x and now i am tired to research what i need.) #LazyFrench
Great work Andrew and Mason! A really valuable resource. Also changing the Image Draw Method to GLSL in User preferences gives about a 5-10% speed increase when rendering with GPU.
May also be a no brainer for some, but if you're making an animation where only the camera moves, bake the lighting. Takes about as much time as rendering one frame, but cuts the cost of rendering frames to like less than one second usually.
This is still a brilliant video well over a year later! I’m not even about to do any cycles rendering any time soon, but I still feel like I need to know this! Thanks for your continued ultra hard work and determined curiosity that brings us this valuable info!!
I know you probably get many of these comments every day, but PLEASE realise that if a 2017 tutorial can help me out with my issues better than the tutorials coming out these days, you must be doing something very right Keep up the awesome work man
Alpha transparency: You can also deactivate "transparent shadows" in the material settings. This will keep the leaf transparent, only the shadow will not use the alphamap (since this is the largest performance hit). Best compromise is to model a rough leaf like the right one in 29:50 so the shadow won't be a square block, USE Alpha Masking but disable transparent shadows.
This is what I needed!! A very high res image that was taking me 5hours a few days ago is now rendering in about 7 min because of these optimizations. Really amazing!! Thanks, Andrew!!
I just watched your video yesterday and used these tips this morning. I was able to cut a 550 frame animation from a minute per frame down to 10 seconds! If my math is right, you just saved me over four hours in render time! I just want to say that your video is still very much relevant, 3 years later, and I sincerely appreciate that you put it out. Smashing that subscription button right now! Thank you
For anyone wondering: MIS just changes how frequently each part of the HDRI is sampled. Without MIS, each pixel in the HDRI as the same probability of being sampled as any other pixel, but MIS will give more samples to the brighter parts of the HDRI, creating a sample pattern more representative of the image. Additionally, MIS will also give more samples to parts of the HDRI that appear in the reflections (including diffuse reflections) of materials. All materials, emission and other, use MIS, but for some reason the environment has a checkbox for it.
'Persistent images' makes an improvment when rendering animations with large textures. From my experience the way it works is as follows; when you press render, Blender will load all image textures into memory and builds the scene BVH for rendering. If you're using a lot of large texture/normal/diff/etc. maps (2k+) this could take a minute or two before the image even starts to render. When it moves onto the next frame it loads all the images from the disk into memory again and this can take a while. With 'persistent images' ticked Blender doesn't unload the texture images from memory after each frame so building the scene for render is faster for all subsequent frames as the textures are still in memory. Generally speaking, I leave it on.
Wow, I'm going to try this. I remember the takeaway from this video being to leave it unchecked but this is a massive and relevant issue I'm having right now. Thanks for the tip, I'm going to try it now.
@@muhammadsban2009 A year late on this but: Render Properties -> Performance -> Final Render. If it's not there, make sure that you have your renderer set to Cycles and not EEVEE.
You are the GOAT of Blender tutorial i mean it sincerely, i watched tons of tutorial on youtube some are extremely good but every time i watched yours there is always some added details that i can't find else where or that i get in few separated tutorials...
DUDE THANKS SO MUCH! After using probably half of the ways, the speed increased a lot! It used to take 3 hours for a single frame to be rendered and now it only takes 4 minutes! Thank you so much
I just yesterday took up animation (finally) and came back to this video hoping to cut render times. Massive difference utilizing about half of the covered methods - render time went from nearly three minutes per frame down to a little over thirty seconds per frame. Across 600 frames, that made my day. (still no meth - I remembered that part)
fun fact, you can kinda render on GPU and CPU at the same time. set everything up so that its ready to render, save the blend file, and open another one, then set one to CPU and one to GPU. btw, tips, make sure the CPU has 1 or 2 threads that does NOT render, otherwise the GPU one will be slower. so limit the CPU one a bit, you can do that in the render settings. Keep in mind, once you set both to render, ur computer will be useless untill its done, so dont do it unless you have no plans of using the PC any time soon.
I do this often, I'll have one project rendering in the background on CPU with 2 or so threads left and then I can continue working on another project using GPU compute for previews etc. or vice versa, depending on the situation.
If you really want to do some multitasking, there's a better way to do that. You can set the blender process that's rendering on the cpu to low priority from Task Manager, so Windows will give whatever program you are using a priority, while still assigning the rest of your CPU to the rendering. That means you can have your GPU and CPU rendering at 100% load 24/7 and also do more work at the same time on the same PC, especially if your CPU has an iGPU, you can also use that for the UI drawing, while your main card is rendering. That way you are using all your parts at 100%, while still running a browser or a third Blender window at +-60fps.
Another thing I suggest (going along with reducing samples). If you have a large scene with variations of assets, you can do this: Many times, I have rendered scenes where I am rendering volumetrics with 3D Geometry. I first do a few test renders (100-200 samples). At that stage, I notice that a lot of my 3D parts of the scene look pretty good and increasing the samples would be a waste ^ as Andrew stated. The volumetrics, however, as usual, need more samples to refine their looks. If you put your 3D stuff or whatever looks fine at low samples on another layer while keeping smoke on the first layer, (in the layers tab) you can actually change the sample amount for each layer! Most people probably know this, but for those who don't, this goes right along with the wasted samples idea Andrew talked about. With this layering method, you can render background stuff or whatever does not need to be cleaned with lower samples, while rendering your volumetrics and stuff at higher levels. This can really save a lot of time depending on the scene (at least in my experiences with this method.)
Watching this whilst waiting for my first original render to complete! Thanks so much for all your videos. You, alongside the guys at Corridor, opened up the world of visual effects to me and have ultimately led me to this point... even if it rendering still takes a lot of time :D Thanks again and keep helping people improve and inspire new people to try. - Will
I don't know if Andrew already mentioned this, but there is a addon called "Auto Tile Size" that calculates the optimal tile size for your graphic's card configuration. So you guys don't have to experiment, just push a button and Blender resizes it for you for maximum performance.
@@the_fl3dd0x It does not like the same, example Light Path --> Bounce, it looks like to be Indirect Light --> Diffuse Bounce... Not sure if it the same,
Hey man, just want to let you know I applied these tips and got great results. I was following your donut tutorial to learn blender, and I'm using a laptop that's not really designed for this kind of work. Just the donut without the environment and other objects was taking 8 minutes to render initially. I changed the render method to CPU, because I think the i7 in this laptop is better than the Nvidia GPU, and reduced tile size to 16. I changed max bounces to 2. And with denoising enabled I could reduce samples all the way to 32 without any loss of quality. Final render time was 1 minute 40 seconds.
Thanks man this is really helpful, I'm new to blender and having a hard time on rendering because of my old hardwares taking ages to finish rendering, but now after applying what I learned here the difference is like heaven and earth.
How's that? Is Eevee actually useful for final renders? I thought it's only use is to give quick visual input via the viewport, and isn't really used for actual rendering.
Kersey Kerman can confirm that. It‘s absolutely awesome to have an instant visual reference of what you are doing but for that realistic look, cycles ist still the choice 👌🏼
@@kerseykerman7307 well depends on the scene. I started to use eevee more than cycles in some of my renders. If you play around with the lighting it becomes better but it will never be as good as cycles. I still love eevee for mograph/stylization/sci fi e.t.c. I use cycles for archviz or displacement/transparency related stuff
Thanks for great tutorial, it allowed me to reduce render time 5 times. I'd like to share the next 2 ways: #19 - run your blend file from RAM disk - it reduces scene preparation by 20 seconds, my scene starts rendering after 15 second, before it was 40-45 seconds. Important is to unpack textures on RAM disk since when when it is packed into .blend file there is no speed up, I suspect .blend is not fully loaded to RAM so reading textures from RAM disk helps a lot. If you render video those 20s in each frame makes a major savings in render time #20 - important for GPU, before render set viewport shading to Solid to avoid unnecessary VRAM usage. This is especially important for GTX970, be sure you do not use over 3.5GB of VRAM, during the rendering. You can check it with GPU-Z. The last 500MB of GTX970 memory are very slow and when you get there rendering times doubles at least for my scene. I played with tiles size going up to 540x540 when I faced the issue, accidentally I noticed Texture/Material/Render viewport eats 2GB before render starts and you get to the slow memory area easily during rendering
HA! This is high comedy. I've watched many of your videos, Andrew, and this one takes the cake. Clearly a lot of effort put into narrative and the sense of humor and although it isn't quite as poignant with the intended information, I found the extraness to be very enjoyable. Thanks for all you do!
For the tile size, there's a plugin that I now believe is built in called Auto Tile Size that takes all of this into account, as well as some extra tricks to optimize the tiles (such as using numbers near powers of two to reduce partial tiles around the edges of the image).
Plugin is good, but remember that Blender does math in its number boxes, so just enter total hoz pixels divided by the number to hoz tiles, e.g. 1920/4 and it will set to the correct tile width... then do the same for the vert pixels... bigger tiles for GPU & smaller for CPU.
31:58 From my experience it works better to create a small rug with low particle counts and the Alt+D instance duplication and intersect them till it has the same tight look. It's tedious but it looks good.
"With great power comes great responsibility. Rest easy on the wicked for they have not seen the truth. Also, don't touch Meth." Bro, you had me rollin' lololol
the way you present these ways, short and precise... this makes this almost one hour video feel like 10 minutes. good work! and btw. your advice actually helped me!
Been watcNice tutorialng your vids for a good few weeks now, learning new sNice tutorialt each day. my worksoftow has improved so much since watcNice tutorialng
I know this video is old and Blender has changed a lot, but for samples (at least on 3.2+): you can leave samples up pretty high (I usually leave it at 2048 or 4096) and then you can increase the threshold. From 0.01, I usually do 0.03 or 0.04. This will skip areas that already have enough paths. So if you have the samples higher and a higher noise threshold, it will help darker areas render clearer and reduce denoising artifacts.
You're the best teacher of any program I ever found in the Internet. Funny, engaging, and clear. Even though you're not always straight to the point, your segues are always new knowledge. Thank you, Andrew!
Note: With recent Blender, if you have an RTX card, you can use Optix instead which is focused for light rays rather than general computation (CUDA) Reducing the light bouncing drastically improved my cycles viewport rendering. Amazing!
Andrew: "If you wanted to upgrade your cpu, you would have to upgrade your motherboard, which means you have to upgrade your ram," Me: *laughs hysterically in AM4*
This was a great video! I am a total noob to 3D stuff and Blender is the application I chose. I did try 3DMax before and it was cool, but as an IT professional, I like to take of challenges! This tutorial is awesome because it explains a lot in terms of 3D work in general. One of the hardest things to learn in any field is the lingo and understanding of the theory behind it enough to put it into practice. This video does a great job with all of that! Too many other Blender videos show just how to make stuff, but this video gives you details needed to make your scenes or animations the highest quality possible! I would love to see this video and other important new items in the 2.82 version that we are working in specifically.
"You forget how good hair looks until you don't have it anymore" - made me choke on my coffee. xD Thanks a lot for these great tips! Made my life much easier. :)
Denoiser is not magic, you can do it with photoshop too, but it's handy like this. Beware for artifacts though. it might still need some touch-up and tweaking. It's especially handy for fireflies.
Be mindful of the VRAM limitations when using the denoiser. Tile settings where the GPU works fastest can consume copious quantities of VRAM. This drawback won't (usually) apply to CPU rendering due to the small tile sizes.
the opening is sooo good XD also the improvement rates you wrote are kind of an understatement. if you go from 100 minutes to 10 minutes, i'd say it's a 1000% improvement and not a 90% improvement, since 1000% means 10 times. and you can render 10 times the frames during that time.
One of the most creative ways to tell us Blender tips that I have ever seen. Absolutely love the concept and the info about rendering. Thank you! I'm sending this from the past BTW
for one frame, 16 hours and..... almost 91 PB of memory???? also at 16 hrs per frame, 1000 frames would take over 2 yrs but good skit, that was hilarious xD
I have needed this video for so long. I've always had my bounces way too high. Thanks Andrew..... you still salting your water ? You did miss one speedup.. even when rendering with GPU the CPU is still needed for setting up the scene so faster is better. I think the adaptive subdivs is CPU calculated.
Thanks for another great vid Andrew. Glad I came across this when I got off from work; I started a 500 frame render a little over 12 hours aggo, and when I got home this evening, it was only at 12 frames rendered! I thought HOLEEE SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!
Another great tutorial. I've been compiling a small list of very informative tutorials in case any of my friends want to learn or I forget some small, crucial detail.
how much would you deem as enough ram when rendering with the CPU? I've just begun blendering(or whatever you can call it) and I want to get into it but I need a new PC. I think I'm gonna upgrade soon but I don't want to regret my purchase choice.
at DislsMe. Most scenes will be under 10 GB of ram but complex scenes will take anywhere up to 128GB ram, this would depend entirely on what you are making and rendering. i use GPU for most scenes and only move to CPU when I run out of GPU memory. max 6GB at the moment. but my PC has 24GB and this works fine...
I didn't dislike even though I use my AMD R9 290 without issue to render most things(and support will be near complete in the upcoming release as it is in the nightly. Performance will outclass CUDA's as seen in Blender's benchmarks)
Is using Blender internal even still a thing? I remember there were still people making tutorials for it two years ago, but now I rarely see anything made with Blender internal.
Denoiser is not magic, you can do it with photoshop too, but it's handy like this. Beware for artifacts though. it might still need some touch-up and tweaking. It's especially handy for fireflies.
Photoshop's denoiser is VERY different from Blender's as far as denoisers go. You will find Photoshop's implementation far less effective than the denoiser in Blender since they were designed to remove different types of noise. And of course Blender has a heap of render data handy too.
I think the blender denoiser works so well because it knows what each sample holds and can nullify the grain using algorithms. Much better than just guess work, which is what photoshop does.
I came here desperate and reduced my time from 26 days to 16 days. Still a lot but damn do these little improvements add up at very little visual cost if properly adjusted. Thanks Andrew from 3 years ago.
The best "How to speed up Cycles" video ever! Very clear, perfectly detailed. Good job! By the way: write this tutorial as a new article in Blender Guru! It's good to have a written version of it!
He literally just compared a Titan X Pascal to a 6700k. That's totally unfair and even so he only got a 33% improvement. That means unless you got the best Gpu out there you should use the CPU.
Had this tutorial going in the background while doing some unrelated work in Blender. So distracting but so funny! Love being able to laugh and learn. We are lucky to have you Andrew! Ha ha fax machines, too much!
Hi, here some clickable timestamps with possible speedup for every tip presented, might be useful for lookup:
0:00 Future Andrew from 2030
3:10 Intro
3:52 #1 Reduce Light bounces (3,8x)
6:40 #2 Use Portals (1,9x)
8:47 #3 Switch to GPU (1,5x)
11:10 #4 Use Optimal Tile Size (6,1x)
13:11 #5 Reduce Samples (4,0x)
15:25 #6 Use Dennoising (3,6x)
17:32 #7 Use latest Blender version (~1,8x GPU;~1,9x CPU)
18:56 #8 Use different OS (1,6x CPU)
20:48 #9 Clamp It (1,5x)
23:23 #10 Turn off Caustics (1,5x)
25:03 #11 Use Object Instancing (1,7x time;97,1x memory)
27:49 #12 Use Adaptive Subdivision (1,5x time;3,9x memory)
29:19 #13 Remove Alpha Transparency (1,8x)
31:08 #14 Reduce Strand Countz (1,4x)
32:11 #15 Remove Volumetrics (1,6x)
33:26 #16 Cut SSS (2,4x)
35:02 #17 Enable MIS (Multiple Importance Sampling) (2,0x)
36:45 #18 Small Performance Improvements (few seconds)
41:10 Summary
43:54 Assessing a Scene
46:44 Special Thanks
Robby Rob you're god
Wish I had seen this sooner. I just finished making my own time stamps on an embedded link to this video.
speeding up a video about speeding up rendering
Pfff, I don't need this, i have plenty of time to watch the whole video while my scene is rendering, right?
Thanks for that, so much easier.
Keeping somebody interested for 47 minutes requires copious amounts of talent! Well done.
And meth
If I had not saw your comment I dont know how long i would have watched
Damn didn't know it was that long😂
@@dibashbikramthapa8790 me too 😅😅
@@michaelchurch2957 Goddamn it you stole my joke. USING TIME TRAVEL and meth
@@shayneoneill1506 Sorry, i didn't realize you were planning to say that six months ago.
You are bloody amazing. I have a month to finish an animation for my final graphics project for my portfolio for university and the render times were giving me night terrors. This video turned a calculated 60 hour render into a 9 hours on top of doing the animating. No one has been better than you at making interesting videos explaining blender.
60 hours...
Damn....
60 hours?? What it was?
@@big_floppa6990 It was a 5 minute animation entirely done in cycles.
@@doctormini-rollz9915 what was your specs ? If you still remember
@@1Ci It was I7-7700 gtx1070 16gb ram
2:33
Fan theory:
The call is breaking up because future andrew's timeline it's collapsing, beucase his past is changing
beucase
Man
OK that’s too far
@@man2452Ok, DM what you want to say.:)
But hey, that's just a theory! A BLENDER THEORY!
Aaaaaand.... render...
7 years old and this video is still incredibly helpful! Thanks
5 years
Dudes from the future
Pretty sure this video is still relevant to the blender community in 2025
didnt you get the memo???? stay away from meth for god sake
3:55 #1 - Reduce Light Bounces
6:40 #2 - Use Portals
8:50 #3 - Use GPU
11:15 #4 - Change the Tile Size
13:12 #5 - Reduce Samples
15:25 #6 - Denoising
17:33 #7 - Use the Latest Blender Version
18:58 #8 - Use a different OS
20:48 #9 - Clamp it
23:23 #10 - Turn off Caustics
25:02 #11 - Object Instancing
27:49 #12 - Adaptive Subdivision
29:20 #13 - Remove Alpha Transparency
31:09 #14 - Reduce the Strand Count
32:15 #15 - Remove Volumetrics
33:27 #16 - Cut SSS
35:03 #17 - Enable MIS
36:45 #18 - Small Performance Improvements
(No, im not trying to improve my english vocabulary lol. I just had to restart video 3x and now i am tired to research what i need.) #LazyFrench
thanks
thanks!
Merci
Thanks too much.
Mulțumesc frumos !
21.05.2019
Great work Andrew and Mason! A really valuable resource. Also changing the Image Draw Method to GLSL in User preferences gives about a 5-10% speed increase when rendering with GPU.
thanks
Thanks for that, it made a noticeable difference on top of all the other hints!
May also be a no brainer for some, but if you're making an animation where only the camera moves, bake the lighting. Takes about as much time as rendering one frame, but cuts the cost of rendering frames to like less than one second usually.
CG Geek Thanks for the helpful tip mate. I'm subbed to your channel also. This community is awesome.
Súper De Algar
That wasn't a no brainer for me buddy. It sounds like a great tip. Thanks man.
This is still a brilliant video well over a year later! I’m not even about to do any cycles rendering any time soon, but I still feel like I need to know this! Thanks for your continued ultra hard work and determined curiosity that brings us this valuable info!!
I know right 😂. I still haven't made a video in cycles yet.
6 years later, still one of the most useful blender videos on this website
I know you probably get many of these comments every day, but PLEASE realise that if a 2017 tutorial can help me out with my issues better than the tutorials coming out these days, you must be doing something very right
Keep up the awesome work man
1:51 "also *meth"*
ahh that makes sense
i like this
1:58
" copious amounts of meth "
Hahahaha
just when i read it he said it 😂
Alpha transparency:
You can also deactivate "transparent shadows" in the material settings. This will keep the leaf transparent, only the shadow will not use the alphamap (since this is the largest performance hit). Best compromise is to model a rough leaf like the right one in 29:50 so the shadow won't be a square block, USE Alpha Masking but disable transparent shadows.
This is what I needed!! A very high res image that was taking me 5hours a few days ago is now rendering in about 7 min because of these optimizations. Really amazing!! Thanks, Andrew!!
I just watched your video yesterday and used these tips this morning. I was able to cut a 550 frame animation from a minute per frame down to 10 seconds! If my math is right, you just saved me over four hours in render time! I just want to say that your video is still very much relevant, 3 years later, and I sincerely appreciate that you put it out. Smashing that subscription button right now! Thank you
For anyone wondering:
MIS just changes how frequently each part of the HDRI is sampled. Without MIS, each pixel in the HDRI as the same probability of being sampled as any other pixel, but MIS will give more samples to the brighter parts of the HDRI, creating a sample pattern more representative of the image. Additionally, MIS will also give more samples to parts of the HDRI that appear in the reflections (including diffuse reflections) of materials.
All materials, emission and other, use MIS, but for some reason the environment has a checkbox for it.
'Persistent images' makes an improvment when rendering animations with large textures. From my experience the way it works is as follows; when you press render, Blender will load all image textures into memory and builds the scene BVH for rendering. If you're using a lot of large texture/normal/diff/etc. maps (2k+) this could take a minute or two before the image even starts to render. When it moves onto the next frame it loads all the images from the disk into memory again and this can take a while. With 'persistent images' ticked Blender doesn't unload the texture images from memory after each frame so building the scene for render is faster for all subsequent frames as the textures are still in memory. Generally speaking, I leave it on.
Where is the persistent images option? It seems like a lifesaver.
Wow, I'm going to try this. I remember the takeaway from this video being to leave it unchecked but this is a massive and relevant issue I'm having right now. Thanks for the tip, I'm going to try it now.
@@muhammadsban2009 A year late on this but:
Render Properties -> Performance -> Final Render. If it's not there, make sure that you have your renderer set to Cycles and not EEVEE.
Render Options -> Final Render - > Persistent data
@@bastiaanwilliams8398 Good update! Yes, it's changed it's name in the past 4 years since the version I was using when I wrote my comment.
This just helped cut my render time in more than half: you just saved me more than 100 hours of render time for my animation. Thank you so much!
Thats very epic
Thats very epic
Thats very epic
@@BrothersInGame99 mnģi
@@BrothersInGame99 tegjjhv!±¹
Making a skit is awesome! Keep doing that! I love it! Makes learning that much more fun.
haha thanks. Was a fun change of pace for me :)
Get the hell off youtube you clones.
yeah, nice intro and perfect video. thks!
7Bryan77 It's much simpler than that. Just showing that you have fun doing what you do is enough to engage people! :D
You are the GOAT of Blender tutorial i mean it sincerely, i watched tons of tutorial on youtube some are extremely good but every time i watched yours there is always some added details that i can't find else where or that i get in few separated tutorials...
Dude you are the definition of humility, it's an honor for me to watch your videos
DUDE THANKS SO MUCH! After using probably half of the ways, the speed increased a lot! It used to take 3 hours for a single frame to be rendered and now it only takes 4 minutes! Thank you so much
SOOOO Cool. i change tile to 512x512 GPU is so faster.
Really?
@@IRUSN4F yes
Lol "so faster"
I find 8x8 CPU faster and better quality.
May just be blender 2.92
You are by far the coolest person I've seen on youtube this week. And this has been a good week. Cheers!
I seriously can't appreciate this little montage in the beginning enough
minute 3, second 11, you haven't said one thing about speeding up cycles and I'm already hooked and have already hit the like button.
I just yesterday took up animation (finally) and came back to this video hoping to cut render times. Massive difference utilizing about half of the covered methods - render time went from nearly three minutes per frame down to a little over thirty seconds per frame. Across 600 frames, that made my day.
(still no meth - I remembered that part)
I'm surprised how useful this is for being nearly 3 years old. Super useful, detailed and exactly what I needed!
Well, I'll be honest, that's probably the most useful tutorial i've seen on UA-cam.
I don't know man... That grainy noise that cycles makes can sometimes make something look surprisingly beautiful. I'm a fan of it.
sometimes
fun fact, you can kinda render on GPU and CPU at the same time. set everything up so that its ready to render, save the blend file, and open another one, then set one to CPU and one to GPU. btw, tips, make sure the CPU has 1 or 2 threads that does NOT render, otherwise the GPU one will be slower. so limit the CPU one a bit, you can do that in the render settings. Keep in mind, once you set both to render, ur computer will be useless untill its done, so dont do it unless you have no plans of using the PC any time soon.
I do this often, I'll have one project rendering in the background on CPU with 2 or so threads left and then I can continue working on another project using GPU compute for previews etc. or vice versa, depending on the situation.
If you really want to do some multitasking, there's a better way to do that. You can set the blender process that's rendering on the cpu to low priority from Task Manager, so Windows will give whatever program you are using a priority, while still assigning the rest of your CPU to the rendering. That means you can have your GPU and CPU rendering at 100% load 24/7 and also do more work at the same time on the same PC, especially if your CPU has an iGPU, you can also use that for the UI drawing, while your main card is rendering. That way you are using all your parts at 100%, while still running a browser or a third Blender window at +-60fps.
HydraOFW you're not alone m8 ;-)
Another thing I suggest (going along with reducing samples). If you have a large scene with variations of assets, you can do this: Many times, I have rendered scenes where I am rendering volumetrics with 3D Geometry. I first do a few test renders (100-200 samples). At that stage, I notice that a lot of my 3D parts of the scene look pretty good and increasing the samples would be a waste ^ as Andrew stated. The volumetrics, however, as usual, need more samples to refine their looks. If you put your 3D stuff or whatever looks fine at low samples on another layer while keeping smoke on the first layer, (in the layers tab) you can actually change the sample amount for each layer! Most people probably know this, but for those who don't, this goes right along with the wasted samples idea Andrew talked about. With this layering method, you can render background stuff or whatever does not need to be cleaned with lower samples, while rendering your volumetrics and stuff at higher levels. This can really save a lot of time depending on the scene (at least in my experiences with this method.)
It's so nice to see someone doing a tutorial without having to edit himself every two sentences because he/she can't talk in front of a camera :-)
I thoroughly enjoyed the intro, breaks up the constant learning serious stuff
"Never give specific details to people in different timelines". This is a piece of art.
love the intro of this video
Me too.
Watching this whilst waiting for my first original render to complete! Thanks so much for all your videos. You, alongside the guys at Corridor, opened up the world of visual effects to me and have ultimately led me to this point... even if it rendering still takes a lot of time :D Thanks again and keep helping people improve and inspire new people to try. - Will
plot twist: the render just completed
I don't know if Andrew already mentioned this, but there is a addon called "Auto Tile Size" that calculates the optimal tile size for your graphic's card configuration. So you guys don't have to experiment, just push a button and Blender resizes it for you for maximum performance.
May be the best and the clearest tip video ever
that tile size setting yo. omg. Brilliant tutorial and still relevant no matter the version of blender :)
Can you do this for Blender 2.8 ^^ having hard time finding these settings now
same dude
Preferences are now in edit
@@the_fl3dd0x It does not like the same, example Light Path --> Bounce, it looks like to be Indirect Light --> Diffuse Bounce... Not sure if it the same,
The only setting that’s under a different name is tile size, I think. It’s under “performance”.
Roberto Quintal not sure what you’re talking about, it’s still under max bounces and the settings are exactly the same
As someone rendering from a Mac Mini I highly appreciate this video. Thank You.
Rusty Shackleford same here
im rendering from a potato
That's where they get the fastest chips from
do not all artist/designers work[better] on a MAC? ;)
TheSmurfboard I have a bag of them! lol
Hey man, just want to let you know I applied these tips and got great results. I was following your donut tutorial to learn blender, and I'm using a laptop that's not really designed for this kind of work. Just the donut without the environment and other objects was taking 8 minutes to render initially.
I changed the render method to CPU, because I think the i7 in this laptop is better than the Nvidia GPU, and reduced tile size to 16. I changed max bounces to 2. And with denoising enabled I could reduce samples all the way to 32 without any loss of quality.
Final render time was 1 minute 40 seconds.
lol me too, from 10 min to work renders in 18 sec
Good to hear
I know this is corny, but it's also cute and wholesome, and super useful. You really are the teaching GOAT of Blender
Thanks man this is really helpful, I'm new to blender and having a hard time on rendering because of my old hardwares taking ages to finish rendering, but now after applying what I learned here the difference is like heaven and earth.
And then EEVEE came in 2019 , and the future of Future Andrew changed.
How's that? Is Eevee actually useful for final renders? I thought it's only use is to give quick visual input via the viewport, and isn't really used for actual rendering.
Maybe cycles r still used
Kersey Kerman can confirm that. It‘s absolutely awesome to have an instant visual reference of what you are doing but for that realistic look, cycles ist still the choice 👌🏼
@@kerseykerman7307 for 3d objects in game development i think yes
@@kerseykerman7307 well depends on the scene. I started to use eevee more than cycles in some of my renders. If you play around with the lighting it becomes better but it will never be as good as cycles. I still love eevee for mograph/stylization/sci fi e.t.c. I use cycles for archviz or displacement/transparency related stuff
and remember guys, don't touch meth! xD
lol i understood math xD But dont touch it either :P
It makes rendering slower? :P
Probably xD
Rico Cilliers
We'll keep that in mind 😉
I've noticed a 37% render time improvement when disabling Meth (CPU)
Thanks for great tutorial, it allowed me to reduce render time 5 times. I'd like to share the next 2 ways:
#19 - run your blend file from RAM disk - it reduces scene preparation by 20 seconds, my scene starts rendering after 15 second, before it was 40-45 seconds. Important is to unpack textures on RAM disk since when when it is packed into .blend file there is no speed up, I suspect .blend is not fully loaded to RAM so reading textures from RAM disk helps a lot. If you render video those 20s in each frame makes a major savings in render time
#20 - important for GPU, before render set viewport shading to Solid to avoid unnecessary VRAM usage. This is especially important for GTX970, be sure you do not use over 3.5GB of VRAM, during the rendering. You can check it with GPU-Z. The last 500MB of GTX970 memory are very slow and when you get there rendering times doubles at least for my scene. I played with tiles size going up to 540x540 when I faced the issue, accidentally I noticed Texture/Material/Render viewport eats 2GB before render starts and you get to the slow memory area easily during rendering
Isn't that what the 'Persistent Images' option is for, keeps images in memory when rendering video so they don't need to be reloaded after each frame?
@@WJS774 yes, that's what persistent images do
HA! This is high comedy. I've watched many of your videos, Andrew, and this one takes the cake. Clearly a lot of effort put into narrative and the sense of humor and although it isn't quite as poignant with the intended information, I found the extraness to be very enjoyable. Thanks for all you do!
After 1 Year of your Donut tutorial i have take a look again on this video! from 2017 and i Improved my Render time so much. Saved tons of Time
For the tile size, there's a plugin that I now believe is built in called Auto Tile Size that takes all of this into account, as well as some extra tricks to optimize the tiles (such as using numbers near powers of two to reduce partial tiles around the edges of the image).
Plugin is good, but remember that Blender does math in its number boxes, so just enter total hoz pixels divided by the number to hoz tiles, e.g. 1920/4 and it will set to the correct tile width... then do the same for the vert pixels... bigger tiles for GPU & smaller for CPU.
Your tutorials are absolutely awesome. Keep it up!
31:58 From my experience it works better to create a small rug with low particle counts and the Alt+D instance duplication and intersect them till it has the same tight look. It's tedious but it looks good.
The guru always coming in clutch, even from the past ... ironically.
Man tNice tutorials is on of the best tutorial in general on youtube. Clear, simple, constant, good to listen. Thank you for sharing.
"With great power comes great responsibility. Rest easy on the wicked for they have not seen the truth. Also, don't touch Meth." Bro, you had me rollin' lololol
I love Andrew’s goofy smile when he says, “Copious amounts of METH!”
22:08 In Blender 2.9, I think the clamping is in Scene, then Light Paths and you should see a "Clamping" Section. Just in case anyone is wondering.
the way you present these ways, short and precise... this makes this almost one hour video feel like 10 minutes.
good work! and btw. your advice actually helped me!
Been watcNice tutorialng your vids for a good few weeks now, learning new sNice tutorialt each day. my worksoftow has improved so much since watcNice tutorialng
I know this video is old and Blender has changed a lot, but for samples (at least on 3.2+): you can leave samples up pretty high (I usually leave it at 2048 or 4096) and then you can increase the threshold. From 0.01, I usually do 0.03 or 0.04. This will skip areas that already have enough paths. So if you have the samples higher and a higher noise threshold, it will help darker areas render clearer and reduce denoising artifacts.
"also don't touch meth"
-Andrew prise 2030
"The hipsters, they brought it back"
XDDDDDD
You're the best teacher of any program I ever found in the Internet. Funny, engaging, and clear. Even though you're not always straight to the point, your segues are always new knowledge. Thank you, Andrew!
Note: With recent Blender, if you have an RTX card, you can use Optix instead which is focused for light rays rather than general computation (CUDA)
Reducing the light bouncing drastically improved my cycles viewport rendering. Amazing!
YES! Do a tutorial of Denoising!
Future Andrew: Listen, the sky's going black again
Me in 2018: Ha, that was funny
Me watching again in 2020: ANDREW CALLED IT! THE END OF THE WORLD!
It happened in 2030
@@shalokshalom I realized, but it worked so well
This video is a masterpiece!!
I know this video is so old but the intro skit is so wholesome and funny. You should do more like that in future videos if you have the time!
Especially the Tilesize-Tip (11:11) is mindblowing. Me and my Ryzen 3 will conquer the Render-World now!
Andrew: "If you wanted to upgrade your cpu, you would have to upgrade your motherboard, which means you have to upgrade your ram,"
Me: *laughs hysterically in AM4*
I hit like before watching the video
Same
AND I DISLIKE
Great tips, I can't wait for 2.79. Just one thing. Can we use a Object Instancing with Particles to reduce the number of Strand Count ?
This was a great video! I am a total noob to 3D stuff and Blender is the application I chose. I did try 3DMax before and it was cool, but as an IT professional, I like to take of challenges! This tutorial is awesome because it explains a lot in terms of 3D work in general. One of the hardest things to learn in any field is the lingo and understanding of the theory behind it enough to put it into practice. This video does a great job with all of that! Too many other Blender videos show just how to make stuff, but this video gives you details needed to make your scenes or animations the highest quality possible! I would love to see this video and other important new items in the 2.82 version that we are working in specifically.
Andrew just found this today. Managed to get frame render times down from 2:40 min to 40 secs. Thanks man!
.
"You forget how good hair looks until you don't have it anymore" - made me choke on my coffee. xD Thanks a lot for these great tips! Made my life much easier. :)
This denoising thing is what is going to let me be able to render again xD.
Denoiser is not magic, you can do it with photoshop too, but it's handy like this. Beware for artifacts though. it might still need some touch-up and tweaking. It's especially handy for fireflies.
Be mindful of the VRAM limitations when using the denoiser. Tile settings where the GPU works fastest can consume copious quantities of VRAM.
This drawback won't (usually) apply to CPU rendering due to the small tile sizes.
Matthijs de Rijk, the Denoiser is kinda magic because it uses data that’s not available to PS.
There ist an addon for tile sizes, just search for auto tile size in the User preferences
the opening is sooo good XD
also the improvement rates you wrote are kind of an understatement. if you go from 100 minutes to 10 minutes, i'd say it's a 1000% improvement and not a 90% improvement, since 1000% means 10 times. and you can render 10 times the frames during that time.
One of the most creative ways to tell us Blender tips that I have ever seen. Absolutely love the concept and the info about rendering. Thank you! I'm sending this from the past BTW
I'm rendering a smoke simulation and denoising is saving my liiifffeee
Tbh I render smoke at 64 samples without denoising. The grain kinda has a good effect
Currently rendering 96 frames since 2 days on my crappy pc on 256 samples
Does denoising really help or does it just destroy any detail in smoke?
@@KarenTookTheKids It destroys a bit of the detail, but with smoke, when it's in motion you don't notice it as much
@@AndrewPRoberts ok thank you
for one frame, 16 hours and..... almost 91 PB of memory????
also at 16 hrs per frame, 1000 frames would take over 2 yrs
but good skit, that was hilarious xD
Heh. Good things that render farms exist. :D
I have needed this video for so long. I've always had my bounces way too high.
Thanks Andrew..... you still salting your water ?
You did miss one speedup.. even when rendering with GPU the CPU is still needed for setting up the scene so faster is better. I think the adaptive subdivs is CPU calculated.
Thanks for another great vid Andrew. Glad I came across this when I got off from work; I started a 500 frame render a little over 12 hours aggo, and when I got home this evening, it was only at 12 frames rendered! I thought HOLEEE SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!
You got a like, a subscriber and a buzzer on from an old guy. TNice tutorials is the best soft soft tutorial I've seen so far. You covered a lot of
Commenting from 2023.. Just checking if that initial render has completed as yet?
"You can also use your GPU!". Looks at Raspberry Pi, hmmm.
hahahahha
how do you run this on a raspberry pi
The Pi (1) has a decent GPU for it's CPU speed. That's why it can do HD video.
@@circuit10 and now rpi 4
@@fosatech Maybe an array of those could be quite fast
Future you has the distinct comic timing of Norm Macdonald “and also meth.... copious amounts of meth” 😂😂😂
Another great tutorial. I've been compiling a small list of very informative tutorials in case any of my friends want to learn or I forget some small, crucial detail.
Thanks Andrew for this precious video...
I've special respect for you.
Andrew, how often has the memory on your graphics cards run out?
DisIsMe a lot. I've only got 3.5gb
Still better than mine, I've only got 2GB which can be problematic when trying to render decent grass.
how much would you deem as enough ram when rendering with the CPU? I've just begun blendering(or whatever you can call it) and I want to get into it but I need a new PC. I think I'm gonna upgrade soon but I don't want to regret my purchase choice.
time for some 1080ti's in sli? :D
at DislsMe. Most scenes will be under 10 GB of ram but complex scenes will take anywhere up to 128GB ram, this would depend entirely on what you are making and rendering. i use GPU for most scenes and only move to CPU when I run out of GPU memory. max 6GB at the moment. but my PC has 24GB and this works fine...
13 Blender internal users disliked this video.
or are they AMD users? 🤔
I didn't dislike even though I use my AMD R9 290 without issue to render most things(and support will be near complete in the upcoming release as it is in the nightly. Performance will outclass CUDA's as seen in Blender's benchmarks)
Is using Blender internal even still a thing? I remember there were still people making tutorials for it two years ago, but now I rarely see anything made with Blender internal.
Oh it's still a thing. People hang on to it like dear life.
luckily it will be thrown out with blender 2.8 in favour of the new realtime viewport renderer
With the new denoiser, clamping is almost obsolete now. The denoiser has the ability to get rid of fireflies quite nicely.
Pixelgrapher Not useable yet with animations. Im actually running a test render to see how it looks denoised... not so good.
Denoiser is not magic, you can do it with photoshop too, but it's handy like this. Beware for artifacts though. it might still need some touch-up and tweaking. It's especially handy for fireflies.
Photoshop's denoiser is VERY different from Blender's as far as denoisers go. You will find Photoshop's implementation far less effective than the denoiser in Blender since they were designed to remove different types of noise. And of course Blender has a heap of render data handy too.
I think the blender denoiser works so well because it knows what each sample holds and can nullify the grain using algorithms. Much better than just guess work, which is what photoshop does.
I came here desperate and reduced my time from 26 days to 16 days. Still a lot but damn do these little improvements add up at very little visual cost if properly adjusted. Thanks Andrew from 3 years ago.
The best "How to speed up Cycles" video ever! Very clear, perfectly detailed. Good job! By the way: write this tutorial as a new article in Blender Guru! It's good to have a written version of it!
When your CPU renders faster than your GPU, lol. GTX 1050 < Ryzen 5 1600
quadro fx 880m...16 minutes for ...a mug
Ikr, I have a 1050 and at R7 1800 and use my CPU because it is faster
He literally just compared a Titan X Pascal to a 6700k.
That's totally unfair and even so he only got a 33% improvement.
That means unless you got the best Gpu out there you should use the CPU.
@@DefinitivelyNotIceBlocker I have dual xeons but my single 980ti is a lot faster at rendering
980 Ti is the predecesor to the Titan X
Also, which xeons do you have?
Luv that skit!
wt
You're fantastic (and hilarious)! "Copious amounts of meth" 😂Thanks for the content.
Had this tutorial going in the background while doing some unrelated work in Blender. So distracting but so funny! Love being able to laugh and learn. We are lucky to have you Andrew! Ha ha fax machines, too much!
Best skit ever
> explains that feature probably isn't necessary and only adds to render time
> proceeds to show example where feature is primary component of scene