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[CoriDavis]

Hey guys, long time no see.

I've mentioned before that I haven't been active in the Anim8or community much, as I've started focusing on Traditional animation now. However, I still borrow Anim8or once in a while because it's still helpful when I need guides on perspective. (Heck, I should post some of that work so you can see)

Anyway, I was inspired the other day by an image that popped into my head, and decided instead of drawing it, I was going to render it entirely in 3D.

Now, back in my heyday of Anim8or usage, I focused far more on animation and wasn't really interested in making realistic renders of still images. But now that I've actually tried it, I realized not only does rendering still take a super long time after all these years, but now that the processing power of the average computer has improved exponentially since then, the renderer isn't even taking advantage of the resources available.

This image which I rendered took around 30 minutes at 1080p using Scanline, raytraced shadows with softness, and anti-aliasing. It contains 4 lights, 3 are casting shadows.


Now I realize 30 minutes is nothing by industry standards. But what concerned me is that while Anim8or was rendering, it was only using 12-13% of my CPU and not even touching the GPU!


For reference, this is my setup. Certainly far better than that old Dell Latitude I used to have back in the day now that I do a lot of high-end video editing:

(Total RAM is 32GB)

Certainly my PC is capable of faster and more powerful rendering. Has anything been done over the years to make it possible to boost it?

[Steve]

Try the ray trace renderer which uses all but one of your 8 cores in parallel (it saves one for interacting with the desktop more smothly). The scan line one only uses 1 which is why only 1/8th (12%) of the CPU was busy.

[CoriDavis]

ART does seem to be faster, but there are remarkable differences in color between the two, and oddly enough what the camera can "see" (is that supposed to happen?). I do like the results of Scanline more, but I can always adjust the lights, and make adjustments in post.

Here are some differences in color. Scanline on left, ART on right:


And here we see (in the exact same frame) The camera can see everything in Scanline, but appears to be clipped behind the wall in ART. Color can be fixed and makes sense. But this...?


Anyway, after fiddling with the camera position to get it out of the wall, I'll render my clip in ART and make my color adjustments in post.

[Steve]

The scanline renderer needs to use a clipping frustrum in a manner similar to how 3D hardware works in order to project the geometry onto the viewing plain. So it doesn't "see" things immediately in fromt of the camera. The ART raytracer however sends rays from the camera's position so it will be blocked by things very close to the camera while the scanlline renderer won't be.

The math for lighting also differs between the two renderers. The ray tracer equations are closer to real-world lighting especially in shadows. This is probably why your ART pictures are darker than the scanline ones.