Help Center - FAQ14

Optimizing Rendering and Workflow

Rendering

When working with the After Effects Plug-in, you can turn on the "Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously" setting in After Effects to improve rendering speeds. However, note that if your system does not have a lot of memory (RAM), you may want to turn off this setting in order to prevent running out of memory while rendering.

If you are running into out of memory issues or want to allocate more memory to Invigorator/ProAnimator, increase or maximize the setting for "RAM reserved for other applications". This allows Invigorator/ProAnimator to have extra memory to work with and may resolve any out of memory issues.

By default, the "Use Multi-Threaded Rendering" setting is turned on in the ProAnimator Preferences. This improves rendering times, but if you are having problems rendering, try turning this setting off and see if that helps.

To speed up rendering, there are a few things you can check:

1. Do you need an alpha channel? If not, you can render the movie with the .H264 compressor instead of the Animation compressor.
2. Is the AntiAlias (Output Panel) setting what you really need? If you have the AntiAlias set to Best, it will render objects with the best smoothness setting. However, it will also take longer to render. You can try using the AntiAlias setting to Fast and see if that works for your project. If it works, your render will be faster.
3. Check the Object Smoothness (Object Controls Panel) setting. Is this value higher than it needs to be? Objects that are far away can use a low Object Smoothness setting while Objects up close and use a higher Object Smoothness setting. This reduces the number of polygons in the scene and can help speed up the rendering.
4. What renderer do you need? Do you need the OpenGL Renderer or the Ray Trace Renderer (Output Panel)? If you are not working with Ray Trace Reflections, Refraction, or Ray Trace Shadows, you can consider using the OpenGL Renderer instead of the Ray Trace renderer for much faster rendering speeds.

Setting Up The Project

While setting up your project file, you can also turn off the setting for "Use GL Shaders in Draft Mode". The objects will not look as good during preview but it will speed up the interaction time if you have too many objects or shaders in the scene.

To speed up your workflow, here are a few settings you can adjust:

1. Avoid using a high value for your Shadow Map Size that is bigger than needed. While setting up the project file, we recommend using a Shadow Map Size of 500 or 1000. This keeps the preview running in real-time and will not bog down the program so that it renders final-quality shadows during preview.
2. When working with Texture Maps, consider whether you will be zooming in on the object. If you are viewing the objects from a distance, a Texture Map size of 512 x 512 or similar dimensions can be used. If you are zooming in somewhat, you can consider using 1024 x 1024, or 2048 x 2048 if needed. You do not always need an extremely detailed Texture Map such as a 4096 x 4096 map just so you can zoom in on the object. This is often unnecessary and can slow down your preview and rendering time.
3. If you are working with a lot of objects, shaders, and effects, consider switching the 3D Preview window to Wireframe. Once you switch to Wireframe rendering, everything will speed up tremendously so you can adjust your animation and make changes quickly.
4. When working with a lot of flares or light cones, consider turning off the light cones or flares while setting up the project. This prevents the program from having to constantly render the flares or light cones.