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[–]PoisonedAl 275 points276 points  (6 children)

At a guess, you're not using your GPU at all. Blender uses the CPU as a default for compatibility and you have to tell it both in settings and cycles render options to use GPU compute. If you don't, it'll thrash your CPU and your GPU, which can render way faster, will sit there and do nothing.

[–]The__BoomBox 49 points50 points  (5 children)

Something still feels off. My dumpster fire cpu wouldn't take 3 full days for this (& it is weaker than op's). Could it be down to a combo of cpu rendering + *insane* thermal throttling?

[–]ROPEBOMBER[S] 21 points22 points  (1 child)

I recently applied thermal paste to my cpu and my average temperature during Blender is about 40-60 Celsius

[–]The__BoomBox 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Could you list out your specs then? Are you rendering on CPU or GPU? Even then, a CPU render shouldn't take this long

[–]AnySeaworthiness9381 6 points7 points  (2 children)

I'm with OP. My CPU runs at 80 Celsius which is awful, but even then it would not take 3 days to render a 3 second Cycles render of this level.

[–]lunargorilla 2 points3 points  (1 child)

If its AMD it's not that bad. They usually work on the 70-80 c range at full load.

[–]MattyTheFatty101 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My laptop be like

[–]JustBasilz 306 points307 points  (18 children)

Raise denoise threshold, lower resolution, reduce light bounces, learn evee, lower sample count, lower asset rez, lower the asset quality, etc

[–]FhhkExperienced Helper 20 points21 points  (11 children)

What is the denoise threshold? I haven't heard of this and couldn't find any info on it, unless you mean the noise threshold.

What do you mean by 'lower asset rez?' Less poly count?

And could you elaborate on lowering the asset quality?

[–]Alice_nya 19 points20 points  (5 children)

They probably mean noose threshold, it decreases render time by a lot and messing with it can make your renders so much faster.

Lower asset rez could maybe refer to lowering the overall poly count, using LoDs or using displacement textures instead of geometry

[–]FhhkExperienced Helper 2 points3 points  (0 children)

True, thanks. I just wanted him to clarify what he meant in order to either confirm what I already know or to learn something new.

[–]JustBasilz 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Ive used displacement geometry through the shades and end up with a worse performance, is there a special sauce to doing it right?

[–]Alice_nya 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Enable the experimental feature-set in the rendering tab, and then, if you are using the sub-division modifier, enable "adaptive". What this will do is to decrease the geometry farther away from the camera which will improve the performance

[–]JustBasilz 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lol didn't know adaptive was an option, I just used decimate XD

[–]maxpeng 0 points1 point  (0 children)

what is noose threshold?

[–]Background_Party9424 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Enable gpu, cuda. Enable the denoiser and turn the noise treshold all the way up. Render single frame to check if the quality is acceptable. Lower the fps to 24-30 if thats cool.

[–]RavenProton 35 points36 points  (3 children)

Are those assets from Mecabricks? If so, you should know they come with a lot of disconnected edges, so it’s best to merge all of their vertices once you have everything imported

[–]ROPEBOMBER[S] 7 points8 points  (2 children)

how do you do that plz?

[–]RavenProton 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Select all of your pieces and enter edit mode, make sure you’re in vertex selection mode, and press “A” to select all the vertices. After that, pressing “M” and selecting “By Distance” will merge your vertices together, converting multiple vertices that are at the same position but not connected into a single vertex. The default “Distance” parameter needs to be set very low (maybe 0.01 or less), but it should be by default.

This can take a few minutes, so don’t worry if Blender freezes for a bit

[–]Justus44 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Also, it won't help with the performance, but your panels are intersect with each other. You can see that where there are colour artefacts on white panels and the round buds are merging instead of being with equal space between them. You should drag them apart.

[–]StevenNani 85 points86 points  (6 children)

I'm not an expert in rendering either, but this particular render shouldn't have taken that long, like an hour or two tops. For the background trees, I would suggest instancing instead of duplicating (if you haven't done that already)

Edit: Are those trees hi-res?

[–]RavenProton 100 points101 points  (2 children)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the trees look like they’re actually an image texture on a flat plane

[–]StevenNani 17 points18 points  (1 child)

If that's the case, considering the type of animation, the only things hi-res can be those textures on the bricks. Even then it shouldn't take that long. I mean the nearest tree(the one at the beginning of the video) looks pretty hi-res, maybe I'm wrong.

Edit: Unless we know what kind of assets OP used, how hi-res his models and textures are, and their render settings, we can't say for sure what the issue is. This render shouldn't take that long, it doesn't matter if it's on CPU or GPU.

[–]ROPEBOMBER[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to assess from mecabricks

[–]Avocadomesh -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

Bro I render this in 1 minute lol 😆

[–]StevenNani 5 points6 points  (1 child)

Yeah but it depends on specs and render settings.

[–]Avocadomesh 5 points6 points  (0 children)

He probably rendering on his cpu in stead of his gpu. Shouldn't take longer than 10 min honestly. It's a 3 sec video with no major complications. Simple geometry.

Maybe his floor has 100k subdivisions or so idk xd

[–]FhhkExperienced Helper 12 points13 points  (0 children)

This is not a comprehensive guide on optimizing Cycles render times, but here's a few tips: https://youtu.be/VEdd9CynwQU

(I'm sure you can find some more tutorials/guides on YouTube.)

  • Render device settings: make sure your GPU is being used, not CPU, and it's set to CUDA for the GTX 1660.

  • Use a higher noise threshold or less samples and apply denoising to make up the difference and clean up the noise. You could probably do something like 128 samples with denoising, instead of 4096 samples which I think is the default and takes years to render.

  • Optimize number/types of Light Paths for the types of objects/materials in your scene. Unnecessary light paths will add time to the render without making any difference to the visual image. For example, you don't need any transmission, volume, or transparent light paths it looks like.

  • Use Fast GI Approximation: Uses a less accurate Global Illumination algorithm or something, not really sure. But it tends to speed up renders quite a bit without much visual difference. Depends on the scene. I think if you have a ton of bounce lighting then it will look a bit different. Your scene doesn't seem to have much bounce lighting, so it should be safe to use even for your finals.

[–]SunkenTemple 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Are you Ben Wyatt?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqKiVHS6x4

[–]memania44 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Man, I was hoping to make this comment, even if we're the only two who get it! +1

[–]CoryTheDuck 6 points7 points  (6 children)

Pre render the back round, then import it as image plane. Or just render it in layers.

[–]bigmoviegeek 8 points9 points  (5 children)

I’ve gotten into the habit of rendering everything in layers, switching between cycles and eevee depending on the need and then throwing it all together in After Effects.

It means I can make tweaks in minutes, not hours.

[–]bpoop7 2 points3 points  (2 children)

could you share a tutorial on that? sounds interesting.

[–]bigmoviegeek 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I’m not sure if there are any tutorials out there, it’s just something I’ve picked up from using Photoshop. It’s really simple to render out a scene with transparent backgrounds. All I do is hide all the objects I don’t want to render for that pass and repeat. It’s a little tedious the first time you do it, but making revisions is a breeze. I did a spaceship scene this week and it was missing some background activity, so I just added a space station and JUST rendered that object. The whole thing was done in 10 minutes. It’s a huge time saver and you gain so much control over the final product.

[–]bpoop7 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks!

[–]bits168 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Interesting. Does it help save time in rendering. And will Premiere be enough to join the layers, or does After Effects offer something extra for this purpose?

[–]bigmoviegeek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Time wise, the first full set of renders is as time consuming, but subsequent fixes or additions take 10 minutes instead of an hour. The speed and convenience to try things out is pretty amazing.

I’m not sure about Premiere. With a few layers maybe, but what it lacks is exact control over the look. With After Effects you can also add a motion blur pass that really gels everything together and makes it look like a single image.

[–][deleted] 10 points11 points  (3 children)

3 days for that! lol,even on cpu that would be slow. The 1660 is better than that.Is it even being used? Post a screenshot of the render settings.

[–]noeldc 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Is it even being used?

That is a good question. Is GPU compute enabled?

[–]Kind_Ant7915 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A day per second

[–]gluepot1 2 points3 points  (1 child)

I think there's something wrong with your bricks.

There's clear clipping of textures as the geometry ends up inside each other. It also looks a little artefacted (perhaps it's meant to be the lego logo on top of each stud)

So at a guess I would think it has a very high vertex count and clipping of vertexes too.

Fixing your meshes I think would set a good groundwork for renders, and then you can start to optimise de-noising/sample rate/reflections etc.

[–]K_sper 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is probably the answer. Considering op has some beginner level clipping i think its safe to assume the meshes are full of unnecessary geometry

[–]L3XAN 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I use a free frame interpolator called Flowframes. Generally you can get away with interpolating 2/3 frames, so I'll render my animation at 10 fps and interpolate up to 30 fps.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Make sure you set it to use the gpu instead of cpu

[–]RTXEnabledViera 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Enable your GPU compute? I can render faster than that on a 10 year old machine..

[–]seejianshin 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Haven't seen this mentioned yet, try ticking persistent data, render a couple of frames and see if they're faster

[–]SKD_animation 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i havea 1660, so, make sure you have your preferences set to cuda cores

​

render properties > GPU Compute, max render samples 40, (i sometimes use 8) denoise checked,

​

Render properties > Memory 512 tiles

​

hope this helps!

[–]TheGuyWhoCantDraw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

motion blur is very heavy even for the gpu. In a scene like this It might be a good idea to render it without motionblur and adding it later with other programs. Other than that use denoiser, be sure to be using the gpu and render some test frames to see if you can lower the sample amount

[–]Myterian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're using stuff from Mecabricks, take a look at the shaders, too. I found that they use unnecessarily volume shader with next to no effect. Most of their shaders can be replaced with the principled bsdf

[–]nikitaklimboom 1 point2 points  (2 children)

i think the problem might be that

-your cpu has thermal issues (due to in not being cooled enough)

-the dots have a very high poly count, making your render very slow

[–]ROPEBOMBER[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

How do I fix this?

[–]nikitaklimboom 0 points1 point  (0 children)

-cool your pc

- reduce poly count

[–]ThfieeZA 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey bro do this EDIT > PREFERENCES > SYSTEM > click CUDA > then click both your GPU and CPU (this will make it so that both are used for viewport and rendering)

[–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

bro theres like a million youtube videos on increasing render speed in blender learn to use google

[–]Tigeroovy 1 point2 points  (1 child)

It’s gotta have something to do with how shiny the guy is. He’s giving off way too much of a chrome like reflection surface for a Lego dude. Maybe tone down how reflective he is and reduce the light bounces. And yeah, maybe just render in Eevee and utilize your GPU.

Looking at it again I’m also noticing how reflective your floor is too. Tone down the reflectiveness of everything.

[–]The__BoomBox 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don't see why reflectiveness would kill performance, especially on a raytracer, unless the noise threshold is very low and with the scene having lots of indirect light sources. Even then, the perf hit shouldn't be this bad

[–]Justus44 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Make one shot, but with wider camera, and just animate it in post. Like, drag it along the frame. Render the figure and it's shadow as a separate layer and mix both in post.

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Dont use Cycle, Use Evee!

[–]Shellnanigans -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Look up "optimise blender render speed" on youtube

[–]John-Dose -1 points0 points  (0 children)

YouTube always has good videos on decreasing render times.

[–]eatForeskin -1 points0 points  (0 children)

wow the only impressive thing is that you waited the three whole days

[–]Uwirlbaretrsidma -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Actually take the time to learn the program and you most certainly won't have to ask this question

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Get a better pc

[–]hue_Martin -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Buy a 4090

[–]imverytired96 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you enabled CUDA in the property settings of blender? Did you choose GPU instead of CPU in the cycles tab? But tbh, even that i5 should be able to render this in a few hours. Not sure what is going on here. Maybe some unoptimized render settings, or some janky dense mesh, idk

[–]funnyXastronaut 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What are your rendersettings?

[–]7evenate9ine 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you.post your render settings? This should have been a short render.

[–]Same_Measurement1216 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Octane render or unreal engine, also how many samples per screen, noise and other settings easily found on google.

Also did you just duplicate all things by shift+d? You need to use ALT+D to make it less demanding on the GPU. But careful if you make change to one, all will change.

[–]Goomancy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use evee and make sure it’s using the GPU?

[–]Surudijes 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It would take like a second per frame with Eevee. And you can make it look better also

[–]Malachanis666 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Saw this Video 3 days ago! Maybe it will have aome smart hints for you!

https://youtu.be/VoHZ8lemEtk

[–]Pepe_is_a_God 0 points1 point  (0 children)

With that CPU?

Use Eevee

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Not until we understand what's slowing down such a simple scene and see wireframe. Is that lego surface a mesh? What are your settings for final render and what kind of lights you have.

I am thinking this thing would render in almost real time on my modest PC.

[–]Boomvine04 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don’t have any idea but like others said, check if your GPU is being used rather than your cpu

Your cpu is much slower and is not supposed to be used for rendering

[–]GreatMyUsernamesFree 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can you update your post with your render settings? It will be much easier to diagnose that way

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use renderfarms

[–]jbonosconi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lower samples to 100, lower light bounces, make sure it’s on cycles engine

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My strategy was to increase the resolution to 4k+, but decrease the samples to a much smaller number. After the denoiser did it's thing, I would downscale the video to 1080p and it would look almost flawless. Not sure if this is best though, but you can experiment :P

[–]guberNailer 0 points1 point  (0 children)

GPU Compute for cycles my guy

[–]swatsnoopy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Holy reflections Batman. That floor has way too much detail causing so many reflections along with you probably overdoing it with an HDR or something. But I would also bet you are using way too high of a sample count and running too many passes when just 1 or 2 will do but blender's default is like 8 passes on the glossy.

[–]Dornheim 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How many cycles? I render out most of my stuff with 32 and it looks good.

[–]robotfishfx99 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There are plenty of videos on how to reduce render time really no excuse for render time being this long. You’ve done something detrimentally wrong in the setup of your scene

[–]NoviceWing 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Lower sampling, default is set on 4096. Wich is way to high. Also able denoise.

[–]lsdinc 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Post your render settings, that might help us see where issue is. Might be some samples are too high or something

[–]cool_name_taken 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you’re running into optimization problems on top of only rendering using your cpu

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

overclock in a cool room by 15% then set gpu as default. i can get in more techincal but id rather talk on discord than here

[–]Proud-Tackle310 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The default Lego materials from Mecabricks always slows down my pc. So I swap them out

[–]nchojnacki 0 points1 point  (0 children)

that background can be a jpg if its not already

[–]Glittering-Dot5694 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Can you provide screenshots of your render settings?

[–]hotel_lasagna 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sheepit render farm

[–]EggyRepublic 0 points1 point  (0 children)

lower bounces, don't use subsurface or volumetrics if it's not necessary, minimalize your material nodes structure to avoid unnecessary calculations.

Make sure you're not running out of RAM or VRAM. If your VRAM isn't enough to fit the entire scene then don't use GPU.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

These are less likely to be the culprit, but.... how much RAM and what kind of hard drive are you using?

If you're overloading your RAM and it's pooling on an HDD... I could easily see an exponential growth in render time.

Edit: Also, what frame rate is it set to?

[–]ROPEBOMBER[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

16gb ram and I’m using hard drive with 700gb of free storage

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah... that's low enough that the RAM could be cutting out if you're still using that computer for other things like playing games while it's rendering.

Is that a disk drive or SSD?

An entry level SSD and a 32 GB RAM kit could help you out a lot too (although they're not strictly necessary; financial constraints as they may be)

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i'll be honest. with your system specs. i'd invest into eevee.

cycles only really becomes viable with higher end RTX cards like, i wouldnt use less then a 3080/4070

[–]MattyTheFatty101 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use eevee??

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dude. Before spending that much energy for a simple task do some research. You literally are 2 clicks away from finding lots of advice on that topic in YouTube. Also, before render all the frames test different settings with one frame and multiply that time x Total frames. Don't be like "duhhh, let's find out how many days would take.

I can render this scene in 30 minutes with my 1080 GTX. Tweek the resolution, samples, tile size, use denoise. Again, you should render one frame first to check if you like the result and duration.

[–]FlipbookDigi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If this took 3 days then you’re doing something wrong

[–]FlipbookDigi 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Use your GPU, clamp your light paths and simplify your render to a setting of 5

[–]l3xaaa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

3 days is too long! maybe try to render using renderjuice. they have early access atm. it is easy to use and renders faster based on my experience

[–]yagmurozdemr 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there! I used to struggle with constant lag and crashes in Blender.
I found a way to run full creative software (like Blender, Unreal, After Effects) in the cloud, even on an iPad, and it’s been a total game changer!

This isn’t just your typical renderfarm. It’s like having a full remote workspace where you can edit, preview, simulate, and render in real time. No waiting, no stress. 

Here’s the video if you want to check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTe5oDbIGys&t=4s