Cut down insanely long render time from lots of vectors

[laughinglots]

I've been searching the net for an answer since Saturday morning with little result so now I ask you!

I have a space travelling vehicle with lots of stars in the background. To cut down on vectors, I did not use the star shape: I used circles instead. I used a lot of them, enough to double the size of my .anme file. Of course, it is slowing down the rendering immensely.

How do I make the starry background without killing my rendering time? I tried to select all the stars and create one shape with them (I read somewhere that might help) but the render times are still insanely long (like 20 minutes for image and five days for the whole thing). Are there any other methods that I can use to cut this down but still keep a very starry background?

[slowtiger]

If none of the stars is animated, render all stars and the dark sky to one image, import this, and set the original vector star layers to invisible. Should speed up everything.

[laughinglots]

Okay, will try and report back. Thanks.

[laughinglots]

I tried to do the image thing several different ways and the stars always come out blurry. I even exported one image as a psd and saved it out of photoshop in several formats.

Is there any way to keep the vectors but have them be less demanding of the render time? Even when only a few stars are visible in the background it really slows the render time down.

[sbtamu]

Make the stars a png about double the size and when you import back scale it down to fit.

[heyvern]

I have done that trick using an IMAGE layer of stars specifically for a moving space background and it works fine if the image is big enough for your output settings. If the image is rendering blurry then it isn't big enough. If you have to scale it up after adding it to Anime Studio it isn't big enough.

You may want to try using a particle layer.
Particle layers do not "add" to the point count... they display a reference to one or more layers multiplied by the particle settings. By fiddling with gravity and the direction of the emitter you could probably get a moving star field (left/right or towards camera) or possibly just a "locked" star field display.

Here's a link to download a simple sample Anime Studio Pro file. Very simple. Only took a few minutes. There is only ONE single circle vector in the particle layer. All the "stars" are created from that one layer and the Anime Studio file is about 28k:
http://hubumedia.com/anime-studio-scrip ... icle-stars

[laughinglots]

I tried to blow it up twice as large and it is still quite blurry. Just to make sure, here is what I did: 1)doubled the project resolution. 2)fit my stars layer to the window. 3)Exported the frame as psd. 4)imported into photoshop 5)saved out as a non-compressed png. 6)import back into asp as an image layer and it is quite large. It does look better but still a bit blurry.

I am interested in this particle layer idea. I opened the sample file and I am confused about one thing: How are you achieving direction? The forward layer is moving forward and the left to right layer is moving left to right. How are you making the stars travel in their prescribed direction? I don't see anything in the particle layer tab that tells me how you are doing that! Thanks!

[laughinglots]

Nevermind, it's the acceleration knob! I'm going to play around with this some more and see if this will work. Thanks!

[heyvern]

I rotated both the particle layer and the vector layer inside to change the direction. Keep in mind that "gravity" has an effect which is why I rotated the layers so the particle layer's "gravity" pointed in the right direction. There is a bunch of combinations to get this right... I was in a hurry and once it looked right I stopped fiddling.

If acceleration direction knob works then go for it. Experimentation may be required.

[slowtiger]

I don't get it how people often complain about their rendered images to be "blurry". I render something as PNG in project size, re-import it, and it is as good as the original. What do those people do differently?

[laughinglots]

Hi slowtiger. I posted my process above. I'd love to get it to where it isn't blurry especially since I don't think the particle thing is working out well (it's really difficult to control). Is there any difference from my process to yours makes my image blurry and yours not?

[slowtiger]

It starts with choosing the correct export format: PNG. This has exactly the same quality as a lossless video render, so it can't be blurry.
Dimensions: if you don't zoom in, the project dimenions are good enough. If you zoom in or the BG is larger than the project (for panning), duplicate the project, adjust project dimensions to hold the whole BG, and multiply each dimension with the factor you zoom in. I'm lazy and just go 2x or 4x.

[heyvern]

I wish I wish we could see the blurry versus not blurry examples.

[laughinglots]

I think I've gotten it to where I can live with it. I had to blow up the project settings to 4x to get it this way but anyway here is the blurred (I added a lot more stars before I rendered it):



And the not blurred/vectored:



It's funny, looking at these renders scaled down, I can not really tell the difference! I sure can in asp though. Oh well, it's good enough. Thanks for your help guys.

[heyvern]

I have no clue what's going on with your output. I did a test of the same thing, created star circles on a vector layer. Rendered out. Imported image. Rendered again. Both renders were nearly identical. I event tested at different project setting resolutions. There was barely the slightest minor difference, but not any "blurring" and nothing really noticeable. I loaded both renders in photoshop and zoomed all the way in. Even the smallest circles a few pixels wide I could barely see any difference between the vector render, and the image layer render.

I did not even render out 2x or 4x. I rendered out and imported the image and didn't scale it at all. I also did a test scaling the imported image down with no bad results. Sharp edges exactly or so close no difference without zooming in 1200% in photoshop.

Are you certain you are exporting with "Extra-Smooth Images" and "Antialiased Edges"? Try "exporting" 1 frame rather than doing a single render. Then you can select the options. I am not certain if all of the options are selected when doing a "render" rather than an "export" which displays the options. I still didn't see any difference though using the render.

Are you ABSOLUTELY certain you are exporting PNG or TARGA format? JPG will ALWAYS degrade the image... well.. 100% quality... no even max quality will degrade to some small amount. You must save to a non-compressed format like png or targa... maybe bmp.

Another issue is that Anime Studio is a "3D" program. Images do not render out perfectly absolutely 100% the same as the original image. They are always "rendered" or modified on export to some small amount. I know there was a discussion about image rendering in Anime Studio and the fact there there is some minor issues regarding thin 1 pixel lines flickering during rendering. I am not 100% sure of the result of this discussion but I seem to recall some possible changes might have been made in one of the recent updates, either 9.1 or 9.2. Make sure you have the latest versions.

This is a mystery. I do not see the blurring you describe. I don't even see it as bad as your sample images. Hard to tell because your samples are different. I don't know what changes you made from one to the other. The first image appears to have "transparent" stars as well as full strength.