3d rendering can be a long and laborious process. Just setting up a scene can take days – weeks and even months! But I will show you how you can save hours of working time purely by organising your resources better.
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Efficiency is the key to reducing your working times. If you are really busy and are constantly doing architectural rendering jobs then this article could save you a lot of time and make you money! All of your resources such as your materials, maps, 3d models, plants and background scenery needs to be very well organised. I’m sure most of you have got everything loosely filed away in a reasonably coherent order. But what can really save you a LOT of production time is to take the next step and get all your resources “hyper organised” (yes I have coined this phrase as a loose definition for extremely well organised). It will take you quite a lot of time initially to set it up, but once you are organised you will save yourself days! I will now show you the extent to which I am talking about.
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Organise your 3D Library
Go through your entire 3d library and organise everything into a well defined group of folders. For example have a folder for chairs, tables, sofas, beds, windows, doors etc etc. It will also greatly help if you create a catalogue of each item within a collection (include an image of each specific item within a collection – that way when you are browsing through all your 3d models you will be able to see what each one looks like).
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Organise your materials
A really good tip for saving yourself loads of time is to go through all your previous work and choose all the materials that you like and save them. Then when you need that specific material in another project you can simply open the saved material and apply it – instead of going through the whole process of recreating it.
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Organise your maps
Again, go through all your maps and textures and organise them into a simple to use folder structure. Now when you are creating your materials you can quickly and easily navigate to each specific category. Eg.. if you are creating a wooden material – you can go straight to your “wood folder”.
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Proxy’s will save you a lot of time
If you are using a lot of objects like cars and plants in your 3d scenes, then it will help you to create proxy’s for all of them. Checkout our tutorial on creating Vray Proxy’s.
Once you have created the proxy’s you can simply drag and drop them into your scene. Again, organise your proxy library in an easy to use and understand folder structure.
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Distributed rendering
If you are using distributed rendering or network rendering, then you will need to have all of your 3d resources in a central location. Now this all depends on how your office network is setup….but basically you need to make sure that the file paths to each map or proxy etc are the same from each render node. This is important as if your render farm doesn’t have the same file paths to your resources as your workstation – your scene will render as if those resources were missing.
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Backgrounds
Organise all of your backgrounds and HDR images so that you can easily grab them and use them in a scene.
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Startup scenes and common scenes
A really good way to save a bit of time is to create a few generic startup scenes. If your like me then you will often start off your scenes with a specific set of settings for a certain scene. So create a few default scenes with all these settings already activated.
1. A standard scene – a basic scene with all your render settings setup for test renders – if you use vray then go through the render settings and make them how you like it!
2. An exterior scene – a scene setup for exterior 3d renderings. Go through the render settings, add a sun and sky setup, some background for reflections etc
3. An interior scene – a simple setup for an interior scene
Having these scenes saved and ready to go each time you start a new project will only save you a few minutes each time…but if you count how many minutes you will save over the course of a year or two…you will be amazed!
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Anyway, these are just a few tips that we use to save time and increase productivity and efficiency in the studio. I hope that helps!
