Professional Rendering with Megarender

The main things that differentiate professional rendering from amateur work are the attention to detail, innate understanding of the settings, good grasp of composition, and a constant and steady demand. This is why visualization studios, big and small, regularly employ the services of render farms. And real pros spend less on each frame than a casual freelancer by using special techniques that everyone can learn.

Project Optimization

Big architectural or design projects can contain dozens of scenes with millions of polygons each. But this doesn’t mean all render specialists have to use the most powerful workstations with modern graphic cards. A real professional knows how to optimize the scene so it can be opened on any computer.

First of all, instances are every 3D specialist’s best friends. They should be used instead of copies as much as possible. Instances form the foundation of any scatter engine, such as Forest Pack, MultiScatter or Corona Scatter. Even if you have 1000 instances of one object in your scene, 3DS MAX sees them as a single object and doesn’t load as much RAM or CPU.

The next step is turning polygon-heavy objects into proxies. A proxy object exists as a separate file and is linked to the main scene as a low poly object. It fully appears only on render and therefore doesn’t encumber the computer. Proxies can be created by means of render engines, like V-Ray and Corona, or as 3DS MAX built-in XRef objects.

Outside of proxies, high-poly objects are not used in backgrounds or for small items. When a piece of furniture has a size of 30 pixels in the final image, there is no difference whether it contains one thousand or three hundred thousand polygons. A high-poly object will always slow down the computer and rendering.

Textures and maps are responsible for the most use of RAM during 3D rendering. But even 4k, 8k and 16k textures can be optimized to weigh much less. The biggest resolution is only used for close-ups and key objects of the scene. Every specialist knows how to use a single map for several materials, adjusting the color or strength through correction maps. It saves a lot of time and doesn’t require additional software. The most optimal way is to unwrap all the objects and create custom UV maps for them. Such maps include only the required parts of the textures and don’t load RAM with unused images.

Finally, professional projects don’t contain any assets that are not being used in the scene. The Material Editor is getting cleared of no longer relevant materials, the extra proxies and maps are deleted from the project folder. All the used files are stored in the same folder as the main scene: this way the computer doesn’t waste time looking for the textures and only focuses on building the final image.

Render farm pipeline

Working with a render farm for the first time may seem overwhelming: you have to prepare your file properly, download a special plugin, and then wait for the scene to upload. But professional studios keep all these things as a part of their pipeline. Each new project is created with render farm requirements in mind, the plugins are pre-installed, and fast ftp-clients are used to upload and download files.

Due to a constant demand, visualization studios also get discounts on rendering projects. At Megarender we offer up to a 50% discount for payments exceeding $500. This means each frame costs essentially half as much as a basic render. Moreover, special rates allow users to launch jobs simultaneously on up to 6 pools. We also can install new plugins or software for professional rendering studios on demand; in addition to 3DS Max, we manually render Maya, Blender, and Cinema4D projects.

Here are a few steps for a studio to start working with Megarender.

For 3DS Max projects:

Sign Up using your company email
Use the calculator to assess the cost of rendering your project
Get a $30 free trial by confirming a phone number in the ‘Bonuses’ tab
Pack your scene with our plugin and upload it to the farm
Choose a suitable rate, create a task and start rendering!

For Maya, Blender, Cinema4D, or other projects:

Sign Up using your company email
Contact our tech support using the live chat at right bottom corner of the screen or at info@megarender.com via email and describe your project: software used, image resolution, number of frames
Upload your scene to our ftp
We will run a few tests to tell you the approximate cost
With the price agreed upon and tests approved, we will launch the whole project
Download final renders and pay after the job is done!

Megarender provides professional rendering services for big and small projects in architecture, interior design, VFX, AR/VR, and game development. Not sure what exactly you need yet? Reach out and let’s discuss!