Optimizing Framerate and rendering.

[Littleman9Mew2 206]

OPTIMIZING MINEIMATOR'S FRAME RATE
A way to make it easier to navigate you animation and help rendering!
^{NO EASTER EGGS HERE GO AWAY}

Mineimator is a handy program, indeed. There's just some problems that users, novice to advance that they will encounter when using this program. It may be slow, choppy or worse, crashes during the rendering of the animation. I been through it, and so have many of the MI forumers here. So I will show you how I cope with this issue. I'll divide the topic into two sections: Creation/Previewing and Exporting. With an "Extras" section at the bottom.

CREATION AND PREVIEWING:
Many of you want to make something inside the program Mineimator, wheither that's a wallpaper or just a animation/music video/etc. What ever the matter is, you may have notice that Mineimators frame rate has dipped, if it's 40/60 FPS drop or a 56/60 FPS drop, you may have a hardtime navigating the program due to it's slow speed.

Shadows(1.0.0 and up only):
In the 1.0.0 version of MI, the program has the ability to use shadows, shadows really make the animation/wallpaper stand out, it make the project more realistic and simply looks better, but the shadows are most taxing on the program. (Second to DoF) The shadows have a quality setting. When you click the workbench, you'll notice the wrench icon, this opens the options menu. Now this is the main menu to optimize many of the options here but we are looking at are "Shadow Quality" and "Shadow Size", Quality is how many shadows that are form with each object (which are then offset by the shadow size setting.) And shadow size is how much the shadow(s) are offset. Usually have the Shadow quality lower to about 6-12 is good during day animations, since that's where alot of the shadows are. Higher values between 8-16 are good for night, or interior animations. For a bad computer, a value of 4 should suffice on Quality. Size is a different matter, the larger the value, the more offset the shadows are going to be, giving a blurred shadow, while a lower value makes the shadows' edge sharper. For bad computers, a value 1.5-2 is good. If desperate, just turn "Shadow Quality" down to 2 or 1.

Sunlight:(1.0.0 and some .6.0 only):
The sun gives off light, everyone knows that, and with that comes this value. "sunlight Range" is the range used for making the shadows in 1.0.0 and lighting up the world in .6, either way. You're probably are not going to use 1000+ blocks of space that the sunlight is covering. In .6, having the light using a small radius (not too much otherwise the world will be lightless) usually suffice. In 1.0.0, turning the value down to about 750 or so is enough to cover a small schematic worth in MI. This can significantly help the render time alot since the light calculations are not counted in the distance.

Pointlights:
This mainly applies to 1.0.0 than any other. You know if you are in a room with two serperate light sources you're going to have to shadows cast on the wall. MI does the same, but at cost of framerate and rendering time. The more pointlights you have in a scene the more laggier it is, especially if they are overlapping each other. One way during an animation is to "turn off" the light when the camera and assets don't need it in that situation and "turn on" the light when the camera is back. This can help with a small light (such as a torch) during one scene and change to a different scene.

Pointlights - Navigation:

This applies when you're animating an moving the objects around, Daben added a feature to turn on a "lightbright" mode, this sets the value of the ENTIRE animation to full bright while editing so lighting isn't calculated. This help a ton with many lights in the scene, or you just need to see in the dark during a night animation.
(Or FN@ -nevermind)

Lights (General):

Lights are often use in animations, in 1.0.0 (and a little in old versions) there's an option to set the sunlight detail, pointlight detail,spotlight detail, shadows. The light details can really make a difference in animation, not always, but it can. This is very powerful, and does take a toll on a computer, one trick to use is to lower the detail to "low" or "medium" during preview and turning it back up to "high" or "very high" when exporting. The last option, "extreme" is VERY CPU INTENSIVE, it even warns you that the computer WILL crash if not careful. This not to be taken lightly (pun intended), this is not good for previewing, I have trouble with this option on. This is only to be used for either wallpapers or final rendering.
     As an extra tip, if you have an animation during the day, point lights should be turned down more than the sunlight and vice versa. This makes it less intensive when working on day animations and night animations.

Particles (1.0.0 And up only):
For those who use the particles, they can be very powerful. Something that many loved to see and especially use in MI. Particles are quite laggy, but it's all about the moderation of particles, withe each particle generator, you can set the particle limit, a value of about 25 is good for small ambient particles like torches. Values of 100-500 are good for a teleport animated particle. With 1000 being a good limit of explosions. This one is most likely the most situational, since this can very on the size, the particle and the amount of particles themselves. Usually have the particles disappear somehow, either by shrinking to nothing, vanishing after  a set time, or after the limit of particles (of that generator) has been reached, if that's not possible, click on a particle generator that has the option to "clear" them.

Previewing:
In 1.0.0 Daben added the ability to preview the render in an animation, but sometimes the play speed for certain things are off. Particles lag behind and it looks choppy. This is typically normal, you usually would want to only use this for well "Previewing" the animation at small bits. Or just play a couple seconds of a previewed animation and quickly get to editing. Sometimes when alot is going on and the program is trying to process alot to render, it just takes a screenshot that says "Rendered In X seconds" this is a feature that is used to not have MI crash when trying to preview the animation. It's normal. Just remember that particles run SLOWER in this than if not in render mode. During the exporting process it goes in real time like it wasn't in render mode.

Schematics:
The new schematic feature that MI has is incredibly powerful, it allows us to import a section of the Minecraft world into our animations. This canbe great for custom schematics, details or just sections of world that you want to show off in a fancy way. Now be warned, this only works with 1.7 and under. You can get away with 1.8/1.9 if you don't have anything from that update in the world (such as prismarine and ceiling buttons and purpur blocks) For some reason, worlds with a height greater than 128 will error, so it's not good to inport with this sized world. Just remember, leaves and water will be more taxing since it has to render the transparent faces. If a schematics is large, you can tick off the "render shadows" option to make the animation run smoother, the schematic in question will not produce any shadows and cast any on itself. However shadows from other objects still show  on this schematic. For big schematics, use something like MCEdit to make it smaller that way or force a schematic in without the world height errors. If you want to see the edges (or not) from the schematics, there's an option in the settings to allows the schematics to render the edges of (newly) placed scenery.

SIZES OF SCHEMATICS
with .7 and under-
Having the size be greater than 100,000 blocks usually crashes. The file size limit is typically under 15kb in size.

With 1.0.0
Having the schematics under 1,500,00 blocks is good for easy navigation around the world. The size limit for 1.0.0 is about 100Kb in size.
EXPORTING YOUR ANIMATION:
When rendering the animation, take the framerate it will render into account. "Will I use a program to slow down the framerate?(Slowmotion)" If no keep it at 30 frames if yes, increase this value. If you cannot render at 30 FPS, the shortest value our eyes can see as a "smooth" animation is about 24 FPS, this can help greatly cutting off the frames in the animation. Now also take the type of rendering into account. In 1.0.0 DEMO 5 and under, the animation is (sadly) going to be rendered in a beefy AVI file, (eww) because of this, it need to render in a specific way. Usually the first option that shows up is fine, I think it varies from CPU to CPU, so I use the first option since during night animations it's not so choppy because on other types of render the lighting is odd with coloring during dark areas. (you know that sick green effect?)

Now for a story:
===
So you got the final thing keyframed and it's ready. You sat there, waiting ten minutes on the entry and you hit the 727 / 728 mark and suddenly...it stops....nothing's happening then DING ERROR DING ERROR DING ERROR . A popup appears "Mineimator ran out memory!" Then it closes and all that time has been wasted for nothing. I had this happen, on the LAST FREAKING FRAME. Yes, I was mad, and yes I want to punch the monitor so hard that I also punched through the wall behind it. I really wanted to.
So what did I do wrong? Was the length? No, it's was in fact SHORTER than the longest animation (at about 850-1700).
Was it the lighting? Nope that wasn't it, I separated the animation from a day animation and a night animation so lighting wasn't an issue.
Was it something running in the background? Not that either, I close all applications if rendering a long animations.
Particles? Not even that, I didn't even used particles at that time.
Using the camera surfaces? I thought it was that honestly but it wasn't.

You know what the culprit is? *drum roll* drrdrdrdrdrrdrdrdrdrrdrdrdrdrdrrdrdr *symbol crash*
Depth of field.
===
Depth of field is the MOST taxing on MI, I had more crashes on there than Oblivion, StarCraft and Simcity put together (THAT'S saying something). I experimented with DoF. Dof is very taxing on the system and MI most likely to crash if not handled correctly.

THE OPTIMIZATIONS:
Depth of Field is quite cool, it's the effect of blurring objects at a distance. This can give it more life. Now the more the camera DoF covers, the more taxing it is on the system. Long animations are usually out of the question. So it's not recommended to use this option for long animations longer than 30 seconds. Now in the options menu, the blur of DoF can be adjusted, from 0% to 10%, having a Dof of 10% isn't ideal as it makes it look like someone is viewing it from the side of a hairy dog. Otherwise MI will CTD(Crash to Desktop) sooner than ever if the value is higher. A good mark is the default 2%, but I find that 0.5% to 1.5% works well. NOTE: If you want to do long animations, DO NOT TURN THIS ON!

EXTRAS:
1)Here's some tips that can help you make animations with many schematics rooms.

I usually do, with multiple rooms, the "Metroid" style of schematics for rooms, I call it this since in Metroid. The rooms are seperated from each other, just like how  a room schematic are seperated with doors, you use these doors as the "transition," See with room 'A' being visible while room 'B' isn't rendered, when the Player opens the door, room 'B' is turns visible and when Player walks through the door and shuts it, Room 'A' turns invisible and isn't rendered. I had to use this once (in an animation I'm currently working on) but it really helps with render times and makes less of a hassle. This hasn't has to apply with rooms, it can apply to caves too!

2)---ERROR 418 I'M A TEAPOT---


Thank you for reading.

~Littleman9mew2

Have something to suggest that can help framerate and exporting? Comment below!

Edited August 30, 2015 by Littleman9Mew2
Added "Extras" section and fixed some missing words and sentence order.

[Mourngrim 18]

Thank you for this.