Render times...........

[auan]

OK...............I have stripped my scenes of everything that I can.............. I have been very selective with the amount of lights and textures............ and my renders render times are still through the roof. 45 MINUTES A FRAME. This might be a stupid question but does the amount of RAM in your box help the rendering? If I filled my machine tomorrow with the maximum amount of RAM that it can take(1.5GB) would I notice a big diference or none at all. I have 320 megs right now. Or do I need a better videocard.............I just got a bunch of upgrades but they only helped out for when I'm in SOFT working in wireframe. THANKS FOR YOUR HELP AGAIN..........

[virtualife]

The amount of memory still affect render times but you will see no significant difference if the renderer only needs 100 meg of the installed 320 and you give him more. for a good performance it is usefull to have around 1/3 free ram at rendering time.
The 45 min render time is a little bit extreme but depends on what is in your scene. What about the polygon count? shaders or antialiasing?
Do you use the mr or soft renderer? For complex scenes the mr is the better choice because of its optimization possibilities
sorry if i could help you not more. If you could describe the scenes settings or whats in it, that would be helpfull.

specter

[pomme]

If you are running soft in Win NT. Knowtise that when you open up task manger. go to CPU usage and RAM usage. Soft is using 100% of your CPU for render. but RAM usually using 85%. So what i suggest is that you upgrade CPU will help ALOT. 3D graphic card only good when doing real time render. which is when you are working in shaded mode. Also, as previous mention, what's in your scene. MR shaders are taking whole a lot more time when you using it. Anti aliasing too.

[devdoka]

What kind of shaders, anti-aliasing, etc.. are you using?
Do you have a lot of reflections and refractions?
Motion blur? DOF?

Matt

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Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
Softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com

[auan]

THANKS for all of your feed back................It was always my understanding that Mental Ray took way longer to render then the SOFT render. However, I was desperate for any solution so I tried rendering the same scene again tonight with MR. I wouldn't have believed it if I someone else told me but I have gone from 45 minutes a frame to 34 frame an hour! ????????????????????????????

I don't get it but I'll take it..................thanks specter

[marlio]

with MR. I wouldn't have believed it if I someone else told me but I have gone from 45 minutes a frame to 34 frame an hour! ????????????????????????????

I don't get it but I'll take it..................thanks specter

That's a big difference indeed. Perhaps it got rid of a few nasty tessaltions in the conversion, who knows.

Take note that in NT, the Soft renderer doesn't take advantage of multiple processors, while mental ray does. Also, it's possible to use distributed rendering with Mental Ray as well.

As long as you're not using motion blur, distributed rendering is a fairly simple process via command line. You'll be able to use a render client on all but the slowest of extra workstations you might have lying around, without even having to use extra RAM or resources to fire up the Soft GUI.

I'd be happy to help along anyone unfamiliar with this process.

Lynn Gray
ruttekin@yahoo.com
http://chomxxo.com

[ikuxp]

speaking of render times, I was told that past versions of MentalRay had a nasty case of memory leaks which slowed render to a crawl; the longer you rendered the slower it got. Is this still the case? I am using SI 3.9 so that would be MR 2.1. I hope they fixed that 'cause I am about to start rendering a big project and don't want any surprises... Does anybody know if 2.1 has any major issues to consider?

subparticle.

[devdoka]

@@speaking of render times, I was told that past versions of MentalRay had a nasty case of memory leaks which slowed render to a crawl; the longer you rendered the slower it got.

You were mis-informed. This 'leak' applied to the native SI3D renderer, not mental ray.

Matt

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Matt Lind
Animator / Technical Director
Softimage certified instructor:
Softimage|3D
Softimage|XSI
speye_21@hotmail.com