Whoa...I just downloaded the test scene here and ran the render on it and got two completely different times, over a minute apart!
Last night I got 3:36 a frame render
This morning I got 2:13 a frame render
Is this normal??
Has anybody else experienced this discrepancy in time?
I am running a Intergraph ZX10 with dual PIII 733, 1024 Ram, and a Wildcat 4110.
Were you rendering with both procs both times? Also you usually should test after a restart for consistant results.
g-
yeah I was rendering with both procs both times. Neither one was after a reboot either. The only difference that I can think of was during the first one I had a browser open, wasn't connected, but had the broswer open at the same time maya was open and rendering?? maybe that slowed it down the first time?
I will give it a shot after a reboot too. I am pretty happy with the results so far...I thought I would need to upgrade before now with computers getting a lot better and all, but its been well over a year and still competes ok.
-gerror
kill everything you don't need - pop up that taskmanager (if u have windows) and kill everything that isn't needed.
Then pop up a command line (either command.com or cmd.exe) and do your render there.
I was able to vary my times greatly just by not killing what was in the background so I thought I'd drop that note. Also Maya wants a constant network connection (being meant for workstations) so if you were connected to the net that may have actually sped it up the 2nd time.
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hey thanks for the info, but I don't know what you mean.
I don't think I have a task manager...I am running NT 4.0, at least I don't know about it.
Command line? -that must be a UNIX thing, right?
oh brother... try holding down control, alt, delete keys and you should be able to figure it out from there.
hmm okay...
well first off given what you have posted I would assume that you are rendering from within Maya. This is a big no-no because Maya launches its Render from within Maya therefor you only have a portion of your available memory/processor since Maya is already hogging it up. So the most efficent and common way is to Render from the command line.
To get to a command line go to START-RUN and type in command and press Enter. You will get a command line (aka DOS prompt). Type maya -Render and you will get a window that pops up that lists all the different Render flags. Take note of which ones you need to use and close that pop up window. To render you would simply type Render followed by any flags (ie -s 1 -e 2 -n 2). The flags will override whatever is in your Render Globals for that scene.
Now to the task manager.... in Windows press CTRL+ALT then press DEL and a window will pop up and you will see a button marked Task Manager - click on that. Behold there is everything running on your computer. Now Quit any applications from within themselves but you can kill processes from the task manager of things you don't need running (at least while u render).
Hopefully that will give you a start, all of these are tremendously important things to know when Rendering.
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