CompuServe Messages

I have been offline for a couple of weeks because of what is explained below. 1. The Background. I have been working on an animation for about two months for the company where I work. The deadline is June 15th, but can be pushed out about a week. Most of my time thus far has been building geometry, but I have been doing test renderings and people have been pleased with the stills. The animation is of a machine to process silicon wafers for computers. It consists of a central robot to move wafers, and 4 modules to process them, plus two other modules for loading and unloading wafers, and a computer monitor with a keyboard. I was approaching having all the parts completed for one process module (which I was going to copy 3 more times), but the images were not quite to my liking. They were missing something. That something was "Chrome" since many of the pieces are stainless steel. After changing some materials from an "aluminum" looking material to "chrome", and making copies of the module, my rendering times went to 2 hours per frame for frames with everything seen at once, and RAM usage was 63.5Megs out of 64Megs. I can get some rendering times down to 30 minutes for some scenes where certain chrome parts are hidden. That may be able to be reduced further for other frames that are close ups of internals of the machine, but at present, there will be some rendering times of 2 hours per frame. The total requested time is 30 seconds of animation. 2. The Questions. By selecting "Chrome", on a part, is 3DS calculating reflections on the inside (unseen side) of a part? If so, can anything be done to only calculate one side of the part? By using only faces? Does anyone have any suggestions (other than more machines) on reducing rendering times? 3. Hardware. One 486-66, and one 486-100 network rendering. It is possible that a third 486-66 could be set up. The limitation currently is RAM. Thank you for any and all suggestions. Dennis