CompuServe Messages

I might have suggested this one before but I've been thinking about it again: I have a lot of spots in my animations where you just sit for a few frames (like 15) and admire the view. 3DS seems to render each frame seperately, so it takes a while. Is is possible to **not** re-render a frame if: 1) None of the active lights are moving. 2) The active camera is not moving. 3) There are no moving objects in the field of view. 4) There are no moving objects out of the field of view that are casting shadows (or affecting reflection maps) on objects that are in the field of view. You could potentially use some fairly crude tests to evaluate condition 4 – calculate a bounding box for cast shadows and see if it intersects anything in the field of view – to speed things up. If this is practical, you could cut out substantial chunks of rendering time by just replicating the current frame instead of rerendering it when nothing on screen could change. Chris