Help! Cut render time?
6 messages in this thread
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
<<If so, can anything be done to only calculate one side of the part? By using
only faces?>>
Have you tried Flat Mirror Reflection Maps that are assigned to "flat" faces?
Since flat mirror reflections can only be assigned to flat faces and your
object may have several curved faces detach the flat faces you want to show
reflections on and then assign the flat mirror reflection material to these
faces.
Check out page 9-64 in the docs.
DaviD "I built a fenske around the garden to keep the wascally wabits out"
GouID
>> "I built a fenske around the garden to keep the wascally wabits out"
Say What? 🙂
That's cute. I always like your humorous closing lines.
I was considering flat mirrored faces. However, I had not tried them on this
project. I may do that. I need to do that on some other parts in this scene.
I was hopeing someone would know the answer and offer it before changing a lot
of geometry to find out it didn't work.
Thanks for the suggestion.
Dennis
Dennis,
PMJI, do you use automatic reflections on the chrome materials ?
If you use a still of your machine as a reflection map (assumed there are no
big flat surfaces) you rendering times will plunge down a lot and look very
well.
Michael
>> PMJI, do you use automatic reflections on the chrome materials ?
Yes. I have many big flat surfaces (panels covering the machine).
Thanks for Jumping in.
Dennis
>> big flat surfaces (panels covering the machine).
Then the only thing to do is: render views from the 'panels view' and assign
them as reflection maps OR create an automatic reflection map and update it
never or seldom
(material editor click on 'A' in the reflection-slot and type something at
'Every Nth frame')
Good luck
Michael