Unusually long render times...

[NAVALHAWKEYE]

For some reason just recently my render times keep getting longer and longer...



That took almost 5 minutes to render...when it seems like it took 1 or 2 minutes not that long ago...what could be causing it to keep getting slower?

System Specs:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.40ghz
RAM: 3gb DDR2 800
GPU: 8800GT OC

Thanks for any help...

[multimediaman]

if you're using mental ray, it's because mental ray is meant primarily for architectural rendering, where everything is on the ground, and structurally sound. Letting light escape in and out of the areas underneath the model is bad news for shadow casting render times.

I say this because it looks like you're building your cage as it floats within the scene. The higher up your objects are from the ground, the longer they'll take to render. I experienced this the ard way, by trying to simulate a good airplane fly-over with mental ray. One frame took nard near 16 minutes to render out.

I'd suggest to learn the scanline renderer, and try to duplicate the lighting setups. Scanline is much faster for floating objects, or objects with unusual shadowing phenomenon

[NAVALHAWKEYE]

Ah...ok that might explain it. Thanks!

Would you by any chance know of a tutorial/settings to get a clay render like that with scanline?

[Dr. Feelgood]

Dump a Skylight in the scene, go to Render Settings > Advanced Lighting and check the box for Light Tracer, hit Render and there ya go

[NAVALHAWKEYE]

Well...actually I was on scanline...

So I was actually using the same settings Dr. Feelgood.

So...back to not knowing why they are taking 5-6 minutes.


Shows what I know...

[multimediaman]

you're going to need to give us more information about your scene then.

How is it lit for example? what lights are there? what are the shadow types and settings?

what are the settings in your advanced lighting tab?

[NAVALHAWKEYE]

Everything is default except antialiasing, I changed that to Catmull-Rom. Advanced lighting is also default.

I have one sky light. And a plane with a matte/shadow material (all default settings). And every object has the default gray material.


Thanks!

[Dr. Feelgood]

Change everything to Default...

Also, if you've got an immense amount of Objects in the Scene, try Attaching them all together. Double-check that you haven't accidentally placed another SKylight somewhere too.

[NAVALHAWKEYE]

With everything set to default (no advanced lighting, area AA) it took around 1 minute to render....which still seems really long

Thanks!

[multimediaman]

even just one sky light will add considerable time to rendering. and materials can play a huge amount in there too.

If you have any materials set to use supersampling that could do it right there

[christopherh101]

usually it's just displacement mapping or hair and fur, etc. that slows a scene down for me. I use mental ray all the time and it's great, floating objects or not. if you want to test it on mental ray create a huge ground plane plop a skylight in and turn on GI and Final Gather. from the look of it that scene should take about 5-10 seconds

[christopherh101]

i think it's the scanline renderer, i'm not sure if it'll use all your cores. i've never heard of anyone seriously using it