Rendering time question
 

Hello! I am pretty new at Lightwave. What I need to render are two connected rooms, empty of anything except wood mouldings (crown moulding, floor moulding...). The project is to go on the web as a Flash to show off the wood mouldings for a lumber company.

The wood mouldings come to me in Adobe Illustrator files that are life-sized. So if the moulding is 4" tall in real life, it also is in the AI file.

Because of this, I have made the 2 connected rooms "life sized".

My question is this - is the size of the rooms the reason it is taking soooo long to render? I have over 300 mouldings to render and it will take me years at this rate.

(I'm sure the fact that I am using a PowerPC Mac with only 450 MHz and 576 MB SDRAM probably isn't helping) ;)

I have attached a screen shot so you can see where I am.

What kind of lighting setup are you using. Are you rendering with Radiosity? If so, what type? What rez are you rendering ?

I am using 3 area lights and 4 point lights, no radiosity (should I? I am new at this still) and in camera properties, I set the resolution mulitiplier to 25% with antialiasing off, just so I wouldn't have to wait forever to see a rendering.

You can scale down the size of your area lights and that will help. The smaller they are, the faster they will render. Set the area light quality to 2. Turn on Shading noise reduction later if you need it to smooth out the shadows. Turn off all of the raytracing features except for Raytrace Shadows. It looks like your camera may be looking through a window, so if you are raytracing transparency and refraction that will really slow it down. Use no Antialiasing or just 2-3 PLD passes and the Mitchell Reconstruction Filter.

Radiosity may actually help speed it up if you use interolated radiosity and turn off the area lights.

For a test you can use these settings:

Ambient Intesity: 20%

Check Shading Noise Reduction

Type: Interpolated

Check Cache Radiosity if you are rendering multiple frames.

Intesity:100%

Rays per Eval: 3x9 (you may want to increase this if it looks patchy.

Indirect Bounces: 1 ( you may want to increase this to 2 or 3 later)

Tolerance: 0.1

Min Eval Spacing: Set this to match your grid size from the screen grab. If your grid is 1m then set it to 1m. (you may also need to adjust this if patchy spots are a problem)

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Your system is slow but you should be able to get a render out of it. Just keep the render resolution at 640x480 and no more than a 50% multiplier for test renders and you should be OK.

Good luck!

Thank you!
 

You have really helped me out, I appreciate your input very much. I will do as you suggested.

Thanks for taking the time for a newbie! :)

Glad to help.

Just a nother note. If you do not need shadows from all of the lights in your scene, under light properties, turn raytrace shadows off for the lights that are fills and use raytrace shadows only for the key lights.

:bandit:

Great, good suggestion. I can already see the rendering is quite a bit faster.

Thank you again.