The other day I created a scene that I was relatively happy with... so I thought.. what the heck, I'll max out the settings, and use the best quality AA, but only at 1024x768. It predicted ~110 hours, I let it go for about 2 days, and it had only moved down 48 hours. Is this normal? It did have quite a few trees in it, but i'm hearing ~9 hour render times, at the most, from most of you. I have a dual Athon 2000xp system, with 768mb of ram, so that DEFINITELY shouldn't be the problem. Any settings i'm overlooking? And how long to high quality renders take for you? Thanks. -CPFitz-

It depends. Did you group properly? You can't stop a 480 X 640 render if it's not done right or you're trying to render the almost impossible. It depends on so many things like I'm not even going to start listing them off. Max setting is sort of overrated. For almost no improvmesnt it takes forever to render. Then what you going to do with the picture? Make it or save it as a jpg and post in the gallery? Dual will not save you much. You can't take the counter to heart, it's just a estimate and depending on the settings and content it could render three more full passes that are not even on the counter. I find when it says 50% it's about 75% done.

It depends. :-)) There are some effects that will definetly will let explode render times. Effects like volumetric lights/atmospheres, transparencies, imported objects with a lot of little facets etc. Our record here is a render time of around three weeks - in Bryce. An image with thousands of transparent objects. My average render times, i would asume, is around 12 hours. But only for final or maximum broadcast quality - and a size of 800x600. And not on the slowest possible Mac. So don't worry, be happy :-))

My longest render is 110 hours. (about 10,000 lights and reflecting on a ocean)But I think Alexsander beat me on that one. His chandelier.... Man, now I know why I never attempted that object. Longest render I've ever heard of is almost 3 months then the guy crashed the program fiddeling instead of just ignoring it for one more day. It was almost done really. Too bad, he should have crashed it on the first day. Nope, lost the picture cause he was not rendering to disk. But the big thing was it was set up incorrectly in the first place and that's why it was so slow. Don't try glowing liquids. It will kill your computer. There are other materials, imposssible objects really that could kill it. Hall of mirrors effects on very high render settings. I find if you group properly (And I'm not going to expiain how to do it, search for posts by me here)and plan well and maybe even tile render ( tutorial here by me) You can cut it to moe reasonable times. I avoid extream render quality settings. It's not worth the wait. You'll never need that kind of quality. It actually degrades the image slightly IMHO. Carefull user settings can beat it really in 1/4 of the rendering time. I don't like the double antialasing pass ultra makes. It smooths it out too much for me. If you MAX everything don't be surprised if you also MAXED the render time. It don't matter how fast your computer is software can make it crawl, Not just Vue. All the rendering software can almost stop a highspeed computer if you go too nuts. I think Mojoworld could kill a main frame computer myself no problem.

Alekssander. Haven't heard or seen anything from him for months - maybe he is rendering the ultimate image at the moment :-))

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=384257&Start=1&Artist=Cheers&ByArtist=Yes

Re the comment about dual cpus not saving much time. Not sure this is quite correct. My duals cut my rendering time down to about one-third of what it is on my husband's machine. His has a slightly faster motherboard bus speed and a slightly faster single cpu, plus a much faster graphics card. Otherwise all our equipment is by the same manufacturers. Only his clock speeds are faster. So the sole difference in our machines is the dual processors (well, I have some ultra fast and wide scsi's and he's stuck with the latest ATA IDE drives.) But I don't try to render on his machine any more. But I agree -renders, especially with reflecting water, which I do a lot of, are time-consuming.

I'm not sure if you are quoting my post forester, but I didnt mean to imply dual CPU's dont save you much time...because they do. I would have hated to have just a single Athlon 2000 XP CPU rendering that scene ;o) Really what I was trying to do was back MightyPetes' coments up, in saying that a high polygon scene and/or a lot of volumetric, reflective, transparent materials is going to take its toll on even the highest spec consumer machines. Cheers

What I meant too is dual will not cut the speed in half. Some people think it will but that is not correct and it's been tested time and again. Two computers will half the speed, dual processors will just improve it less than that. Poorly thought out scenes don't mater how good they look will probably kill your computer. Those quality sliders should be displayed as graphs so you could see how much extra time it will take for almost no improvement on quality. It's exponential growth, not linear.

Right again MightyPete ;o). On my dual Athlon 2000 MP machine the render times work out to just about 80% faster, compared to a single Athlon 2000 XP rig. Cheers