It cut an 8 second render to just under 4 for me.

Doing the blank tex avi thingy has not alony cut render time, it's allowed me to render some things that froze my comp before.

Attached Link: http://www.thedarkzone.freeserve.co.uk/status45.AVI

You can get the heartbeat avi file from the attached link, as canb anyone else who wants a beating heart as their status avi :) Enjoy! :)

Swamp- that does sort of make sense. But we don't really worry about 8 second renders anyway, do we? It takes that long to figure out a name when we save the file. It is only the long ones that seem slow.

Exactly my point...it does nothing for slow renders..but speeds up fast renders. I just do it because I don't like orange people. Untitled#1000396,SWAMP

Yeah and doesn't anyone else do dozens and dozens of test renders? My fear is that some people simply set up a scene then render once. Like some do in Bryce. ::shudder:: I turn shadows off when I'm testing and use simple lights 'til I'm ready to get fancier. Any speedup at all is valuable.

When I was setting up my triple mirror pics I did _dozens_ of test renders for each. Turn the side panel a little and render, repeat 20 times! Ouch! I used to render dozens of times in Bryce too, mainly because you can't see hardly anything until you render. At least in P5 you can tell what is in front, and what is in back. My conclusion was I need a faster computer, though, not a cute-little-man-replacement. Lets see, is it worth the $180 to put a P4 3.0 in it, instead of a 2.8, should I wait for the 3.2? Or wait for the P5 4.0? ;-)

I'm oh sooooo sorry if my 8 second renders mean nothing to you. ...but...you wannabees are sooooo...! ...artist my as*!