Hello! I jumped into my new copy of Vue Pro by doing the QuickStart tutorial - the one where you add an atmosphere, a terrain, water, and a tree, slap on a couple materials, do a ten second animation, and render a small window in Broadcast quality. I followed the tutorial with 2 exceptions: I used a Volumetric Atmosphere and the Autumn Cherry tree rather than a palm tree. I know that both of these exceptions added to my render time, but it took 4 hours on my 800 MHz iMac with 756 meg of RAM to render a 160 x 106 window at Broadcast quality. Is this a typical render time for a scene this size? Might I be doing something horribly wrong? I have a horrible feeling that when I really start adding foliage, models, and more animation to some scenes my renders won't be done in the same calendar year that I start them!

Well, render times are always a surprise to newbies :-)) What setting have you had for your animation? 15 frames per second i assume. That makes 150 frames to be rendered. 4 hours are 240 minutes. That means less than 2 minutes per frame. Not sooo bad. Problem here is probably the volumetric atmosphere. Maybe you test it again with a standard atmosphere to see the difference! The other problem could be, that broadcast rendering on my Mac seems pretty slow as well. I only uses it when i really do have motion blur in a scene. For me "final" is enough. But that my 2 cents only. I think others have found out as well, that broadcast in Pro is slower than in Vue 4. Strange, but... When it comes to render times, i always tell, that our longest renderer took 3 weeks - for one image (high resolution for print). Just to make you feel better! Or so. Let us know when you need more help, Walther PS: If you do have some old windows boxes (or Macs with OSX, how about using the RenderCow and let all your computers help your poor iMac that will never be switched off for the rest of his life anymore probably.

Just to give you some perspective. I'm rendering a scene right now. It's been going for about 12 hours now and it says that it has 27 more hours to go. Rendering on Ultra setting with no volumetrics. So 4 hours is pretty good. ;-)

You know ? great rendering times are extra : sometimes I use volumetrics and ultra rendering option just for the sake of doing something else rather than rotting in front of my computer, something useful you know like eating a real meal or seing friends...;))Good luck!

:-)) I think i have said it in another thread with a similar purpose already. Start thinking about a book "Zen and the art of 3D rendering". Write it while you are waiting and probably you become so wealthy that you can buy yourself a faster computer. I only want 40 % for the idea. Good luck from me too - and have fun!

What they said....with additions.... ;P Vue can have long render times; and when you are doing animation, they seem even longer. This is where experimenting in the advanced render options will come in handy. There are lots of settings, and some of them are utter resource hogs. Volumetrics, for one, are infamous for eating time. Not arranging your scene in proper layers can also add a =lot= of time (remember Vue is a ray tracer. If everything is in one layer, or scrambled as to placement and 'depth', then Vue has to throw the full ray count at -every object- at the same time. Whereas if things are arranged in logical layers, it will prioritize and assign levels of tracing detail, and that will speed things up. Same with volumetric effects). If you plan on dabbling in animation, having at least 1 renderbox will cut your rendertime by up to 50% (assuming equivalent computers. A slower box won't give you quite the same speed increase, but better some than none). Basically, it's TANSTASFL. Your results are determined by the time you're willing to invest.

WOW! Dale, Thanks. I just learned something new about layers.

Thanks Dale_B for some really valuable info.

Thanks to all and an extra thanks to Dale - I never would have figured that out about layers. Hmmmmm. Looks like I have an excuse to start saving for that dual-processor G5 ;)

u have NO clue what ur in for. I have p4 hyperthreading. man oh man vue pro freezes on large scenes, forget animation it freezes on images aswell. I figured I need another comp as render server, let me see how it goes.

You're welcome! Just passing on what I either learned from others, or the hard way. You can set up test scenes and play with where things are ordered, and see the difference that a little planning can make easily. Jot; What kind of system specs have you got, and what OS? Hyperthreading can cause more headaches than it cures, simply due to the fact that -everything- in the pipeline has to be coded to take advantage of it for things to be stable. VuePro -is- optimized to make use of it, but the OS has to play nice first. Try disabling HT in the BIOS, then run a test render of a show stopper. If things finish, then you have the culprit. If not, your Vue install may be flaked; or possibly some other app is running in the background that insists on CPU priority. I've noticed that Vue is very touchy about sharing at certain times during a render, and having something wrest priority from it will cause it to freeze (some of the mp3 software players are infamous for doing that). And once you set up a rendergarden, you will love it. And the RenderCow system is one of the least painful out there. And once Mover 5 comes out, with that lovely support for the Poser 5 dynamics..... (drooooool...)

my specs are quite high win xp pro p4 3.0g 2g ram 120x2 hdd nvidia 5600 asus 3d card with open gl support

Now, I hope you won't take it bad Dale B if I do not agree with you on putting the objects on layers can reduce the rendering time... that it may affect the refreshing time of the views OK (giving the possibility of hiding all the objs on a layer) but to me it has no influence on the render time...
I propose a simple experiment to support my point of view :

(make sure the bounding hierarchy is checked in the render options from the beginning of this experiment)

make ten spheres with red glass, put them in the same zone of your pic, then make ten cones (with bottle glass for clarity) put them in the other corner of your scene...
all of the objects being in the same layer as the camera (i.e. don't create a new layer)
full screen render in 1024, final, takes 2min40 on my machine
now make two layers, one for the spheres , one for the cones
render time comes: 2min39 ... 0.01 benefit ? much less than 1% (if it is not a clock approx)
return the stuff to single layer, make a GROUP of the spheres, and another GROUP of the cones .. The render times passes to 1m56 :44s benefit (40% or so)
with one group per layer you won't have more benefit... It's worth what it's worth, you just try...
Sorry for contradicting but 'group' and 'layers' are often confusing maybe because some softs work otherwise... Vue prefers groups !
Paul.

Don't take it bad at all, actually. It's a very valid point, and a definition I should have made. I haven't worked with single 'objects' in a long time, as most of my Vue work involves imported models of all stripes. Proper grouping is definitely -very- important. Proper layering doesn't really have significant effect until you are working with multiple light sources, and objects that are at varied 'depths' in relation to the camera plane.