I use Carrara Studio 3 on a Mac G4 with a Gig of ram. I am creating animations and wonder if there is some kind of graphic accelerator that will speed up the processing. A 12 second animation at 50dpi, 6 fps takes up to 41 hours to process, when a client then makes a change... yikes!

Or is there another modeling program that is affordable and for the Mac that works better or faster? Carrara is a splendid program for still images which still take forever to process, but there are some quirks in the way it deals with animation. For instance, an applied texture can be moved on a surface during animation but not changed to a different texture without changing the texture throughout.

Thank you,

verny

Thanks

Dunno about the acceleration, but I wondered about this-

"For instance, an applied texture can be moved on a surface during animation but not changed to a different texture without changing the texture throughout."

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but it is pretty easy to change a texture in an animation by using a mixer with texture 1 and 2 in the sources, and a value in the blender. Start the value at 0 for text1 to show, animate it to 100 for text2. If you need to change all the channels (color, highlight, glow, etc) you would need one mixer in each, with all the blenders synced, or all pointing to a reference shader.

Markd

Message edited on: 06/07/2004 13:18

Cool, I will try it. I am showing an image (a picture) that moves along on a path and the image (picture) needs to change to a different image as it moves along, think it will work?

Should work fine. Probably only need to animate the color channel in the shader. You could even get fancy and instead of using a simple value in the blender, you could make a more complex shader that shifts from 0-100- using something like noise, or checkers, for instance, depending on what you want the effect to look like. Skys the limit! ;-) If you get stuck, post again. Markd

Why not copy the object, put one picture on one object and the other pict on the other object. Then just use the transparency to mix between the two. I have a feeling that a faster graphics card will not change the render time, just get the finnished pictures to your screen quicker. Groucho3D

I still don't see why it is taking you 41 hours to render 72 frames. How complex is this 12 second animation?

The animation follows a printing path which is transparent through a partially transparent printer. The internal parts are all partially transparent too. And of course the camera is moving all the time. I think that is why the rendering is so slow. Also, I've used 6 lights located to highlight areas and that doesn't help either.

How many processors dose your Mac have. If it's a G4 there is a good chance that you may upgrade it to a dual processor deal cutting your render time considerably. I have a dual 1.2 and it dose render reasonably fast compared to the G3 I used to have. Carrara is written to use two processors if you are using OS X. Depending on what model you have, I believe that their are several 3rd party solutions out there for you to choose from.

It will speed it up quite a bit if you don't use the best possible settings for GI, for example. Maybe your client won't notice the difference if you lower settings on all the rendering parameters. They're right about graphics cards - those things only speed up screen displays, previews etc. They don't do the final render calculations. If all else fails, switch to a dual 2 or 2.6 GHZ G5 with 2 or more GB RAM.

Thank you, I will need to evaluate the budget to see if I can squeeze in a new G5.

Try disabling the "bump" in the render settings. I found that bump ang transparency really slows things down. Use texture maps to simulate bump if you can. My 2 cents. Mike

I should clarify , "bump and transparency" on the same object really slows things down when it comes to rendering. Mike

Thanks, I suppose to nullify bump I would give it a value of 0?

Also , uncheck "bump" in the render settings in the render room. Mike