Hey folks I'm running C4 and I've been doing some tests with the motion path s and the new landscapes and the new vector motion blur and all... The thing is I've been running this render now for close to 72 hours! I've paused it and re-started it and every time the processor usage spikes to full... then after about an hour or so it drops down to using half the processor. (Or, more accuratly, it uses one processor of the multi-threaded P4 3Gig with 1Gig RAM.) Now... I know I'm asking a lot, (vector motion blur adds 2 extra frames to every one 'actual' frame,) and I am using sky light. But EVERYTHING is set to the lowest settings of the renderer.

Not sure whats going on. Since I've done similar scenes with the same settings. I'll ask the Mark question...are you using soft shadows? Spotlights? Or Bulb lights? In my experience Vector Motion Blur has been pretty fast. When you cancelled it did you save it and close out Carrara? How many objects in your scene? Etc.

What's the page file usage when the cpu usage drops? And what portion of the cpu usage is due to Carrara?

Message edited on: 11/22/2004 20:45

I don't know how much this contributes to your problem, but I do see one CPU-eater: when you save as QuickTime, saving each frame takes successively longer, until it's really dragging along. I've seen it even with low resolutions like yours (although I have a much slower machine). For me the solution was to render to sequenced TIFFs and then re-save the finished animation as QuickTime. One other thing: if you're using blurry reflections those can also be a major CPU hit.

Thanx all. I'll answer one at a time... Nicholas: One sun light and that's it. No soft shadows. I didn't canccel, but I did pause the render, then restart it again later. BUT, this has happened before wether I pause, cancel, close/re-open, whatever. One object, the landscape. Sailor: I'm not sure, since I haven't seen it drop, just noticed after a while that it wasn't at full anymore. Carrara is the only thing running, (besides windows and the 20 things it THINKS it needs to run ;) ) Renderer: I hadn't heard about QT being successively longer in rendering, but I do know what you mean about sequencial TIFs. That's what I do for important/final renders, but for a quickie test, I've just done the QT Sorensen 3 codec and not had too much of a problem before. It's sad to think that there's a bug with going directly to a QT for simple tests. I'll try starting the render over with seq. TIFs and see what the speed increase is like. No blurry reflections. I appreciate your responses, and I think I'll send the file off to Eovia and see what Charles & Co think. Thanx again!

bluetone, I unfortunately do not know enough about animation to have a feeling for how fast this should go on your system. However to better trouble shoot this you should notice what the PF Usage is in the lower window of the Task Manager>Performance tab once the CPU usage has dropped from high to low. If it is much above 1Gig then this may be the problem. (you do not have enough physical memory and paging is slowing you down) If it is below 1 Gig then check Carrara in the Task Manager> Processes tab. If the cpu entry is zero and the System Idle Process is high (90+) then Carrara has just crashed. If Carraras CPU is >0 and the mem usage is fluctuating then its running and thinks it is doing something worthwhile and the problem lies somewhere other than your hardware. Hope this helps and is understandable!

Page File Usaeg = 216 Meg on a 1 Gig RAM system Carrara is #1 system user with exactly 50% usage. System Idle is 48% with other spurious things hanging on underneth. And this time... doing sequential frames... it dropped to 50% within bout 10 minutes. And it shows that it has been running now for 7 hrs with another 54 to go! I have done nothing with the computer besides doing a full shut-down/re-start and then starting over with sequential frames. >:(

Well, I've blown my expertise on this one. I hope Eovia has some ideas. I suppose you could start deleting things until the performance improves...

One thing I was thinking about was the fact that there is a whole landscape that I'm flying down into the valleys and back up and over and back in again. I wonder if the problem is figuring out the GI solution for the whole thing, yet I'm only seeing a portion of it for the most part. Even still... every time I do a GI render it takes FAR too long. Longer then people here report for their files. :(

Have you sent your file to our technical support (support@eovia.com) ? If not, please do and we will take a look and see if it is a bug or not. There were a couple of issues that slowed down the rendering in Carrara 4 that will be fixed in the patch that we are going to release soon. Charles