The counter is totally wrong, the way the counter works, is it takes the current line it's on in calculations and estimates that if the rest of the scene is like that, that will be the time it takes. Don't pay attention to Vue's time remaining estimates, I had an animation that started out saying it had 180 hours remaining, then went up to 295 hours (after about 6 hours of rendering)leveled off at about 450 hours and stayed at 450 hours remaining for 5 days till it finally got done with the rough stuff and started dropping 6 hours in it's estimate every 20 minutes of actual render time till it was done. It's horribly inaccurate to the point that it really shouldn't even be there at all.

That said, you didn't mention what lighting model you were using either, I recently did some tests with Vue 5 Esprit to gauge time versus quality for some of the lighting tests, a scene with a single model I imported from Autocad (.3ds format) rendered in the following times at 800X600 superior quality (dpi has no effect on render time as far as I have been able to tell)

standard: 12 min (low side)
global ambiance: 12 min (high side)
global illumination: 1 hour 13 min
global radiosity: 7 hours 41 min

I basically discovered too that the difference in appearance between global illumination and radiosity is practically non-existant, especially given the huge time difference. I made sure to make the lighting model low (25%) on the ambiance slider so as to notice the appropriate variations, as having high ambiance from the sun wipes out the effects of GI and radiosity more.

Anyway, I would suggest letting the scene render out for a few hours and see how far it's gone, and do your own estimates, Vue's cannot be trusted.

Message edited on: 03/27/2005 00:39