Any one else having this problem??? I have Vue 4 Pro and could render a fairly complicated image in a reasonable amount of time, ie under 10 hrs. I just got V5I yesterday and have created my first scene which I want to render at a nice quality setting. (800X600 @ 300 DPI, Superior setting) My scene consists of a dog, some trees and bushes. Terrain size is 500X500. Total poly count is 55,486,401.....more than any scene I've done in Vue 4 Pro. I know this scene will take some time to render and was prepared to let it go over night. Vue 5 I, however is saying it will take 40 hrs to render, that's almost two days!!! Now if I drop the render settings to final @ 80 DPI it will only take 12 hrs to render. Your asking why am I rendering at this setting??? I'm testing the render times because I want to make a render which I can make a print from. If this scene is taking 40 hrs to render I can't even imagine how long a render of that quality would take!!!

Oh yeah, my pc is a Dell XPS Gen 4, 2G memory, Pent 4 @ 3.6 GHZ, and 256MB ATI Radeon X850 XT video card.

Jim

can you load the EXACT same scene into Vue 4 and let it tell you the time...just so you know if you should point your finger on Vue 5 or not. ::::: Opera :::::

"It" says. It hasn't rendered it yet. I found that the counter is all wrong but I don't know if that's your problem or not. I would suggest you make a simple test scene or even that scene there and try to render it at extreme quality at a way smaller size to test the actual render times. Then post your results.

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

I'm letting it render. So far it's dropped from 40 hrs to 9 hrs so your prob right about the counter being out of wack. And yes I am using a global radiosity atmo so that probably doesn't help either. For posting purposes I'll use the broadcast setting but I wanted to see how long V5I would take to render a high quality image. Now I know and have to allow for a longer render time than in Vue 4 Pro. Thanks for all the tips and suggestions!!! Jim

I've also noticed that scenes created in V5 and V5I render faster than those scenes that I created in V4Pro and brought in. The counter said the time frame was going to be insane and it turned out to be true. V5I, from my experience, has really toned up its rendering machine and times are much better than they were in V5.

Total time for my image was 14 hrs, long but comparible to Vue 4 Pro.

Yeah, that sounds about right for a radiosity render. If that's comparable to Vue 4 Pro I'd have to say E-on's made a huge leap in improving render times. Anyway, I'd suggest cutting it down to GI, you'll barely notice the difference, and in fact in my tests I actually liked the result of the GI better than the radiosity, but that probably had to do with the scene itself. There was a nice tip earlier too about reducing the radiosity quality to -.5, this cut the same render using GI from 1 hour 41 minutes down to 52 minutes, with only a slight decrease in quality that was only really noticeable because I looked at the two images side by side, if I'd just had the one I probably couldn't tell the difference. Anyway, hope this helps!

A note about GI vrs. GR for poser figures. Someone told me that GR is so much better for interiors on skin tones etc. Forget that, it is true but so much less system time to cheat. Render your indoor scene in GI, then adjust your brightness contrast and color balance in post. Nearly the same results as was mentioned above and always remember the fine points of color tone can be very easily tweeked in post. Render times? You wanna try something nuts - load the As Shamin short hair on a poser figure and load her up. Your time counter will read the numeric equivilant of "no problem dude" till that magic line HITS THE HAIR, then it will say "the world will run out of your electric supply before the render is finished" Seriously I went to sleep with the counter reading 2 hours and woke up with it reading 89 or so hours. Now I keep that hair in Poser.

Oh yeah, that's a whole 'nother thing all together. Things that result in higher render times other than the obvious higher poly more object and reflection things: -High res textures (don't go higher than you can see on the screen, it's really not necessary unless you're looking to eventually print the thing and you know you're going to see it real up close) -Mixed materials, ESPECIALLY mixed water materials add render time as well, Eon actually recommended in a thread on their site that users not render in ultra when mixing water materials and using GI. -Soft shadows, they add a ton to the render time but in most scenes it is absolutely justified, especially as an enhancement to global ambiance scenes where you can't afford the render time bump up to Global Illumination. -Transparent objects (as tlaloc mentioned with the hair) are definate time crunchers, especially if you happen to try to mix them in with other materials (hence the previously mentioned water dilemma) -Anything with variable transparency or variable reflections is also going to be an additional time cruncher. Hope those tips help anybody trying to shave render time off, they're just things I've had to pay attention more and more to with me starting to get into animation at work.