Hi, I have a couple of questions. The image here is just a fast and dirty render of my scene. I was experimenting with lights. If you look towards the back of the scene in the corner of the room, there is light illuminating part of the floor, right on the corner. This light seems to be coming from a spotlight that is in the hallway on the other side of the wall. Why is the light showing through the wall? The spotlight is placed below the height of the said wall. My other question is about render times. I tried rendering my scene using global illumination. After ten hours my computer pretty much just bogged down and I wasn't even able to abort the render, couldnt even ctl-alt delete the thing, had to reboot. I have a P4 3.2, 1 gig of ram, and a QuadroFX500 video card. Is this kind of render sluggishness normal? And in the same vein, do objects that are out of the frame affect the render time? In this scene for instance there are a few items on the bookshelves that are out of frame in this render, but that are fairly complex objects, would they affect render time even if they are out-of-frame? Thanks, H&B

PS. About that light in the back corner. It doesnt seem to be from the spot that is coming in through the open door. There are 2 lights in the hall. If i remove the one placed near the door, that splotch of light is still there. The second light is place on the other side of the door, kind of (but not quite)level with the back wall.

One GByte of RAM is a bit minimum for any of todays 3D applications. I imagine a lot of off-loading to the hard drive is driving up your render times?

I would go for at least 2 GByte of ram, with 3 pretty much all your system can use. ~ 1.8 GByte is all carrara gets -- under ideal conditions, and assuming a good stable motherboard/RAM.

If you're using C5Pro, try Ambient Occlusion Only, rather than full Indirect Lighting. Ambient Occlusion does a good job of simulating real indirect lighting. though it's probably really best for animations.

Post your render settings and I'll tell you what may have caused the lockup. I use a P3 with 1GB RAM that can do GI with a scene like yours with no problem. For the light going through the wall, make sure your walls have volume as well as your floor. Don't use planes. Also make sure there are now duplicate points causing open seams on the wall edges. Shove the walls slighting into the floor so light doesn't get through.

I agree, based on the scene 1 GByte should work fine. I'm thinking very high mesh resolutions.

With all the glass/water/lights in the scene, the computer may sit there for 5-8 minutes before it starts calculating the environment and even thinks about rendering the thing. It depends 95% on your render settings, 5% on your objects.

For the lighting issue, increase the accuracy of the interpolation or, better yet, enable Full Raytracing.

For the light: is the "Cast Shadows" checkbox checked? Otherwise it just goes through the wall as if were not there ...

Just from the reading of the Carrara3 pdf. , objects outside the scene are calculated as well as in the camera view - everything is taken into account and takes up RAM, I'm pretty sure. Correct me if I'm wrong. R

ominousplay... you are NOT wrong. Objects in the scene are taken into account, especially for GI, since it needs the information about objects the lights might reflect some color back from to do it's calculations. The multiple transparent objects are my guess as to why it would take so long and bog down your system.

Thanks everyone. I've taken out all the objects that werent within the production frame. That should help. I'm still trying to solve that leaking light problem in the back corner though. I made sure cast shadows was checked, changed the floor from a plane to a solid form and raised it a smidge to make sure no space is left between floor and walls.....but I still have light leaking in. As a test I removed the light behind that wall, and the leakage did in fact vanish. So it is caused by that one spolight. I'll keep working on it and run some more tests, try the GI again, perhaps on different settings. I'll let you know how it works out. Thanks, H&B

I still think that your light problem may come from the shadows. Did you check also that your wall casts shadows?

No, havent checked. Will do that now though. :o)