Last night I tried to render my 1st scene of a project Im doing for college. I left it running at 11pm, and when I woke at 7am it had only rendered 90 frames of the 210 - I thought this was rather slow - am I right ? The scene was two characters with camera movement only, I was using the firefly render engine using the cinepac codec. This was on my laptop, Im thinking I might need to borrow my folks base unit and using it purely for rendering - does anyone have any experience on this ? Cheers Chris

Nothing wrong, all normal and not slow. Also should check your render settings. Can help speed up the render times. Their will be a time even just one render (image) instead of frames can take up to 6-7hours. All random due to settings.

I thought this was rather slow - am I right ?

I was churning out a single frame every three minutes on one project, and at that speed it was actually moving along nicely, considering what I had going on.

It might be slow. Then again, it might be blindingly fast. It really depends upon the render dimensions, number of lights in the scene, the presence of P6's dynamic hair, various render options and material settings, your CPU speed and system RAM, etc.

Your choice of codec shouldn't have any significant impact on total render time. Not even if you'd decided to use MSU Lossless, which is one of the slowest damned codecs I've ever tested.

when animating a scene its always a good idea to do a test render at current display settings to make sure you are getting what you want , things happen unexpectedly like your lights may be animating or something..., only takes a few minutes to double check, may save you hours of waiting only to be disapointed with the result....hell sometimes the results of the render may be 'good enuff for govt. work' ...210 frames takes less than 10 min to check :} JAFO

I've had an animation take 12 hours per frame about i said **** it and quit on 3rd frame :P but nothing wrong with the renderer, just depends on the scene as for animations, better to render to pics afterwards you can have many options more for your animation including playing with which codec gets used

Thats cool then, I was kinda worried for a moment. I recently had to render a 10 sec kitchen flythrough sequence in 3D Max, and it was roughly about 10 hours with all the reflections etc. Well my folks said that I could take there machine, so hopefully that will free up the laptop for creating and all the rendering can be done on the base unit. Im looking to add a background into the scene anyway using something Ive created in 3d max, the tutor told me there was a free plugin download from e-frontier that I could use to take my poser files into max, had a look but it looks like it costs a couple of hundred bucks ???? Cheers Chris

I second anxcon on the separate image idea. I get much better results by rendering to stills and compiling in Monkey Jam, and then rendering to AVI with no compression. Also if there are any imperfections on a few frames you can fix them in a 2D editing program. I've found default P5 AVI renders are not of very high quality, or is it my codecs?

Probably the codecs. Poser defaults to Microsoft Video 1, which was horrible even back in 1992. The Cinepak codec included with Windows is almost as old, and not much better. I'd recommend Huffyuv or Lagarith for lossless compression and editing, and DivX or XviD for final work.

... a free plugin download from e-frontier that I could use to take my poser files into max ....

Your tutor might be thinking of the free plugin for Rhino, which was released recently.

http://www.e-frontier.com/article/articleview/1745/1/742

The Max hosting plugin is now developed by Reiss Studio, and sells for about $180. The other alternative is GestureMax, which is even more expensive.

You might find HABWare's free plugins for 3DS Max (OBJ2MAX, MAX2OBJ) useful.

http://www.habware.at/duck.htm