Quality is not an issue... what settings will produce the quickest render?

In the Render quality I turned everything off except Apply Materials. Still very slow. (I tried it without materials, too, but all the objects were rendered flat black, and it was STILL slow as hell)

I've got the compression quality turned down to 50%, the size of the screen is 500x213 at 72dpi.

I've got making it look crappy totally licked. I just can't seem to get a fast render into the repetoir.

Any suggestions?

A bit confused as to what exactly you are looking for here? How quick is quick? I see that you have already turned all options off before rendering except for materials, but what is it that you are rendering? And, probably most importantly, what version of VUE are you using and what kind of machine do you have your copy of VUE? installed on?

The above scenario is outputting approx. 10seconds of render an hour. And like I said, looks like complete ass. If it rendered 10 seconds in... five minutes? I could live with that.

I guess I'm suffering from unfairly comparing Vue capabilities to something like Maya, which will bang out some kind of "playblast" type render real speedy-like.

As far as specs, I'm running Vue4Pro on Windows XP with a Pentium4 3.6GHz and 3G RAM. So... fast enough to not be its own problem I think...

I'm just pining for a function Vue4Pro doesn't offer, right? How about Vue5 iterations?

From Industrial Light and Magic: "The shots of Episode III resulted in a total rendering time of 6,598,928 hours, spread across the rendering farms of multiple processors. To do it on a single system running continuously, it would take over 750 years to produce." I work on one frame every ten minutes on average, meaning I get 10 seconds every 41 hours. I am not sure what you are saying here. You want to do ten seconds of animation in five minutes? Even Maya will not do that for you.

What kind of render are you talking about? It sounds like you are talking about finished, high quality images. And of course, it's going to take what time it takes. I'm only vaguely familiar with the playblast feature in Maya, but SoftImage has a similar function called flip book, which just pumps out frames, kind of like your 3D view will show you in semi-real time what's going on when you play the animation. I want something like that -- not for looking nice, but for doing quick output of movement/animation issues. I need to output because I am in the middle of a work pipeline, so someone else edits after me... Does that make sense, or am I explaining myself poorly?

OK, I get what you are saying, you just want a preview render to see the motion. In Vue, set your render quality to preview, not boadcast or anything like that. Drop your frame rate to between 5 and 8 frames per second, instead of the normal 25 or 30. Delete all lights except the sun, and turn of shadows on your objects. If you are using Vue 5 Infinite, you can also decimate the meshes for fewer polygons. Set the size of your render down as well. If you just want to see the motion, you don't need a big size. I think that turning up the compression may actually slow it down, as it has to calculate the compression for every frame. Just render to straight image files, jpg, with no compression. Rendering time increases proportionally with an increase in the amount of polygons, lights, shadows, image size, and number of objects. If there are objects in the scene that you don't need to see in the preview, I think there is a hide from render option as well (I am not at my Vue PC to check).

I'm not specialist, using Vue5inf.
In addition to what says Helgard, above,
if it's for previews, i get rather fast results with "personal settings",
lowering number of rays,
turning off reflexion (and/or transparency) if not needed,
turning off all anti-aliasings.
No compression, one, max two lights only, no lens flare, no infinite planes in render. Also, glowing mats take time.
But, if your scene is more FX and lighting, than polygon, disabling all that would leave nearly nothing...
Put unseen objects outside the camera's FOV on "invisible" layers.
Verify, if there ain't a small object with zillions of (notnecessary) polygons in the scene.
I first render some frames on screen, to see if it runs ok, then render to disk.

This is most of the stuff I've been doing. I might mess with the compression levels some more, but basically that's it. Thanks a lot.

Somewhat OT, though it has to do with render speeds:

A GPU is better equipped for rendering than a CPU. Some 3D programs have a wonderful OpenGL preview that could almost rival the Preview render setting of Vue, and it works in (semi) realtime. Poser 6 for instance.
And the 3D quality of recent games is very, very good. Realtime. Now I would LOVE to see some software that would implement a standard rendering interface (Renderman for instance) using the graphics processor for the rendering calculations. There is some work being done there, but I haven't seen any software yet.
Two major advantages: first, the GPU is easily 10 times as fast as a high end CPU when it comes to rendering, and second, a GPU is much cheaper than a CPU. Imagine a mid to high end PC (around $1500) with multiple PCI-e graphics cards of $500 each (FAST graphics cards!), you could have a renderfarm in a single box that outperforms a 100 node CPU based farm!
Ah, sweet dreams...

Message edited on: 03/01/2006 11:53

Attached Link: http://www.boxxtech.com/applications/rendering_systems.asp

I also find this lack of speedy preview ,for animation, an absolute pain in vue.I've found that the easiest way is to make frame size 320x180 then in user settings deselect almost everything you see and select "only selected objects". This will give bare basic view but you can check your animations for smoothness etc.in a very quick time. I have found this to be helpful when dealing with poser figures in vue.....you can select all or just one of your figures and test movements. All other comments above are extremely helpful.

"Only selected objects." Good call. Thanks man.