The other day I put together a test render of a model I am making and I put together what I thought was a simple scene.  However, with the addition of the Global Radiosity & Reflections it took 12 hours to render.

  The machine I did this on is a liquid cooled AMD 64FX with 2GB RAM and a Quad-SLI video system with 1GB RAM.  Is 12 hours normal?

  I tried doing another scene that I thought was complex (and it was) and at 1% the timer said I had another 700+ hours to go.  Yikes!

  Is there a better answer?  I love Vue 6 Extreem but I want things to be able to render in my lifetime.

Thanks,

John

GR and reflections are a real render killer.  You could try setting the light to GI rather than GR which will help

It grandly depends of your render settings. With User Settings you can lower the render time.
Using some material specifications (such as blurry reflections, sss, ...) could also increase the render time. And use GR only if necessary, try GI. Sometimes there is no visible changes, except for the render time ;)

You could also try to use reflection maps instead of calculated reflections. For this kind of model, actual reflections are less important than the illusion of reflective material.

Attached Link: MultiPassLink

Attached Link: another link

Doesn't look like a good candidate for GR. You should save GR for flat, diffuse, nearby light colored objects passing indirect light to each other (eg rooms with white walls and such).

GR has to do a huge amount of extra work, but won't look any different than much faster rendering lighting types, if used in inappropriate scenes.

Have you tried Ambient Occlusion?

Vincebagna is right  on with careful use of custom "User" render settings to minimize render time.

Excellent modeling!

Thank you all for your advice.  :)  I am still very new to the whole rendering thing.  You have all given me a lot of pointers and I am eager to put them to use.

The model above is actually a part of a Buddist temple that I am working on.  I will be sure to post a render of it here so you can take a look.

Thank you again.

John

GR is not necessary for this type of renders, as others already said. GR computes light that bouces between objects in a scene. Here you have one model and a ground plane. Not much boncing light, but a lot of unnecessary computation. AO would be best here imho, because it would spread soft shadows around occluding surfaces, and and it would look quite good on the robe drapes of this Buddah. Be sure to use a lot of ambient light for the effect to be seen, otherwise, a lot of computation and no nice soft shadows.
Also if you are new to Vue, you may not know this, but you can cut rendering times greatly, by lowering the quality boost of the advanced lighting models to -1 in the atmosphere editor, without noticing any difference, most if the times.

"Also if you are new to Vue, you may not know this, but you can cut rendering times greatly, by lowering the quality boost of the advanced lighting models to -1 in the atmosphere editor, without noticing any difference, most if the times."
As a new user of the demo, thanx for this fine piece of advice.. ...

Quote -
Also if you are new to Vue, you may not know this, but you can cut rendering times greatly, by lowering the quality boost of the advanced lighting models to -1 in the atmosphere editor, without noticing any difference, most if the times.

I didn't know that too, great advice Bruno! ;)

The render time went from 12 hours to 90 minutes.  (And that was with Pirates of the Carribean 3) playing on the same computer.)

There was however a noticible difference in the lighting quality.  I think that the Global Radiosity had better overall lighting.  But was it worth 10 and a half hours of extra rendering time?  I don't know.

Anyway, here is a side-by-side for you.

The left side is with the Global Radiosity and the right side is the Ambient Oclusion.  Very minor difference.

Interesting to see the difference here. Not really noticeable though.
You could also try with GI instead of AO, just to see.

          "I think that the Global Radiosity had better overall lighting.  But was it worth 10 and a half hours of extra rendering time?  I don't know."

The thing is that GR use global illumination and radio, so the better overall lighting rather comes from GI than GR, radio is here for the boucing light, and in your scene, you have no much thing that could bounce light overall. So it could be interesting to have a side-by-side with GI too :)

The difference in the lighting comes I think from the "artificial ambience" parameter. This parameter adds ambient light in the scene to compute GA, AO and GI, because these models need a lot of ambient lighting to give pleasing results, and create fake bounced light between objects. And the colour used is the one from the ambient light colour swatch, thus a light blue.
This parameter isn't taken into account for radiosity, because radiosity computes real bounced light, instead of this fake one.
I think the lighting is good in the new render, because it is outdoors after all, and this pale blue tint gives the impression of a hot sunny day.
And I think the shadows look better now.