I have just started tinkering with Vue d'espirit 5, and am very surprised at how long it takes to  render the sample scenes that came with the program (My Poser 6 renders typically take less than 20 minutes on my fairly fast PC: a Pentium4 2.8 GHz with 2 Gigabytes of RAM).  Even the simplest Vue 5 sample scenes (e.g. the one with the ball and the fluoroscent light in the dark grey room) take over 45 minutes to render on my PC: - and that's with no adjustments on my part: I open the scene, click "Render", and have to wait 45 minutes for completion.

Please tell me: approximately how long does Vue take to render your images?  I understand that total render time varies along with the complexity of the scene and the rendering options chosen, but can you give me a "ballpark" range for the majority of your simple images?

And if 30-45 minutes sounds about right for simple scenes, what would you suggest I do to speed things up a bit?  Purchase a render farm?  Are there companies out there that can cheaply render Vue images for me?

There is nothing strange about multi hour renders, especially the final, high quality ones. If you want to get a feeling about the meaning of the word "slow", just go to the Terragen2 forums and you will find tales of multi HUNDRED hour renders...

Bye!!!

I recommand to use custom user settings instead of their ready build render settings. It could save you a lot of times.
Render time increases a lot also with GI and GR applied.

For your system and a reasonably complex scene with Gi or GR lighting could literally take hours, I've had 10+ hour renders in Vue6Inf, although my render times have decreased big time since I upped my pc spec.
Also if you have water in your scene that will increase render times by a lot too!
But I have to say the end result in Vue is worth the wait.
Also don't forget Vue has the option to stop the render and resume at another time as long as no changes were made to the scene in between!

Remember to check the render settings of the sample scenes before running them. Most of them are using high quality settings. And most of them are far from simple scenes as well. My render times range usually from 8 hours to 3 days for one single image. If you want to compare with Poser, make sure to run comparable scenes. Add one figure to an empty poser scenes, adjust the lights and render. Then import the same figure in Vue, recreate the same lights as in poser and render again. You will find that render times are not that different, and in some caes, to Vue's advamtage.

This is a good thread. I have been wondering about render times myself.

8 hours to 3 Days! Yikes. I am guessing the 3 days is for a very high resolution scene?

I want to use Vue6 for animations, but I am really hesitant now. I am looking for a max 1 hour per frame render. Even that is too long for me. ;)

Thanks for the info. I am using the demo and I thought it was slow because it isn't 6.5.

I render mostly stills - so my render sizes are into the 3000x3000 pixels range.

I'm a Max user and I use it for all my animations (I don't do artwork). But when it comes to landscaping I don't hesitate to turn to Vue 6. Let's face it: Vue produces stunning scenery. I'm in Europe and I frequently use the PAL standard (e.g. 1024x576 if 16:9) for animation. Even with a dual Xeon dual core at that resolution it may take up to half an hour to render one frame from a complex scene. And of course it's all related to my settings. I agree to go for user settings in the first place. But you have to be very careful with supersampling, object and texture anti aliasing.  It depends on your project. A max of 9 subrays/pixel will usually give me a good result (look at your rendered shadows for example), but it may not be good enough for hi quality arwork. Now, supersampling is extremely important in animation, but less important when you create stills. I prefer the way Max handles supersampling and anti aliasing. But if I want to avoid flickering shadows casted by objects in motion, I have to turn to raytraced shadows. And believe me, rendering times will increase sunstantially as well. As far as a Vue is concerned It is always worth it, as others already pointed out here.

Don't forget to check your atmosphere quality setting in the atmo editor. This has a huge effect on Vue render times. You can get some pretty nice renders at -.1 to -1, depending on your scene.

If render times really seem too slow, you can visit us at the RANCH. But there are serious limitations with Vue 5/6 Esprit projects, as this version of Vue does not have the "Incorporate texture maps" option, which is rather essential to send a complete project in one .vue scene (this is required to use the automated RANCH).

www.ranchcomputing.com