Quote - By the way.  That's a cool video you have on youtube. How long did it take to render that video and what kind of pc are you using?

Hi zonkerman!

The video on youtube was rendered at 640480 at 24fps (720 frames) on my mini rendergarten (three PCs (2 Core2 duo and one dual xeon) with Rendercows controlled by HyperVue). The render time was ca. 26h. I have now a new system with i930 quadcore and that would probably bring the render time for the same scene down to about 12h if I add it to the farm.

The external renderer is identical to the one used inside Vue. The only time I have seen a significant speed boost was when I was operating at the memory limit of my system. Not having the interface around made more memory available and it was rendering somewhat faster. So the major advantage is stability in my mind as the external renderer has a smaller memory foot print.

But yes, rendering animations is pretty slow unless you have access to several additional systems to run a small render farm. There are other things you can do. I have converted the scene in the video to camera projection for the background model and then "baked in" the indirect lighting. That way I was able to shave about 20% off the render time. Depending on your scene you can also re-use the indirect lighting (not sure if that is available in Vue 6). Another big time saver is to convert procedural terrains into standard terrains and add the detail back via the bump map.

Ciao
TD