I use Vue 8 Pro Studio and it can be very slow at rendering, depending on the scene complexity. Animations are even worse. I was just wondering, would placing Vue on a Solid State Drive (no moving parts) make a significant difference to render time?

I use an NVidia GTX 540 with over 1 gig memory onboard and have 12 Gigs of RAM on my system. Nothing else seems to speed up my render times!

An SSD will speed up opening a VUE file, but not the rendering of one.  You just need a faster CPU is all.

Well that's disappointing - I have an i7 CPU. Do you know of any tutorials on RAM configfuration that might help? Right now I'm working on a 15 second animation in Vue with some water movement and a gentle breeze blowing through some grass and reeds on a small island. According to Vue, it will finish in about 265 hours, or about 11 days of solid 24/7 rendering. In my mind, that is unacceptable. I could almost draw it by hand in that time!  !!

It all boils down to the atmosphere "thickness", your render settings, and the resolution size you are using.

If you use Google+ Hangout, I can tell you what settings I typically use and compare with your Vue setup.  My Google+ is https://plus.google.com/u/0/108238709099957334707

Sorry, I don't use Google+ but thanks anyway. I'll keep searching...

No problem.  These settings might help.  http://www.perpetualvisions.com/new-articles/render-settings/renders.html

Thanks! I've bookmarked that site as well as the one he refers to as the place he got his info from: http://www.silverblades-suitcase.com/tutorials/htm/48.html Got some reading to do tonight!

Upgrading to Vue 11 Studio may help. Seems like your using old software with newer hardware. I've got Vue 10 Studio, but before that I had Vue 11 Frontier, but downgraded to Vue 10 Studio, since I could get someone license. When rendering the same scene in Vue 11 and Vue 10, Vue 11 is about 25-30% faster. I know Vue 10 is roughly 25-30% faster when rendering then Vue 9, so if Vue 9 is faster then Vue 8 is, you could gain a lot.

I bought a new pc a while back. Before doing so I asked people to render a test scene on their machine to compare various computers. Quite some people participated and I did notice one thing..... on similair setups the render speeds would roughly be the same, only a few percent different. Some of those machines were custom build highly optimised, but they weren't much faster then stock machine that weren't optimised at all. You can add SSD, tweak your RAM, cut your background processes, but it will only decrease your render time a few percent.

The thing that will really speed up your renders is getting a faster CPU or even better more cores, but I'm not sure if Vue 8 Studio restricts the number of cores you can use as Vue 10/11 do to 8 cores max.

You can also tweak your render settings and see render decrease that way, but there is a limit to that. I've found that my scenes loose quality is your take it to far. But you can sure gain by tweaking.

The other option may be upgrading your Vue version.... if you can figure out if Vue 9 is faster then Vue 8. Even if Vue 9 has the same render speeds as Vue 8 or is only a little faster, you still will see renders speeding up a lot by going to 11.

Thanks, and I'm beginning to see that you are right. My kids got me a 120GB SSD for Father's Day and while the extra space is always good, it doesn't seem to have improved my render speeds at all. So now I start saving up for an upgrade. I've used Vue since version 4.5 but after 8, the pricing is too steep for me to just jump in blindly.

Vue 9 is a little faster that Vue 8.  Vue 10 is much faster than Vue 9.  But Vue 10 is cheating by not including all of a scene at render time.  My eco graveyard was missing some tombstones, for example, where Vue 9 rendered the complete scene.  I hear Vue 11 does the same thing with ecos to get faster rendering.  I got 6 or 7 bugs fixed in Vue 10 that I reported.  But I didn't report the eco bug since I wasn't planning on buying Vue 11.  Too stressfull having to prove bugs to e-on.  Vue 9 had the fewest bugs, so I went back to that version.

I hear ya!  It's been a love/hate relationship for me, right from the start.
I love Vue - I hate e-on.

:o/

Quote - I love Vue - I hate e-on.

That is so short and sweet and perfect.  That's it in a nutshell.  And to the point.

Well, it's slightly more generous than I was in the newsgroups where I called Vue one of the finest programs for the creation of digital nature ever written, but controlled by a gang of knuckle-dragging apes in pin-striped suits.