Hi everyone. I have a scene containing 500 000 polygons and it takes forever to render (over 9 hours!!!). I don't have any light in it, only the sun. And the only reflections in this scene are coming from 2 planes. Can someone give me some tips on hour to reduce the rendering time ?? Ben

Are you usung a volumteric atmosphere? This can dramatically increase render times.

No, I have used the standard atmosphere...

What are your render settings? If you render at really high settings it will increase render time dramatically. Also, Ultra will be a significant increase over Final. You may want to consider Final as your render setting. Just render a little larger than you want the finished image to be and then scale it down to where you want it. Sometimes you just can't reduce the render time to as low as you want :(. Laurie

My render settings are set to Ultra, image is 720x486. I have to render it at a high quality because it's for business purpose... I will try it at final to see the difference in the quality of the image...

I find the best way to reduce render time is to go to the pub, get pissed, crawl home and slump into bed. Its a dramatic method that makes renders fly by.

9 HOURS!!!!...is that all? ;D If you are using blur (lights, textures, motion or camera), then try Broadcast. The finished result is better than Ultra, as well as quicker to render, and better than Final but slightly slower to render. The reason Ultra is worse than Broadcast with blur, is becuase in Vue 4 there is now no Standard anti-aliasing on top of the Superior, as was the case in previous versions. Cheers

The ghost ship one I just posted took 18hrs 15minutes to render, broadcast at 640x480. Usually I leave things like that to render overnight, stop them in the morning, save the half finished render and the .vue file and start again at bedtime. But when I tried that with this one the render would not resume, (I have no idea why) so in the end I despaired of ever getting it done unless I just left it to run. I let it have the computer to itself for the 18 hours it wanted.

There is only one volumetric light in that one (the light rays) but the ship, which is where it took the time during anti-aliasing, is made of transparent, reflective, luminous material and that can slow rendering a lot. I once did an ice cave in Vue3.1 which took 42hours - a week of night renders - but Vue 4 seems much better for render times.

I'm scratching my head on this one. 9 hours for only 500,000 polygons? I find that really strange unless you have too little ram or an under-powered CPU. My typical scene is 8 to 10 million polygons. If I'm in a hurry, I render in final mode either to sceen at 1600 by 1200 then bump it up in Photopaint. Otherwise, I render it to file, usually at 3200 by 2400. In most cases, 3 to 4 hours is the maximum. -SMT

9 hours?! LOL....that's a quickie ;) Laurie

Quickie indeed :) Another trick to reduce rendering time is to check out the materials of distant objects. If you have distant objects, try removing their bump material - this can have a dramatic effect on the time. Also, make sure you don't have anything running one your machine at the same time (screensaver, anti-virus, mail, web browser... ). Going to bed is the best way to make time fly... going to work too. I just started a render in User (1200x800). Estimated time : 9h. I will get it beck tomorrow afternoon when I come back from work.

Try going for User Settings with everything from (and including) "Enable Super-sampling" downwards set to off, and leave/set everything above it on (unless you're doing a foggy or misty scene). Render at twice the desired size, then go into Paintshop or Photoshop and reduce to half-size. You may want to sharpen or sharpen-more first.

Whoops - forgot to mention that you shoould also leave anti-aliasing off, of course. No anti-aliasing + render at double size + reduce in paint program is in itself one hell of a time-saver.

I'm sorry to tell you this but I have 600 frames to render for an animation. The longest time per frame acceptable in my case is 10 min/frame. I guess the render engine of Vue d'Esprit is not enough powerfull for that amount of work... I wish it was because the atmosphere and the water textures are too much..:-)

I'd still give suggestions 12+13 a try. Depending on poly count, I can render a 1600x1200 image with three lights more or less easily within your above-mentioned time limit. The necessary post-production (size reduction and possibly sharpen) can be done in Paint Shop Pro using batch mode.