HELP! i want to render my rhinos image at 4000 x 3000 pixels. the smegging thing says it will render to disk in 9 hours. um... my computer cant run without crashing for more than 3-4 hours... so i have discovered you CAN resume renders if you properly terminate them before you shut down. so i had a 15% render that i resumed this morning. why is it now only at 3%?? i KNOW it read the bmp and prepared to resume... is it 3% of my remaining 85%? or did i just destroy my morning's work? ::sigh:: so then i figured, if i select a render area, even a small area that can render to the screen, i can render the pieces to completion in less than an hour, and then stitch them together. the problem is, i don't know how to get vue to do that right. the last time i did it, the piece i rendered was the top of 'irony;' i selected the whole top, but it came out too small. vue re-calculated the render size based on... i have no clue what. but it wasn't the selected area's size of the whole huge render. ::SIGH::

Bloodsong, I take it you're rendering ultra to disk? When rendering to that size, I find ultra to be overkill but final is still not good enough. This made me start experimenting with the user settings, doing things like cutting out the final "Standard Anti-aliasing", lowering the number of subrays to 8 (Final uses 4, ultra uses 16), lowering the quality threshold, and optimizing the last pass. It takes some work, but you can get much better quality than final mode without the huge time penalty of ultra. Be careful though, if you set your parameter in correctly you can actually wind up taking longer than you would in ultra! -SMT BTW: for long renders, you might want to try the batch renderer.

BTW part II: Trust me on this, instead of rendering to 4000 by 3000, render to 4096 by 3072. You'll get better re-sampling results both upward and downward.

heyas; actually, i AM rendering in only final mode. :/ i'll try the 4096 bit, too, thanks :) i did try the batch renderer, all it did was open vue and start rendering. i can do that! ::sigh:: i'm thinking i'll have to render smaller, than sample up in photoshop, like i did with the zygote calendar images. oh, and i got it back to 35% after four more hours... and it still had 8 hours left.... ::SIGH::

Ouch! Ok. 1. I've done tests and from what I've seen, rendering to sceen at ultra, minus the last "standard antialias" pass (just stop the render at that point) and then resampling in a paint program looks as good or better than rendering a larger file size to disk in Final mode. It make sense, since Ultra is 4 times the resolution of Final without the standard antialiasing. Try the same scene, rendering to screen at ultra and see what kind of time estimates you get. It should be less, if not a whole lot less. -SMT (who keeps forgetting that not everyone has a PIII 1gHz with 512meg of memory)

Hey bloodsong: Try this...when you are finished with your rendering period (by that I mean all you want to render before you shut down Vue), save the image in your Pictures folder and then immediately save the scene. This will keep the render right where it was when you left off. If you let it render a bit and save the scene but not the image, it will not be in the same place as it was when you ended it last. You will have lost rendering time. I hope this made sense...I'm not very good at explaining it ;) Laurie

Hear, hear...:) Just my experience but not necessary that it would happen to you. As Laurie said, its the "Resuming Render" thingy from the Vue manual. I have experience problem with it before (twice to be exact)and this was with "Noctural Angle" Zygote Calender image at 3300x2250). I have it rendered 1/3 way and apply the "resume render" procedure. when I restarted rendering again, there was this nice thin pixelated colourful line that appeared on the bitmap which was last saved. I thought it was one of those video card 'magical showoff', but no, the bitmap file was sorta 'corrupted'...Vue is funny!

heyas; okay, that sounds good. i'm rendering in ultra at... um... what, 1/2? 1/4? size? i dont know if i can render to screen... i'll have to change my screen resolution to something bigger. daffy: now that's weird. normally when i quit rendering and shut down, and then come back later, the resume render is blanked out. okay, vue forgot i already started a render, it lost its place. for the longest time, i thought you could only resume a render in the same session, not at a later date. so anyway, then i found i could open a scene and not touch anything, and resume render. but if you open your scene and save it... then won't vue think you've changed something and start over?? this is so crazy... anyway, when i render to disk, it automatically saves the picture file when i hit esc. tesign: i had one that rendered like the top 1/3 of an image as the top row of pixels repeated down in straight lines. that was annoying. :) we should email e-on about the proper proceedure for resuming renders at later dates... ya think?

Hi bloodsong....not sure if you got Daffy right and about the "resumming render" I mentioned...last few pages of the manual has the procedure which I would not post here (reason is obvious of course). Vue actully allows you to stop rendering a bitmap image anytime you want. Export and save as whatever you call it and also that scene must be saved before quitting. When you on your PC again ow whatever, you can go back to Vue anytime and open up that saved image in Vue and you would see the resumme render feature to start from where you last stopm. I done this quite often and it works okay but except for that two incident that I mentioned. Bill

Attached Link: http://start.et/arte

OH!!!!!!! THERE it is. now all is clear. thank you. :) hey, small....? i'm not sure i have this down right. what do you mean 'hit cancel at the last anti-alias pass'?? what i did was, halved the image size (1/4 didn't work so well), then hit the ultra mode. then i went to custom to turn off the superior anti-aliasing and only use standard. i also turned off blurry reflections and transparencies, because i didn't have any of that in my scene. i'm not sure i did everything correctly... my foreground grasses came out very jaggy anyway. guitta: you know, i did that once, but i have a problem where i cant get the pieces to come out the correct size. when i tried to render the upper 1/3 of one of my images (that got messed up in render), it came out a different size, and i had to stretch it to cover the piece of the whole image where it had to go.

Oooh! Watch out! As soon as you go to "User Settings", you no longer retain any of the "Ultra" settings. (Threshold, number of subrays, etc.) The user settings can be quite useful, but tricky to manage. No, what I meant when I said, "minus the last "standard anti-alias" pass (just stop the render at that point)" was this: Vue is a multipass renderer with each pass spawning new subrays. There are a total of 5 render passes. The "Standard Anti-aliasing" is essentially a sophisticated blurring algorithm that happens on a SIXTH pass. It doesn't increase the number of subrays, it just interpolates the pixel colors wherever the color difference exceeds a predetermined threshold. Because "ultra" mode spawns 4 times as many subrays as "Final" mode, I've found that the 6th anti-aliasing pass achieves no visible improvement in the quality of the render, but greatly increases the render time. Therefore, I simply stop the Ultra render after the 5th pass is completed and save the picture. Mind you, when I render to screen, I'm rendering to 1600 by 1200. If your screen is set to a lower resolution, you may actually NEED to have the last anti-aliasing pass. Hope this helps :) -SMT

To stop the last pass...small mean hit the "esc" key. Bill

Thanks, Bill. I forgot to mention that :) -SMT

::getting a headache:: but if i'm not sitting at my computer for four hours watching the four hour render, i wont be there to stop this extra antialiasing pass. :) okay, so when i hit ultra and switched to user, it looked like ultra, but wasnt? so i did it wrong? :/ ::sigh:: okay, we won't mess with this any more. except for one thing... was i supposed to render it at 1/4 final size in ultra, or 1/2?? :)

No need to watch the computer, at least past the third pass. When rendering to screen Vue gives you the time remaining, BUT...that time remaining does NOT include the 6th antialiasing pass. Once you are past the third render, the time will have stabilized enough so that you'll have a good idea when to come back and check on it. As far as doing anything with the user settings, see my thread, above. -SMT

IMHO and just sharing what I normally do when I expect a render to be more then 5 hours. I would just let Vue reneder in the background and go about my other chores with the PC. There is a slight down in performance for opening files, programs and sufring the internet but it gets by okay. When I'm done and nothing else, the rendering goes on without being interuppted. Not sure why rendering to disk is needed and I don't really see any advantage. I usually do "render to screen" which is faster, much faster then to disk as there are other process like caching or something like that going on. If you have to do a "render to disk", my suggestion is that, make sure your hard disk is clean with no files left in the "temp" and last but not least, defragmented and enough space. If your hard disk is a ATA enhance 100/66 or SCSCI 2, better still but giving it a big permernant virtual ram. If I am not there, I'll just switch off the monitor. After the hours when I am back, I will on the monitor again to see how much has been completed. Like small said, if it pass the five and the image is good enough (usually is), I'll hit "escape" key and save the image and the scene file. Normally that is final for me but should you feel you want to complete the last super antiliasing pass, you can always call out the image and "resume" render...just make sure you do a "save as" to the original image (ie. giving it a different file name so that the original stay original). Not sure if its of concern...but its good to have your WinOS setting for "hardisk suspend, screensaver, screen off etc...) setting all to "none" before you leave Vue to do a long hour render. I did an 18 hours (slightly more)render before with WinOS setting to no terminal residence activities like antivirus, firewall, etc...except Memory Turbo on (works well in recovering defragmented Win Mem resourses when it hits bottom line...for those interested - http://www.memturbo.com/ ). Please note that what I said here may not apply to everybody system but mine is just a normal standar PC. Ciao! Bill

hah!! tesign, if i did that.... i'd crash my computer and lose my render. geeze, just NOT doing anything on the computer while it renders can make it crash. not only that, but i am forever hitting the escape button. it is essential in rhino. i use it in poser. i use it on the web.... and every time i hit it, vue quits rendering and i gotta resume! ugh :) i had that happen to me, once. i was rendering a huge image in ray dream, and the dumb power save shut down my hard drives, so the thing couldn't render!! after three hours, i come back, and it is still only 10% done! argh! :)

What do you have running in the background? Only Explorer and Systray need to be operating when you boot Windows. Anything else just eats up resources and may cause conflicts. With a normal Windows system, it should be able to sit there for days on end without crashing. Even when rendering, (so long as you're not dickering your hard drive to death with memory swaps) you should be able to leave your computer indefinitely and it should be fine when you get back. -SMT

hahahhahhahaa!! winclock. that's the only thing i run. um... and who said i had a 'normal' windows system? (actually, isn't it an abnormal windows system that runs without crashing??) ;D really, though, it is a heat problem. the video card runs hot, and when my system gets tired and over-heated, it just quits.

Hee! x3!...easy one!....go get a table fan and blow at the inside...FULL BLAST with the PC box chassis off. Seriouly, each of my hard disk has a mounted fan, an inyernal slot suction fan, 3d lab card has fan on the video chip, usual front and back chassis fan, never had my chassis cover on since day one and last but on list, in an airconditioning romm..muwaha!ha!ha! Kool idea eh! :-)

That's one thing I don't have to worry about with my Dell. The fan is enormous, BUT whisper quite! Even running a PIII 1gHz with 512meg of RAM, two hard drives, a CDRW, and a Hercules NVidia Gforce II Ultra with 64 megs of RAM, I still don't have a heat problem! -SMT

Hey..."whisper quiet!"...like the sound of that..the fans I have do grind and moan when the bearing silicon grease runs dry though.

The one big complaint about the early Dell Dimension computers was that the fan was way too noisy. So Dell really spent some considerable effort designing a ducted fan system that makes almost no noise. In fact, it's so quiet that if I have the monitor turned off, I have to double check to make sure the computer is still running :) -SMT

hey! i am new here at renderosity, sorry if I make misstakes. I use Vue 4, and my scenes do get well but the rendering time is big, does it have to do with the computer? (processor, memory, hardrive etc.) Thanks!