Hey Everybody, I'm working on an architectural visualization and need advice on easy ways to save on rendertime with lots of glass. I'm running an animation and the client wants the animation at the highest resolution he can get and wants it to last 5-10 minutes, all the while circling around this fancy 3d model I built for him, which happens to have a lot of glass surfaces. I'm not going inside the building so I'm looking for any ideas anyone might have for cutting the render time (either reflection maps, no reflections and a solid color, those kind of things) down, as the glass is the most intensive part of rendering the building at the moment. Thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone might have!

My two cents here .. reflection maps of course would be quicker.. you could build one from a spherical render of the scene.. but also imho , maybe the 'cast shadows' and/or 'receive shadows'for the glass mat could be unchecked depending on how far away the point of view is from the glass panels. (shadows are great render-time eaters.) -'show caustics' surely can be unchecked too if you put some refraction. but maybe refraction could be avoided too ? no blurred transparency is evident.. these are just some ideas :) good luck ! Paul

Thanks for the feedback Paul, so far reflection maps seem to be the best solution so far, I'll have to leave receive shadows on but I think I can turn off cast shadows without making the model look out of place. I'd already turned off show caustics so hopefully doing some of these things will help. Since I'm using Vue 4 Pro I may experiment with shadow maps as well since I'd heard that reduces render times as well. Thanks Again!

if you're not looking in.. whay have glass at all.. use a chrome (obviously you'd have to refine it some but it's the general idea) or blackish texture.. not sure if that would give you want you want or if it would be faster than maps are but it's a thought

The problem with Chrome is it's high reflectivity, which seens to be worse on render times than transparency, thanks for the suggestion though! The idea I've been bouncing around lately is rendering out a close up shot of one of the windows with regular slightly transparent blue glass and then using that render to create a texture and map it to the rest of the glass for the final animation, not sure of that one yet but I'll just have to try it out and see.