P6 renders so much slower than P5! This is especially true when cast shadows is enabled. I rendered a simple scene with mostly procedural textures, two figures and a couple of props, and it's taking forever! Anyone else have this problem? I'm using the Firefly render at the default settings, with texture filtering and Raytracing OFF. Am I doing something wrong? thanks

I don't normally have too muchof a problem.... How many lgihts do you have setup? This is the one thing that really clogs my system when I have too many lights.

Hmmmm. Not in my experience. In fact, P6 seems to render faster than P5 -- and it is generally more stable.

If you turn on a lot of the bells & whistles that P6 offers, then I'd expect to see a difference in rendering times. Usually, the difference is worth the extra wait. But when you are using the default render settings? I haven't noticed any major time issues.

Do you have the SR1 (Service Release 1) update to P6 installed?

Do your characters have any sort of heavy-duty memory-consuming hair? I've found that certain hair props/figures can sometimes make a huge difference in render times.

Switch from Auto render settings to Manual. Then use whatever settings you would have used in P5 and re-render. Should be as quick, if not quicker than P5.

You have to look at your render settings and adjust accordingy for your needs. You can set them higher for final renders.

I had a huge problem along those lines one time...couldn't get a scene to render, it seemed to simply hang, although it said "rendering" all the while...finally, someone suggested I reduce my maximum texture size in the render settings, which I did and it rendered fine afterwards...if the max texture is set too high, especially higher than the size you're rendering, it can hang it...I dont know if this is even your problem, but I'm sure it couldn't hurt to try! :D Karen

I don't know if anyone else has experienced this, but it seems to me that (for a simple one figure, minimal props/clothing) when I render with Raytraced shadows (2 bounces I think) it goes much quicker than with Depth Mapped shadows. Certainly this probably changes as the scene gets more complex, but I was surprised even at this - I just naturally assumed Ray Trace would always be slower.

Anyone else experience that?

Unzipped edited to add: following tips from others on this board I find render time can be reduced by setting your bucket size to as large a multiple of 2 as possible. I've had it up to 512 at some points, but when I enable Ambient Occlusion I have to cut down to 128 or 64 lest I hit the memory limit. So try a larger bucket size if you can - it seems to speed things up a bit for me at least.

Message edited on: 10/14/2005 16:09