Is there any way I can have clear high quality pictures and animations without waiting ages for them to render especially when it comes to water Does anyone know of any trade sectrets?

Water is one of the most difficult materials to render. It has transparency, but not simple transparency, it starts transparent and become less and less as light travles though it, until it can't anymore, and then the water has no transparency left. And it's reflective too, but not as a mirror, it only reflects at low angles of incidence, so this has to be computed too.

Depending on the Vue version you have, you can tweak some settings.

So let's see what is your version of Vue.

Bonjour Bruno, my version is Vue 5 Infinite

Ok in V5I, you can select how much reflection you want, by using the user  render settings, click edit next to the compute reflection box, and go for small numbers for both options, use 3 minimum, otherwise it may not look good enough.

You can alo tweak the anti aliasing settings in this user mode. If you don't have ecosystems in your render, go for min9, max12, 70%.

if you have ecosystems, then you'll need to bump it up to min 12, max 18, 75%

Even more if you have animated ( wind) vegetation, there is other way, I'm afraid to go for insane high AA settings , otherwise you get a flickering animation if you use global illumination. or you can wait for a  flicker free Vue6!

Also keep the  quality boost for advanced effects to max 46%, if you go over, you won't see much difference ( or none at all), but render times will go crazy.

I guess the only way is an expensive CPU :(  

Also, if you have more than one machine, you can network render.

Or get a more powerful CPU, indeed!

I work with Clouseau - we're using a power mac G5 with a pretty reasonable processor - we tried to do network rendering over a hybrid network (all the others are PCs) but found it pretty unreliable and not much faster than doing it all on the 1 mac.

Will Vue 6 be any quicker at rendering - we are trying to do 30 second clips at 25 frames per second =750 frames - if each frame 5 mins long, will take 62 hrs (2 & half days)

Also, is Vue 6 'flicker free' even at low quality high speed renders?

( We are taking our AA settings way down ( 2 lowest / 4 highest ), making the picture a bit bigger than we want, and then resizing the frames in photioshop to use ITS anti-aliasing, to get quickest render times) see pic

Will Vue 6 be a big improvement in all this?

Don't know more about V6 than what's discribed at e-on.

I'm surprised about your network rendering not being reliable. There were issues with the previous update, but apparently, they have fixed it. Haven't tried it myself yet, though. Do you run the latest upadte? 5.11-02?

Your solution about making the renders bigger is a good one, imho, but I don't know if it will remove the flickering. If it does, many here would love to know all about it.

Long render times depends on ones perception. If you have a look through my gallery keep in mind that almost all of my posted images for the last 6-8 months have not taken more than 3hrs to render per image.
It's definately possible to acheive DECENT quality renders  with some tweaking.

My PC is a p4 2.8Ghz with 1.5Gb ram..so..nothing flash.

It's a shame stupidity isn't painful.

My recent works usually taking a long time to render (like 70-80 hours) Especially when I want to make it available as print. I have render 3000*4500 pixels.

I am using Athlon 64 3000+ with 2gb of ram. It is actually much more faster than my previous P4 2.40...

But I am planing to upgrade it to Athlon X2 3800+

Take a look at my tutorial on Vue render settings.  It may help, but water will increase render times.

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Peggy

LVS - Where Learning is Fun!  
http://www.lvsonline.com/index.html

Quote - Take a look at my tutorial on Vue render settings.  It may help, but water will increase render times.

http://users.tns.net/~mwalter1/Vue_Render_Settings.pdf

Peggy

Your tutorials are stunning - and very useful. Great job...