I have a few questions about efficient files in Carrara. And I am mostly concerned in how it applies to animation more so than straight modeling. When creating a model with, lets say multiple cylindrical shapes, is it better to have one master object and scale it to the different proportions needed or to create many master object cylinders of the exact proportion necessary for the model? Does scaling objects either proportionally or unproportionally effect system efficiency or speed when rendering a scene or animation? If I have a model and bring it into another scene but need to reduce it by 50% or even more does this cause Carrara great difficulty? What if there are many objects reduced in the scene? I know these are all fairly similar questions but I have been wondering about this ever since I started creating more and more complex images with Carrara. These questions aren't barn burners for me but I was just curious how careful I need to be about creating efficient files. For the record I am still using C1.1 and plan to move up to C2 relatively soon. I don't know if the answers would be different to the different versions of the program. Good day all. memaci

Hi, I suprised no one has responded to this yet so I'll give it a try. Simply put, the more polygons in a scene, the longer it will take to render. I favor spline models to vertex when it makes sense to use spline models because they are handled more easliy by Carrara. They also produce much smaller file sizes. Using duplicates v.s. creating new is more efficient too. The big animation time savings comes from hiding/suppressing anything that is "off camera" Additionally, lights that have effects added like Light Cone etc. should have those effects turned off in the timeline as soon as they are off camera. If you still need one of the off camera lights to illuminated the scene, they can be left "on" with only the effects suppressed. The render time savings will be hours, not minutes. Hope that this helps.

I suppose I wasn't sure how much computational power it took from the software to recalculate a single master object in varied proportions. This may change how I approach building models. Thanks for the input Mark.

Some of the set-ups I have animated end up taking hours just to set-up the "on-off" keyframes! (Room fly-throughs of meeting set-ups with 300 chairs, tables, and some times people/manequins. LOTS of polygons!) Occasionally I've seen that I've missed some objects whose shadows noticably dissapear when they move off-camera AFTER the client has signed-off on the project. (Do I fix it? Or, cash the check... hmmmm ;> ) I know they say it speeds up the render in the manual, but I'm never really sure if it helped or not in the end.

I'm laughing because of done the same thing. My favorite is having the light and light cone come on at different times! Hey, it's magic... Anymore, I just make some mondo groups and turn everything off in large, collected sets.