How slow?
 

HELP ME ! ! ! I am having a nightmare with rendering times. The last image I rendered took 45mins ! I am running an AMD Athlon XP2000 chip with 768MB DDR_PC2700 RAM. I am contemplating a 3minute animation but at these speeds it will take 3240hrs to render. Anyone have any ideas?

Tell us about the image. If you have things like Raytraycing turned on it'll multiply render times by about 100% :banghead:

I'm only using a PIII 677 with 250mb of RAM and havent had an image render take that long. (although there was the full 1024, pro quality, raytracing on movie that took 12 hrs :mad: )

To render out some pictures it is going to take a long time for us single processor ppl. And it depends what settings you have set in render globals. The more serious you get into animation, the more need for higher end equipment...a render farm with Alpha RISC processors

I had maya installed on my 800Mhz Athlon T-Bird and a 12 sec animated movie took 5 hours to render.....:banghead: :banghead:

LOL, dont forget the type of graphic card you have, i have an ATI 9000 PRO 128 DDR and its doing allright:D! What about you guys?

a while back I was playing with fluids and to render an Atomic Bomb animation that was 35 frames, it was going to take about 3.5 hours... (not bad but still.. ) 6 min per frame (1024x768 res)

Using Athlon XP 1900+ with 512MB DDR and a GeForce 3 Ti500

-Emo

As a general rule, you should render only as large as your target delivery format requires. For NTSC video, 720x540 (square pixels) is all you need. For display on computers (web, download, etc.) 640x480 is standard. HD and film are much higher (1920x1080 and 2k+ respectively). A 1024x768 animation is simply too large. There's nothing that says you can't do it, but I think you're just wasting time and drive space to get that size. Also, you'll never get it compressed decently enough for reasonable file transfer times. But, if you want huge movies, more power to you. :p

Also, you can speed up render times by rendering at the command line. By using command line rendering, you don't have to load the entire Maya UI which can take up processor time. At this point, it also doesn't matter what video card you have.

Finally, Maya's renderer is incredibly slow. It gets even slower when you start adding fur, cloth, fluids, etc. Throwing raytracing on top of that pretty much kills any notion of reasonable render times.

One way to get around the slow render times is to render multiple passes and composite the elements in After Effects, Shake, Combustion, etc. It requires some planning and setup time, but when it comes time to tweak and re-render elements, it goes by a lot faster.

Carefully planned light linking and shadow settings or even baking also improves render time a lot.

Hey englar, im running a Pentium 4 2.4 ghz, with 512 ddr ram and the ATI RADEON 9700 pro... single processor... but hella fast :D. And gekko.. make sure you have norton or mcaffee antivirus.. so that you can check for trojans and stuff! those can make your computer move like a slug. Also If your Harddrive is almost full then you have to give it some free space.. so back stuff up on disc if you have a burner and get it off.... ANother thing and i forget the total name. But if you are running off of a windows OS then go "Start>Program files>Accessories>system tools?.. Well its in the system tools folder, or just the acessories folder. And its a thing there that has to do with cleaning up your disc. Its not the one that actually deletes the files that you dont need.. but its the one that cleans up your whole harddrive and i have had friends that dont do this once a month.. or week, and wow... i did it for them and their computer went from moving SUPER slow.. to moving SUPER FAST!. So check those out.. if someone can give the exact name it would be appreciated... i THINK its called "Disk Defragmenter". Yea, thats it :D. Cya man, hope this helped

Pentiums suck :p

-Emo

Hehe, why do you say that emo? I thought pentium was proven to last longer and operate faster at its given speed... so a 2.4 actually runs closer to 2.4 ghz then a 2.4 for athalon. Correct me if im wrong.

Here is what I'm trying to say..

My friend just bought an Athlon XP 2400 (I think) running at 2Ghz... he overclocked it to 2.4Ghz and now his CPU is about as fast as a Pentium 4 3ghz... (not as fast but close)

that same guy explained this theory to me..

Imagine this:
Pentium is an Ant
Athlon is a a type of slower animal but bigger in size than the ant...

now, when the Athlon walks, it makes 5 steps and it stops... then here comes the ant and for it to make the same distance as the Athlon, it has to do 25 steps for the same amount of distance...

so what I'm saying is that Pentiums are running higher clock speeds but that does not make them faster than AMDs...and because Athlons have a better stucture, they run better with less clock speeds (this is why there is a difference between Intel and AMD clock speeds)

One thing that Intels are good is cooling... if you take off the cooling off an Athlon, you can kiss it goodbye ... whereas if you do that to a pentium it wont fry

-Emo

danny: there are times when rendering larger and scaling the resulting image can be the quickest solution to texture buzzing problems.

-- Mark

Hey you explained that very well Emo. Yes I am familiar with clock speeds and such and never really researched too much about that whole thing. Makes sence though, therefore my next computer will most likely be AMD (when i need a whole new computer and I cannot upgrade anymore, which will be a while). Could of saved me some cash too if i just waited :P... my fault though. This Pentium is still running great though, no problems so far.

Mark: Quite true. I hadn't thought of that.

)v(, yeah, I'm planning to build a new PC because my poor Athlon can't handle maya :D

I wanted to get the Hammer but now that it's coming out in September, I'll just get dual Athlon 2100 T-bed's, with about 1 (maybe 2) gigs of RAM... 200 or so GB HDD... and maybe a Radeon 9700 (or a Quadro :D )

-Emo