Optimising render times
 

I've created a landscape scene where I've painted (quite a lot of) grass and a few trees. Is it best to leave it as paint for rendering or is it best to convert the paint to poly?

So far I tried rendering a 20 sec scene at 720 x 576 24fps at 300dpi and on my 2.6Ghz Intel dual core machine with 3GB RAM it's going to take about 20 hours to render currently! I got an error after 8 hours yesterday so I have to try again! grr!

I like the quality that the paint has given me and I've tied bump mapping the plane but I don't like it. As it's for a final year project too, I want it to be the best it can be but I want to cut down the rendering time.

Any suggestions please (In plain English as I'm still learning!)

Thanks a lot
Mike

i would render a closeup of the grass, if they are like long pipe grass looking ones.

Then create an alpha channel in photoshop from the grass, then import the alpha channel and collor map back to maya as a background.

Then from that image use it as a sort of matte background behind the 3d grass, this will lower your render time.

Mostly you try to do as much as possible in matte paintings as possible.

This saves time. in production and rendering.