[long render times]

By "preview" mode I assume you mean "shaded" or "wireframe/shaded" mode.

 

"Preview" mode is a term encountered when the render panel does not have "advanced" checked. It equates to "final" render with multipass ON and set to 1 pass. Shadows are enabled.

 

"Real-time" equates to shaded mode, which cannot do shadows.

 

I misunderstood, then. Regardless, shaded mode sure renders a lot faster now in 12.

[long render times]

Hello -

 

I have purchased a custom built PC with an AMD 320+Ghz dual core processor with 2 gig of RAM and I'm still running into long rendering times. Rendering a 20 sec (491 frames) animation in "preview" mode at low res (320x240) is still taking over 2 hours. My choreography's ground and sky are just the default A:M backgrounds. I am running A:M 11.1 on my startup disc and rendering to a seperate internal hard drive. Surely this rendering time is abnormally long. Any suggestions?

 

Having just experimented (and come up with a reportable bug) with this today, I'll comment. I'm running a dual 3.4GhZ Dell and I just upgraded to A:M 12.0. By "preview" mode I assume you mean "shaded" or "wireframe/shaded" mode. Doing a render with the maximum in shaded quality (set with Page-Up/Page-Down) is a bit on the slow side. I found that 11.1 is much slower than 12.0 for that type of render. (I've only recently gotten 12.0 so I haven't gotten to compare "final" render times.)

 

From your render times, I was going to guess you were rendering some hair. I saw in later posts you were. Hair density makes a difference. I've got hair in the render I'm doing, but it's very un-dense leaves on a small tree.

 

That said, kudos to the development staff at Hash. I took the same .prj file and loaded it into 11.1 and 12.0 while I wrote this post. I started a render (relevant details: 640x480, hair on with the hair being leaves, Polys per patch = 1, shaded render, decals on) in 12.0 and estimated complete time after 30 seconds was 35 minutes. Abort render, save project; re-open in 11.1 and re-render. After 30 seconds, estimated render time was over 6 hours. I'm a programmer, and my professional opinion is: that's a helluva good improvement between versions. Wahoo!

 

If you're concerned with speed in rendering (I am, considering my project at hand), upgrade to 12.0 for "shaded" renders. Avoid calculated materials like the plague. They are very cool, but cpu consumption is wicked. Use that for photo-realism, not quick-and-dirty animation. I've swung to decals for results in that arena. For a segment I did that needed some fruit, I bought some objects to save time from Eggprops (yes, it's a plug), but I stripped the materials from them. Why? The calculated materials pushed final renders upward to 3 minutes per frame. Ack! I'm doing nearly 10,000 frames per vid. I thanked Eggprops for the models, then removed materials and did simple coloring. It looked fine in the animimation.

 

Speed? Avoid hair and calculated materials. Speed and quality? Use decals.

[Welcome New Users]

Well, since I'm posting here a few times, I may as well introduce myself.

 

I'm a programmer mostly, but the head of the company I work with found A:M and said (in summary) "this looks good. can we use it to make new products?" I had to agree and suddenly I found myself an animator.

 

I'm currently in the process of trying to animate a dozen 5 minute educational videos. It's been a challenge. Part of the challenge is figuring out what paths to take. Some of the debate here makes it hard (start a religious war by asking about dope sheets).

 

Frankly, I have nothing to compare A:M to, but I'm happy that all the files are text. I've already had some fun writing programs to do some repetitive tasks in changing the files.