Rendering?

[Robert-Jank]

Ok.....just wondering....is it normal for a 10 second movie to take 3 days to render???

[Robert-Jank]

Well im using an IMac and i got a whole Gig of RAM.

[Dhar]

For a 10 second movie to take that long I'd expect there to be a lot of particle use (fog, smoke), hair, fabrics, multi passes, bump surfaces, ambiance with default render settings.

 

I don't know what it is you're trying to achieve in your movie, but for me this is way too long.

[Robert-Jank]

Every thing you named i havent used....this is wierd..

[Stuart Rogers]

Ok.....just wondering....is it normal for a 10 second movie to take 3 days to render???

This is not unheard of, depending on what you're asking A:M to do. The following is a non-exhaustive list of things that can escalate render times:

 

Transparency

Reflections

Lots of lights

Multipass with several passes

Particles (hair, streaks, blobbies)

Displacement maps

Materials

 

If your iMac is a current model then your system is not likely to be a cause of long render times. How about decribing what features your project uses - what settings do you use that vary from default settings?

[Robert-Jank]

ok

 

heres some snap shots,

[robcat2075]

If you just want to test it out to see how things are moving, choose "shaded" instead of "Final"

 

You can set "Final" to Multi-pass ON at 1 pass for quicker previews.

 

You can choose a smaller render size than VGA.

 

Turn particles off unless you actually need to see some you have put in your scene.

 

Are there lights in those street lights? DO you need them?

 

A ten second aniamtion is 240 frames. If all those lights are on, if they're invoking ray tracing, or if many of the above parameters are used... yeah you could get to 45 minutes per frame. 45mins x 240frames = more than a week

[Dhar]

AHA!

 

It's that darn warehouse in the background. That warehouse take way too long to render even for a single scene. I think it's too spline heavy. See if you can change the warehouse to a simpler one. make a box and decal it with warehouse stuff and see if that doesn't help.

 

I bet it's the warehouse.

[Stuart Rogers]

It's that darn warehouse in the background. ... I think it's too spline heavy. See if you can change the warehouse to a simpler one.

Even though it's spline heavy, I'm not entirely convinced it's the culprit (but I'll happily be proved wrong). An easier way to check is to simply uncheck it's 'Active' channel on frame 0 and rerendering, rather than replacing it.

 

If those streetlights have lights in them, they certainly won't be helping. Try rerendering with those reflections turned off (it won't make any difference if none of your models use reflections, though). If it's not your final render, try something smaller than VGA. For example, 320x240 will only have to render one quarter the number of pixels than VGA (640x480).

 

On a side note, Robert - if you're rendering to a TGA sequence (as your screenshot suggests) then give your filename with zero-padded trailing digits. For example, if your movie is 300 frames long, use "MyMovie000.tga". Your rendered TGAs will then have sequential numbers, and the zero-padding will help whatever program you use to glue the sequence together into a movie file.

[MMZ_TimeLord]

It's not the warehouse, I used that for my walk lesson and it showed reflections just fine at 640x480. Rendered pretty fast too... under a minute per frame.

 

I believe Stuart is correct, you have WAY too many lights in there to expect it to render quickly. Mac platforms historically render slower (not my fault, just what I read)

 

I would say open the properties for the lights in choreography and turn all the streetlights to 'Active = off'. Then do a test render of a few frames to get a feel for it. You also have two other lights, the fill light, rim light and the key light. For my own projects I get rid of the original key, rim and fill lights.

[Paul Forwood]

Yes to everything that Robcat and Stuart suggested.

 

I expect it is a combination of particles and lights. You have to learn use both of these prudently if you want to keep render times as low as possible.

 

As Stuart suggests, try making the most likely candidates inactive in the choreography and note how your render times are affected. Start with multi-pass set to 1 and work up from there until you find a good balance.

[Robert-Jank]

OK i'll try that, thanks for all the commets.