With the CPU and memory available any more, what resolution do you render to? I seem to go for 2048x1536 my self. This is enough so that when printed on 8x10 paper it still looks good. I will do 640x480 "check prints" but what I keep is high res. Typical render times are 10 to 15 min (I guess I need MORE CPU). But one thing I do is lower the priority of the executable so that I can use the computer for other things like posting on this board....
2048 x 1536 in 10 - 15 min is extremely quick - if you are doing Advanced render at top quality (5), especially if you have a complex model.
Even 1024 x 768 seems to come up not too bad for 8x10.
I have just rendered a 360 degree rotation movie at 930 x 320 at quality 3 and it took over 6 hours! Came out beautiful though.
Allan
Advanced render, and quality 5. The first step of rendering shows about 8000 verticies. This is just a triple core AMD. If I had an i7 Intel then I would think that the time would drop significantly. I put a tip on setting the priority over in the tips and tricks. I also believe that the Ramdisk speeds things up significantly but don't have numbers. I guess I should benchmark that.
Well, maybe a Ramdisk isn't such a big deal. No significant difference in rendering.
8300 poylgons,
107 seconds for Radiosity,
495 seconds for Raytrace
Interesting comparisons. Out of curiosity I had a look at one of my recent models and it was 94,005 polygons. This accounts for some of the time difference obviously. Just under 100 lights too which individually add to render time. Couple of image attached of this one. These were 1024x768 but reduced a little to fit the forum better, size wise and memory wise.
The model I am doing the 360 degree movie of, is just under 40,000 with only a dozen lights and it renders a still image in about 15 minutes, but as I mentioned before the radiosity movie takes 6 hours! Normally I work on other image editing work while the render is happening but the movie is an overnight job.
I just bought a new laptop yesterday, by no means top of the range but somewhat better than the old one, so I will be interested to see how it goes. Haven't had time yet even to turn it on.
Allan