Why is Maya Rendering so slow?

[ietra]

If you want a technical answer, you're going to have to ask a more technical question.http://cgtalk.com/images/smilies/smile.gif Specifically, need way more info on what settings you're using in your Render Globals... resolution, sampling, filtering, all that good stuff.

[Jhavna]

Yeah, we're going to need to know a little more on how you are rendering.

If you;re using the Maya software rendered (which is normally the default renderer) then that's probably one reason it's slower, as all calculations are performed via software which can be slow given certain features.
The Maya hardware renderer will speed things up as it will utilise the hardware of your gfx card.

Which on you use depends on what you are rendering, as some things won't render in HW but only in SW and so on.

[JPSelter]

I have no special fancy stuff in my scene. I already described everything I have: A Subdiv Head, a fog light with shadowmap (512 res), a second point light with shadowmap (512 res) and ome textures. I have no antialiasing, no motion blur, quality setting is set to "low".
I have a 3D Max Scene with much more special effects and very high render quality and it renders the fifth of the time...

EDIT: Ah, reading the "hardware" stuff. Maybe that´s why I set 3D Max to "OpenGL" and Maya offers me "Software" right now. Thanks, I will see what "Maya Hardware" can achieve.

[ZippZopp]

when you use point lights with shadow maps on, it is actually creating 6 depthmaps for each point light. a point light is omnidirectional, so it has to create a lot of shadow maps to create accurate shadows. that could be one thing that is chewing up some render time...how long are the renders taking?

[WhiteRabbitObj]

One thing no one seems to have caught on to yet is also that you're using SubD's. Maya SubD's are very slow. If you're modeling using subdivision levels, it will get even slower. If you go beyond level 2, you might as well forget about it. Convert your head to polygons and see if it renders faster. I bet it will.

[1armedScissor]

You're probably not going to want to render your scenes in maya hardware mode. If the point lights are indeed the cause of the problem you can fix this by turning off some of the uneccessary point light shadows (for directions facing away from what you need) in the attribute editor of the point light. How big are the texture files that you're using? Depending on thier size this will also cause renders to slow down, also is there any filtering on the textures? As stated in some of the earlier posts, there's really quite a number of things that could be causing an apparantly simple render to take longer than it should. There a many, many things that need to be considered

[cpan]

you'd better use mray with depthmap shadows or even raytrace shadows cause it's much much faster than maya software render and gives better quality even without FG, GI.

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