Rendering: Frame time keeps increasing!

[CapnPanic]

if you are under a tight dealine, i'd say hide the trees and render without them first.

once that is done, set the ground (and anything else the trees might cast shadows on) to a matte/shadow material, set your background to black, and then render just the trees (or maybe even one tree at a time) and comp them all in in post.

my guess is that the scene/max is just sucking up too much in the way of resources, dragging things to a halt. this may not be the case, but if you are in a hurry, and try the above method, you should have a finished product and maybe determine what exactly is causing the problem.

good luck :)

[gnarlycranium]

...This is where I admit I've never comped something in post in my life, and have no clue how to do it. Ack! Guess I've got some reading to do...

I should also mention, the trees are in the courtyard and all around the house-- I think it's fair to say they're casting shadows on ALL the other objects in the scene, including each other. So how would I really be saving time by rendering everything again? The materials would be simpler, and there'd be no background-- apart from that nothing would be different about the tree run, it'd have just as many polys as a full run.

[Khepri]

if the quality is good... 80 hours aint bad... 7 minutes a frame aint bad......


is it worth it to render it even if it takes that long...?

[gnarlycranium]

Considering that without the trees, the rendering time is only 30 seconds... I'd say that the addition of trees is NOT a sufficient increase in quality to justify an 80 hour rendering time. Especially considering that I am indeed in a bit of a hurry. Two minutes for the trees I can stand... 7, absolutely not. The thing is, the rendering time keeps going up even though I haven't added or changed anything significantly. Which means something must be very wrong. Was wondering if anybody else had encountered this.

Anyway, this is what it looks like. The tree models are from 3dCafe, I textured them.

http://www.moreplans.com/Norman149/N149flypano0000.jpg

[PokeChop]

Hi Gnarly. You are correct. By the looks of your scene, that really does not look like it should take 7 minutes a frame to render. Something is going on there.

Things to try. Run those trees though the optimize modifer and crank the level way down on those things. As long as you stay at about the distance throughout the sequence, you won't notice a difference in tree quality. Make them as low rez as you can because your textures will still hold up even on a low poly version of the trees. Also, this my sound strange, make sure you do not have anything grouped while you are rendering. For some reason. I have found if I group objects and render, my render times can sometimes double or triple. Also you may want to fake the shadows on the trees. Here's what I do sometimes to fake shadows. Hide everything and render out just the profile of one tree. Now save that render to a TGA file. Now go into Photoshop and select the alpha channel and you will have the outline of the tree, then fill with black and you have yourself a tree shadow TGA file that you can take back into MAX and create a flat plane object and map the TGA onto that with the alpha channel used in the opacity slot. Lay the plane object down beside each tree and you got yourself a fake shadow. You can adjust the opacity to match the surrounding house shadows. Sounds like a lot of work but anytime you don't have to render shadows, it will speed things up considerably.

Good bet if you lower the rez on the trees with the optimize modifier it will be a good start though. Hope this helps get you back your render time.

Maybe too, make sure your tree copies are instances.

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