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Spazette
01-12-2009, 10:23 PM
hi everyone.
in need of some serious help! i feel like i'm losing my mind!!
trying to render a grid of quite a few point particles, which have a turbulence and an air field affecting them. nothing too over the top really! not even any colour. they're all black.
when i render one scene in the render view, using hardware render, it takes 0.01 seconds. nice and simple.
but when i batch render the 300 frames, each frame is taking at least 30 seconds to render.
does anyone have ANY idea why this is happening and if there is anything i can do about it?
thanks!
Aikiman
01-13-2009, 02:23 AM
Not sure, try caching your particles first.
DavidLessel
01-13-2009, 02:40 PM
Dunno why this is the case with the hardware renderer in batchmode, with particle-heavy scenes the hardware render is useless in batchmode, I always use this script when hardware rendering... Waaay faster than batch.

http://highend3d.com/maya/downloads/mel_scripts/rendering/misc/4735.html

That script is awesome, it only renders 8bit images though...
Spazette
01-13-2009, 02:56 PM
that's great! i'll give it a try :)
i managed to get it to render using the hardware render buffer. the alpha channel wasn't working before...but i think i didn't have one of the boxes ticked or something...anyway!

can someone explain what 'caching' the particles means?

thanks for the help :)
Aikiman
01-13-2009, 10:49 PM
that's great! i'll give it a try :)
i managed to get it to render using the hardware render buffer. the alpha channel wasn't working before...but i think i didn't have one of the boxes ticked or something...anyway!

can someone explain what 'caching' the particles means?

thanks for the help :)

Alpha source is off by default, under the Render menu on the Hardware Render Buffer window is the Attributes options. Here you can change Alpha source to Hardware Alpha and any other option you like.

As for caching, caching means you save the position of each particle per frame to a single file so if you have 100 frames you have 100 files. This saves you time at render time because all Maya has to do is render the frame rather than calculate the dynamics also, though I dont think this sounds like a remedy for your problem. To cache your particles have a look at the options under Solvers menu > Particle Disc Cache in the Dynamics module, it will explain everything you need to know. Once cached, Maya will connect a cache node to your particles and link it to your files. If you want to change your animation though you will need to disconnect the node or just delete the cache.
Spazette
01-14-2009, 12:22 AM
:D wow! thank you so much for the help. and explaining a few things!
there's definitely still a lot for me to learn on Maya.
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01-14-2009, 12:22 AM
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