CGTalk - speed up rendering

Darrell Croswell

05-11-2002, 08:46 PM

hey,
i was hoping to ask how i could speed up my system when rendering (and i mean dramatically).

right now i have dual p3 1000 processors with 512 ram and a 40 gig hard drive....(im not too sure of its clock speed).

what can i put in to make it render much faster???

this week i was going to get another 512 ram card so that i will have a gig of ram. as well i was going to get 2 more hard drives and then stripe them so all 3 work together. would this speed me up??

the reason i ask is that i am using maya and i have a raytraced scene to render out. it is pretty optimised for render time, but is still a long time per frame (like 3-5 hours long), but i must use raytracing for a few reasons.

can anyone give me any advice?

thanks.

Lyr

05-11-2002, 08:54 PM

Have you tried using render layers and passes, then compositing it all together? It goes much quicker that way. Also what are you raytracing that absolutely must be raytraced? If you are doing reflections try using reflection maps. Also optimize your sampling so that objects far away from the camera do less shading samples than ones close to the camera. It is difficult to give you advice on optimizing your render times without knowing the specifics of your scene and what you have already tried.

Darrell Croswell

05-11-2002, 08:58 PM

thanks man, but my problem is not really with the software...i have the scene quite customised for rendering.....i was just wondering about the hardware upgrades...how i can make it a lot faster in that sence

thanks again though

svenip

05-11-2002, 09:07 PM

there isn't a lot you can do by hardware :hmm:
the only parts which are doing the work is the cpu and the ram. so upgrade both. there isn't more you can do by hardware.

Aegis

05-11-2002, 09:43 PM

raytraced shadows as well?

Darrell Croswell

05-11-2002, 10:46 PM

yes raytraced shadows too, but i was wondering another thing while we're on the topic...
can i turn off raytraced shadows and use depth maps even if raytracing is still turned on for the reflections\refractions etc.

thanks again!

-wT-

05-11-2002, 11:27 PM

Ofcourse you can! If you don't need raytraced shadows, then for a christ sake don't use 'em! :)

Darrell Croswell

05-12-2002, 12:09 AM

BITCHIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THANKS!!!:buttrock:

Jhonus

05-12-2002, 01:00 AM

Also make sure your ground planes are not casting shadows.

You don't want maya accomadating a huge ground plane for your dmaps. It effectively lowers the resolution.

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