HELP MentalRay is rendering slow

#1

Hello everyone,

I have a big problem rendering my scene for my student animation. So I’m hoping that I could get help here.

Here is the problem:

I was thinking to split my rendering into two render layers. One is for the characters and the other for background. The scene uses simple shaders like lambert and toon with gamma correction nodes attached. I’ve put 4 light sources 3 area lights as lights coming from windows and one spot light focusing on the center of the room. All lights have raytrace shadows on.
My problem is that my rendering a HD 1080 resolution just for the background at this res takes 25 minutes. My animation is 2:35 mins long. Needless to say that this is too long for a render… When I do software rendering with raytraceing on it takes the same if not longer it took 23 mins to render HD 720.
I need to fix this render time…

In the output window maya gives me following messages:
“MB warn 302018: type conflict: “color” is type color, “adskMayaGamma” returns type vector
MB warn 302018: type conflict: “value” is type vector, “adskMayaGamma” returns type vector
MB warn 302018: type conflict: “color” is type color, “maya_multdiv” returns type vector”

etc…

Another peculiar problem is with lights… When I was lighting the scene and tried to adjusts lights one by one… it seemed that there was weird ambient or default light somewhere… for example, I’d expect to get a dark window if I’ve turned all light off, but instead I’d get a full render where I would be able to see everything (remember all lights are off and the default light off and no final gather no image based lighting on either!!)…

I need to get to the bottom of this as soon as I can… otherwise I’m risking to spend long time rendering…

#2

Your scene doesn’t look complex, but render speed is certainly dependent on scene complexity and your computer’s internal hardware, specifically your CPU itself. There are many ways to optimize mental ray of course, are you using Final Gather or anything, or just those four lights?

What does a full render look like, or is that one that you posted? It should be rendering pretty fast, are you using Raytrace Shadows or Depth Map shadows?

Some of my landscape scenes take 3 or 4 hours at 1080HD resolution, on an 8-core Bulldozer, but they’re very complex scenes with billions of polys. What kind of computer are you using?

#3

under Rendering Menu Set > Render > Render Current Frame Options, change verbosity to Progress and post up a txt file of your output