I just spent 3 hours waiting on a test render!!!!

[jtroupe]

I am using 3D Studio Max 8 with the scanline render. My scene contains a house with as many poly's deleted as possible. There is nothing modeled that you can't see. It is lit with a skylight. And it just took 3 hours to do a test render so I could see if the lighting was working. I know that the roof is contributing some to this proble, but I have done others in the past with this roof and it didn't take nearly as long.

 

Anybody have any ideas on how I can reduce this time? (Aside from the obvious answer of 'Get VRay'). It is taking forever to get this one done as I can't even do a test render for lighting without waiting forever.

 

Thanks.

 

Here is a shot of the 3 hour render.

[ATTACH]17323[/ATTACH]

[jccloutier]

if the roof is actually modelled, tile-for-tile, that's definately it.

[ipxstudios]

It might have to do with the size you are rendering it at - a test render would be something like 720 x 480

[edub]

without knowing your computer specs it might be a little hard to determine if your render time is unreasonable.

 

I'm not familiar with Max and what you refer to as a skylight, but it sounds like some sort of GI?

[jtroupe]

The size of the render was 800 x 500.

 

I am running an Intel Dual Processor, 3.4 GHz with 2.0 GB of Ram.

 

I just did another render without the roof and it still took 45 minutes.

[ATTACH]17325[/ATTACH]

 

I believe that the skylight does have GI, but I have used it before on other renders, and it didn't increase the render time this much.

 

Any other ideas???

[chuck]

Max's skylight is really slow if you turn on cast shadows...not sure what the point would be without them on. Have you decreased the ammount of rays per sample? Dropping it from the default 20 to something like 5 will be grainy but faster.

 

I just did 2 quick test renders of plain boxes:

20 rays per sample, 4:15

5 rays per sample, 15 seconds.

 

Chuck

[eksg]

ok....i havent been doing a lot of exterior works,maybe just a couple of it for the past 3 years(hehe).and i havent been using the skylight since i was in college,but here are some tips that may help you out with the test render.max 8 have this a feature called "manage scene stae".im not sure if your familiar with it,but if you do,you can have all scene in plain white,well if your only concern is to see if the lighting is correct,then bring it back to its normal material state after seeing the test render.another thing that i remember that was keeping my rendering time longer than usual was when im having a transparent object with "raytrace" on it,and it is double sided.another tip is that you can just use a target direct on it,with area shadows.u can get it really close to what you've did,with less rendering time.oki.ciao!

[alikashan]

are you using ligtracer, in advance lighting rollout or no. it can make a difference will using lightracer, just a thougt.

[eksg]

are you using ligtracer, in advance lighting rollout or no. it can make a difference will using lightracer, just a thougt.

 

 

ummm...am not sure about light tracer,i had a bad experience with it.hehehe.im too dumb to use that thing.hehehe.

[alikashan]

ummm...am not sure about light tracer,i had a bad experience with it.hehehe.im too dumb to use that thing.hehehe.

in my experience if using skylight with light tracer on(standard sttings) it renders way faster than skylight without light tracer. . i dont really know the reason but it happens.

[eksg]

ok,i remembered doing something,its worth a try,though i dont know if it would really work when working with GI.ived used this before but what i used were a few target direct lights insted of skylight,but i still got some pretty descent rendering.

 

here it goes:put ur entire scene inside a huge sphere,and use that sphere as ur sky/background,etch.(dont forget to make the sphere material double sided).i just have this thought, that at least,light would have a specific space to bounce off,(am not sure if u can set the light bounce,im not a technical guy)though this technique is usually being used on gaming,i think it wont harm if u try it.ciao!!