Speed of renderings

[nilariver@gmail.com]

Can any body suggest how shadow, vertices and light effect the speed of rendering?

[John Dollus]

Couldn't find a harder question to ask?

 

Well, at render time, vertices are translated directly into binary space which is usually stored in Ram so as long as you have enough Ram to store your scene geometry (vertices), rendering time will not be affected as much with regards to vertices. If you have a complex scene, you can use a system like renderman's delay read archive which is a way of translating geometry in advance and calling the information into memory only when needed to avoid including it all at once when the entire scene is loaded.

Shadows can be either created prior to render time (maps and baking) which will render very fast or can be computed during rendering like most raytracing engines and can be extremely slow especially if you are using area shadows. For previews, turn off shadows and see how much faster it is to gauge the impact.

Light can have a huge impact on CPU's. If you are rendering with scanline and only using point sources, rendering is quite fast. If you are rendering with a raytracer and incorporating area lights and global illumination in the form of bounced light energy, it can be quite slow. You can avoid excessive cpu usage by baking lighting onto your objects or precomputing the light energy within a space.

 

I hope that gets you going in the right direction with your question. There are others far more qualified than myself who can expand on this. An interesting read is an interview here:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=165&t=314374