Render time too long?

Chris Fox Art

First i have to say that i have a i7 920 cpu with 9GB DDR3-SDRAM and 2x Point of View GeForce GTX560ti Ultra Charged Edition with SLI (2x2GB graphc storage)

So now i wanted to make a picture with a Stoney Creek scene and my newest character, i even haven't used the best render settings but it was rendering for about 16 hours and only finished 8% of rendering, how can that take that long time?

I also saw that the program use the CPU to 100% so could it be that it gets laggy when it use 100% of the CPU?
The image was 1920x1080px and i just saw that it only take about 4,5GB RAM, wouldnt it be much faster if it would use less CPU but more RAM?

Dartanbeck

Yes... that is a huge resolution to shoot a Howie Farkes scene at. It will render - but, yeah - it's gonna take time!
Impressive PC! But 3d rendering can bring the best to their knees! lol
Graphics cards aren't used in the final render at all.

With Howie Farkes scenes, be patient - it's worth the wait. I'm not at my workstation, so I can't tell you if they give you his artzone info in the newer downloads - or just the read me. He went into excellent detail in his artzone topic, which was linked to in my ReadMe file - but I cannot find it now.

Pjotter

chiisuchianu said:

First i have to say that i have a i7 920 cpu with 9GB DDR3-SDRAM and 2x Point of View GeForce GTX560ti Ultra Charged Edition with SLI (2x2GB graphc storage)

So now i wanted to make a picture with a Stoney Creek scene and my newest character, i even haven't used the best render settings but it was rendering for about 16 hours and only finished 8% of rendering, how can that take that long time?

I also saw that the program use the CPU to 100% so could it be that it gets laggy when it use 100% of the CPU?
The image was 1920x1080px and i just saw that it only take about 4,5GB RAM, wouldnt it be much faster if it would use less CPU but more RAM?

I have the same with my scenes. CPU maxed out to 100% on 8 cores. And RAM around 45%. Buying more RAM is useless. CPU is the bottleneck. Probably this is the way it is. For testing purposes disable everything in the render tab. Then see how it looks. Then start enabling parts and see what takes time and how it looks.

I think many are overdoing things. I doubt one can see the difference between a 2 hour render and a 24 hour render. I don't think more is better. But it sounds good. "I have done a 7 days rendering on one image."

WendyLuvsCatz

I tend to throw everything out the window as far as lighting as I do animations
my animations just use a distant light and no skydome, I add bulb to the camera with a low light intensity
transparency and Light through transparency biggest time killer,
needed for creek but a dry creek bed is always an alternative!
or a turbulent one using reflection instead of transparency
not artistic but ideas you can borrow bits from

Headwax

wendy yo dah queen of d'animation!

chiisuchianu

Howie goes for quality over speed.
I have a few of his works
but have made only one usable render

- his work is good to examine for how to do things to perfection

ManStan

Your graphics card has nothing to do with rendering; carrara UI sure. It's all about CPU and ram. Is carrara set to render multicore on your machine?

Displacement maps. Howie uses a lot of displacements maps; and lets face I would too if they didn't bog down my comp while rendering. Also, if I recall correctly Howie uses SSS in the leaves on the trees. Dropping both of these would cut your render time way down. When Howie sets up a scene is is set up for max detail and realism right out of the box. Thing is to reset all the shaders to drop your render time is going to take some work on your part. You will need to go through and drop all displacement mapping, and drop all SSS. This should drop the render time way down to almost tolerable levels.

I love Howies work, It shows a level of ambition and talent I can only dream of ;-)

Dartanbeck

Yeah, I love Howie's work, too!
I couldn't really dream of animating his scenes - I know Wendy does. But I still collect them all, because I love the scenes and all he's done to create them. So I use that as a learning tool. I used to open his Stoney Creek scenes a lot more - I must be due again :)
Aside from having all of his custom trees as presets in the plant editor, I have the actual trees that he made, and uses in his scenes. That along with his ground cover, rocks and litter... I dissect them and use what I can from them.

One day I may just have a powerful (and fast) enough system to crank out animation clips using these at recommended settings. Now that will be a good day! Until then, though... I'm having a lot of fun making stuff work the way I need it to. F A S T ! ! !

evilproducer

The other thing you can do is post a screen shot of your render settings. There may be some things we can suggest, but it's hard to know where to start.

If he's using SSS, you can definitely turn that off, but as Stan (I think) said, it requires going into the shaders to do so. It's a simple fix, just a little checkbox to disable, but if there are a lot of shaders it could take some time. Sometimes the Texture room can get buggy (in C7.2 anyway) when changing a lot of shaders. What can help performance and hopefully avoid any hang-ups is to disable the the auto-update in the shader preview window. Also, when closing shader windows, don't do it as fast as you can click.