My computer renders so slow.....tips?

acitone

How fast does your computer render your scenes? Mine renders at such a slow pace.

And I live in Africa now where the power outages are constant and my "uninterruptable" power supply never works so needless to say my renders never finish.

I work on a Phenom II dual core unlocked to quad core, which helps, but not as much as I'd like, and runs at 3.3 ghz. In a place like Africa where good computer parts are scarce to non-existent I'd be close to a fool to OC my cpu.

Rendering this pic alone took 7 minutes, that should give you some idea how slow my renders get done



Imagine how long animation would take. I think I was averaging about 20 frames/hr on that scene earlier today when I tried an animation render.

What affordable CPU out there would be the best bang for my buck? One that would actually be a big jump from my current 4 core Phenom II. Perhaps I could try and get it shipped.

I've also heard about "render farms". Sounds interesting, is that just what it sounds - a bunch of pc's rendering the same thing? Hard to set that up?

EarthQuake

You will need to tell us what software, and what settings you are using to render, the more specific you can be about the settings the better.

acitone

I use 3ds Max 2013 and mentalray. High resolution would only take longer so I render to 1280x720 pixels. Everything else is pretty much at default. I use several lights in the scene. Wish I could be more specific but I don't know much about render terminology.

ZacD

There's cetrain things that make renders a lot slower. Particularly glossy reflections, motion blur, high anti aliasing settings, final gathering, global illumination, high ambient occlusion valvues, soft shadows. You can optimize the settings of those featurse so it doesn't take as long.

I'd expect something like that to render in 45 seconds or less on a quad core.

womball

Can you render with gpu settings in 3d max? If not try out Octane renderer demo.

acitone

I know right ZacD? You guys here should know that is a simple scene. 7 minutes is just crazy. Maybe I do have some things I could turn down, but like I said I don't know much about render settings yet so I just kind of leave them as they come.

And no womball I don't think you can.

Stromberg90

Well you really need to show your settings, we can't figure it out otherwise.

I mean even if a simple scene if your settings is really high it can even take hours without any visual difference.

gray

you need to read the documentation on EVERY setting in your render options and start to experiment with your settings. you also need to k read about EVERY setting for lights shaders etc. rendering with an ofline renderer is 90% messing with settings. looking at your scene you should be able to render that in under 30sec.

ZacD

Yeah show us your material and render settings

acitone

OK here goes the images of the settings in the scene.










Really Gray? 30 seconds? With my Phenom II dual unlocked to quad? I guess it might be the fact I've gotten used to such slow rendering but 30 seconds or even around a minute per frame would make me a very happy guy

acitone

Ah crap. I think the text might be too small, let me know if y'all need better res pics and I'll post the single shots.

ZacD

Apply a gray lambert material to everything and see how long that takes to render.

acitone

Sorry to be such a noob, but what's a gray lambert material?

ZacD

or a basic phong material http://sirikata.com/wiki/index.php?title=Material_Creation_in_3ds_Max_9

acitone

OK, cool, about to do that

acitone

Wow. Basic Phong gray mat applied to everything yielded less than a minute render time for the same frame. Do mats really wreck a CPU that badly?

Also, and I don't know if this is of any importance but I'm running a GTX 260.


What about the technique known as texture baking? Would that help? I really need to learn about that...

maximumsproductions

What I think would of helped is reducing trace depth under reflections/refractions and reducing the max refraction/reflections as well. Mainly I think what is costing you render time is your glass shaders.

Also I'm not sure if Mental Ray can do it but some render engines can use your GPU or RAM if you have a technical preference

And if you're just previewing you can turn off shadows as well. Mainly I believe professionals work in layers of elements/objects so it's a lot faster.

ZacD

Rendering with mental ray is all cpu based. I think the problem is you have glossy reflections on all the arch+design materials. try turning the reflection down to 0 on all of the old materials and re rendering it.

acitone

OK. I'll turn down the reflections and refractions then. I knew it had to have more to do with the materials than anything else.

gray

ZacD wrote: »

Apply a gray lambert material to everything and see how long that takes to render.

^^^ yes

and also turn off ALL lights. turn them on one by one. and try them individually. adjust settings on lights with your flat shader.

then reapply your shaders one by one and do test renders.

yes around 30sec. the shadows for your lights and other render settings have just as much an effect as the shaders do. if you tweak your lights, sampling etc you could render that scene with a flat shader in 5sec. yes 5sec.

but it takes lots of test renders and you have to read the docs and understand what all those settings do. they put them there for a reason! :thumbup:

poopipe

if you have unreliable power supply it might be wise to use render elements and composite them after. each pass will render quicker than the full frame and cos they'll all get saved independently you'll lose less work if the power does go out.

whatever you do and no matter how efficient your scene, you're going to end up with long render times at some point. the trick is minimizing damage from power failures and reducing iteration time when it docs happen

xXm0RpH3usXx

well, you could also render regions and stitch them together in your 2d app afterwards.

what i noticed though with max 2013 is that it slowed down on my rig heavily aswell.
even to the extent that max freezes (render to texturing a few alpha mapped planes shouldnt make max crash -.-)
So what i did is under the task manager you can set the affinity to your cpus. i take away one and max renders just fine. i think its because otherwise max is standing in windows way and thus the whitescreens occur.

acitone

poopipe wrote: »

if you have unreliable power supply it might be wise to use render elements and composite them after.

xXm0RpH3usXx wrote: »

well, you could also render regions and stitch them together in your 2d app afterwards.

That seems a great idea for single image renders. I do those but I also like to render animation. So I take it compositing is possible for animated scenes as well? I guess I have a lot to learn. I suppose that's how they do the movies

I'm happy to start by visiting any links I can get from y'all.

xXm0RpH3usXx wrote: »

So what i did is under the task manager you can set the affinity to your cpus. i take away one and max renders just fine.

I will have to try that. The same is true for Fraps. If I leave all cpu's to Fraps it's very choppy, but if I take away a core or two it's much smoother.

Back on topic, I really like the idea of Compositing - rendering a flat scene (no materials) and then adding them. I don't have a clue how it's done, so any resources are welcome. I can and will Google, but I may not find what you may have

poopipe

the max help files explain how to render the various passes you need. sticking them together in after fx is basically the same as photoshop