animation help

[lamont_edwards]

Hello all,

I have some quick question regarding speading up my animation rendering time. The spec on my machine is as follows

Intel i7 cpu 930@2.80ghz out of the box
Evga x58 ftw^3 motherboard
nividia gtx 460 gpu
12 gigs of ram.

I would like to create an animation of a screen wall study I am doing for my architecture course. I would like the animation to be in hd so, the animation will need to be rendered at 1080x1920. Currently I am only using a skylight in the scene and I made sure to turn refraction and reflection down to 2. It is taking my scene roughy 2 mins per image the total animation time is 30 secs ( roughly 720 images needed to create the animation).

[stusic]

Yep, sounds about right I suppose...

[lamont_edwards]

Would you know how I could decrease my rendering time?

[loydg]

Is the HD output for the screen wall or the final animation? Perhaps reduce the number of GI bounces and samples...

[lamont_edwards]

I lowered the GI bounces to two, I know I could you scanline rendering and it would render the images in roughly 5 sec a frame. I was just wondering how If it is possible to render any faster with my computer.

[Steve_Bennett]

Something to think about - will the display device display at the resolution you are rendering to or does it display less than your output. Make a couple test renders, one at your posted scale, another at 1280x720 and see if there is a noticeable difference - rendering half the size should cut your render times in half.

Also, if you are in 3ds max 2011 and using mental ray, be sure to set your option for fg to interpolate between frames to avoid flickering of the output.

Even still, 2 mins per frame at full HD is not too bad. Last time I rendered an animation, it was a city and each frame was taking about 30 minutes to render at 1280x720. I didn't bother rendering at a higher resolution because the projector that would be displaying it was ****...

Lastly, can you tie your classroom systems together to create a small render farm?

[lamont_edwards]

The projector my professor is using is 1920x1080, will play with the settings a bit....Thanks for all the help and advice.