Rendering Times with Lights

[stusic]

Okay, this is a bit odd, but I want to see if there's a way to reproduce it....

I have a rendered sequence that was taking about 1:30m per frame, 90% of which was processing the lights. It would process the lights on each frame.

I had to re-render a portion of it, but this time it processed the lights once, then just rendered each frame back to back. This cut down my per-frame render time to about 15 seconds (after the first frame).

What did I do to do this? How did this happen?

Each frame looks just as good as the ones that were taking 1.5m to render, but taking a lot less time. I'd really like to reproduce this anamoly if at all possible...

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[arshiel88]

What Renderer are you using?
Are you using Mental Ray with Final Gather?

anyway, my guess is that your advance lighting saved the calculations to a file/cache from previous render/first frame and re-using it on the next frames while the first render does not.
...just a guess.

[stusic]

What Renderer are you using?
Are you using Mental Ray with Final Gather?

anyway, my guess is that your advance lighting saved the calculations to a file/cache from previous render/first frame and re-using it on the next frames while the first render does not.
...just a guess.No, just simple scanline rendering.... Your idea makes sense, but how can I re-create it? It didn't do it the first time around, but it's doing it now. What the heck did I do to make it do that? Can I set it to do that all the time?