Actually it should take less time to render next time as I discovered the HP Scanjet driver was taking up about 5% CPU with no scanner connected.

Each frame was taking between 1 and 1.5 minutes to render. So multiply that up by 800 and you can see that 12 hours was not too bad.

Hopefully Apple will provide me with a cheap dedicated rendering computer on Tuesday

Andrew Sage Wrote:Hopefully Apple will provide me with a cheap dedicated rendering computer on Tuesday

You mean the new $500 iMac?

Max Wrote:You mean the new $500 iMac?

That would be the one, especially as now Apple have noticed the US $ is weak and now use a realistic exchange rate for the UK store.

Andrew Sage Wrote:Each frame was taking between 1 and 1.5 seconds to render. So multiply that up by 800 and you can see that 12 hours was not too bad.

Wait, what... Am I totally lost here? Isn't 1.5 sec * 800 = 20 minutes?
Why would that take 12 hours?
Can someone explain what I'm missing

Sorry my mistake, I meant 1 to 1.5 minutes.

I've just kicked off a new render session with some lighting and camera path changes.
Things are looking better this time as the first frame rendered in 22 seconds compared to 1.13 minutes.

tell us when you got a new video up.

SkyHawk Wrote:tell us when you got a new video up.

NO!!!
SHOW US!!!!

It took about 4 hours to render this time which is a great improvement.
I guess I should look at trying to set up ScreamerNet , or whatever it is, seeing as I have so many computers just sitting there.

I'll upload the new version some time tonight when I get home from work (about 10 hours from the time of this post) and have done some post production on it.

http://homepage.mac.com/cloisterroom/iMo...ter14.html

Thats awesome.

The sky seems to need more work. Volumetric clouds would be awesome but they would probably kill your render time.

hangt5 Wrote:Thats awesome.

The sky seems to need more work. Volumetric clouds would be awesome but they would probably kill your render time.

Thanks.

I turned the sky object off in the latest render as it is now a night scene. However the render time has well and truely been killed. I turned on high level anti-aliasing and now get some very nice images indeed, but it took just over 29 hours to render all 800 frames at a mere 400 x 300 image size

Well more depressing news with my Mac rendering set up.

I rendered the same 800 frames, this time at 800 x 600 and it only took 3 hours 15 minutes on my Vaio laptop

My next option is to use ScreamerNet for shared rendering to see if my iMac and iBook working together can improve things. Otherwise I'm left with the option of switching to Windows for rendering or getting a PowerMac.

I'm happy with my new 1.8 GHz G5 iMac.

It managed to render the same scene at 800 x 600 in 2 hour 5 minutes.

My next attempt to get things done even quicker will to be get ScreamerNet working to use my old iMac with this new one.

Once I have finished doing my tests then I can get on with completing the animation and move on to finishing the 'short' I've been working on and off over the last 4 years.

Hmm.. what kind of rendering setup did you use before that G5 iMac.
I'm starting to look into Blender, so I thought I'd try to calculate what render times to expect when I get deeper into the program.