Are all cores rendering?

[Brian Jones]

if you are using physical render you should only get two buckets regardless of the number of processors you are running – they all work on the two buckets. You can check your Preferences/Renderer and make sure “Custom Number of Render Threads” is not set to something lower than the threads you have available (which should be 24).
Assuming you are using the Physical renderer what are your Render Settings/Physical/Advanced/Raytracing Engine set to?
What is going on in the scene you are rendering (that takes 8 rather than 10 minutes)? particles/metaballs/material settings etc. Some materials are hugely wasteful in render time for no visual difference. Have you changed any materials in your scene to use the new Reflectance channel?

[Adam Taylor]

ahh, right…never realised the physical renderer worked that way. I really dont get enough time to learn this software properly.

theres not really too much happening – its a model of an opaque plastic toy with a few clear plastic bottles, a box mapped with the product artwork, three lights, some global illumination and a camera tracking in an arc around the static models.

The model was made in R15, and i did notice the warning that three of the models no longer had access to “real Fresnel” but i could not figure out how to remove that, as it just no longer appeared anywhere.

What puzzled me is why a Mac with so much more processing and ram would take almost as long to render each frame as my laptop.

Adam Taylor
Video Editor/Audio Mixer/ Compositor/Motion GFX/Barista
Character Options Ltd
Oldham, UK

http://www.sculptedbliss.co.uk
My YouTube Animations Page

[Brian Jones]

I don’t know enough of the inner workings to do more than guess which might be your problem in that scene which is holding it up. Try taking the textures off the toy and the bottles and substitute a simple white texture. What’s the render speed? Any metals? Some of the metals in the collections (and available elsewhere) are extremely expensive in render time.
Basically I’m thinking something is holding up the render (because thats just the way it works and it’s nice results) but it makes the end result in time look not much different even with more cores and since your machines per core speed is almost the same, single core performance is not going to improve much. That’s just guesses though – some of the really wise heads will know more

[Brian Jones]

oh yeah, this won’t change the speed/core thing you are experiencing but are you using Physical because it’s faster or ‘just because’? Depending on the scene, if you don’t need Physical for something it’s really good at, sometimes Standard is a lot faster (sometimes).