Clone animations after restart…?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

Need a little more information about your scene. As a general rule, unless you’ve run out of physical RAM there is no generic reason that rendering should slow down. The only exception that I know of is global illumination which can slow down due to the build up of samples that have to be calculated.

[Justin Breen]

I have an animation of 2000 clones that have been applied to the surface of 4 extruded arrows placed close to each other so it appears to be a solid 3d arrow… There are objects that have their visibility turned off with rigid body tags that fly through the clones and knock them around the scene…

I faked GI with a light dome and yet is still taking an average of 43 min a frame to render… I ran cinebench and could definitely use some work on my processor speed, but the first frame only took 12 minutes to render (however, this frame seems to be really blown out and the lighting is off)… I guess my real question is “Does Mograph run the exact same calculations no matter what frame I start at, or does it need to start from frame 0 to get the same end result…?”

If I restart Cinema, that has been running for 33 hours and 10 minutes straight now, will frame 48 be the same as 47 as far as lighting and position of the clones?

[Adam Trachtenberg]

The first thing I’d do in your case is cache the mograph animation. That will illiminate one factor though I doubt that’s what’s causing the majority of the slowdown. Here are some thoughts:

* Reflection/transparency: it’s possible to have major slow-downs if you have reflective objects that are bouncing rays back and forth between each other — like the hall of mirrors effect — especially if the reflective objects are small relative to the render dimensions. Same deal if you have small overlapping transparencies. If that’s the case you may be able to speed things up significantly by choosing a different “small fragments” mode in render>AA settings. You might also try reducing ray (for transparency) and reflection depth in Render>options;

* You may be able to save RAM and render time by turning on “render instances” in your cloner;

* If you’re using movie files for textures, try using sequences of still frames instead;

* Any time you’re generating objects from splines, reduce the splines’ intermediate points as much as you can.

* Make sure you don’t have hyperNURBS objects inside of other hyperNURBS objects. If you do that you can quickly run up massive polygon countrs;

* Area shadows usually look better than soft shadows but they are much slower to calculate. If you do use them you can probably speed them up by lowering the default samples and accuracy without affecting their appearance too much;

* Blurry reflections and transparencies take a long time to calculate. You may be able to substitute a fine noise in the reflectance/transparency channel, with the same noise in the bump channel at a very low level (less than 1%);

* If you’re using scene motion blur you can reduce AA or even turn it off altogether;

That’s all I can think of off the of my head.