PW 2 really slow

[NHPilot]

Don't know if I have something wrong, but rendering in PW R2 takes many times longer than in earlier versions of PW. I've heard the new version is slower, but I have to wonder if there is just something wrong with what I'm doing. I'm waiting for a rendering now that has been running for 1-1/2 hrs. Tried this last week too with similar wait times. I'm confident that I could have rendered this in 10 minutes max. with the old PW.
I have a fairly simple assembly, using default SW material, all settings set for speed (no reflections, just shadows, rendering to file at 1280x960.
Running a Dell 360, 1 gig ram, FX3000 card.
Any suggestions anyone?

 

[rockguy]

Check your anti alias settings under PW/options/general. If this setting is set to very high or custom it will slow the rendering. Also are your shadow quality settings set higher? Using any of the advanced settings (GI, caustics, ID) will all greatly increase rendering time. PW2 is slower than PW1 but the quality is much better. You must have a setting or settings checked somewhere that are slowing you down. If your rendering would take 10 min. in PW1 than it should take 15-30 in PW2.

 

[Theophilus]

Rockguy is right.

One other thing that really increases render time is indirect lighting settings (especially with shadows and transparent objects and their shadows).

If these don't apply, it sounds to me like something is wrong in your system or installation. I regularly render at greater than 2,000 pixels wide and never wait more than three or four minutes for complex shadows and materials and indirect lighting set at it's lowest setting (good enough for near-photoreal most of the time). One scene took about 20 minutes, but had transparent objects and shadows using indirect lighting.


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

 

[NHPilot]

Finally finished the first image. Took about 2.5 hours. Looks really good though.
Anti aliasing was set to high, no depth settings,no indirect illumination. Shadow settings were set to default. How will the memory management settings affect performance?

 

[rockguy]

It won't make your performance better. It will stop PW2 from crashing because it has run out of memory.

 

[Theophilus]

The largest factor for fast renderings is a fast CPU. In fact, SW doesn't use dual processors, but PW will. (Nice to have multiple CPUs for that purpose.)

With such a long render time, it seems something is out of order within your system. I can render something comparable within 1.5 minutes on my machine.


Jeff Mowry

http://www.industrialdesignhaus.com

Reality is no respecter of good intentions.

 

[NHPilot]

Thanks for your help guys.