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Make povray render faster?

Hey,

I'm making a movie for school, and its due monday. I need to render this stuff fast, I have about 9000+ frames that need to be done, and they are taking about a minute each.

The pc is plenty powerful, but the frames are still taking about 1 minute each! Thats 6.25 days! and I only have 1! AHHHHHHHHHHHH!

The pc is a 2.4C ghz Pentium 4, running at 3.3 ghz, with HT
512 megs of PC3500

But whenever I check, PovRAY only uses about 58% percent of my resources. Can't it use 100%? It would go so much faster with that extra 40%. And is there a way for it to use HT? I've found patches to use it with multiple processor machines, but I'm not sure if that would work.


Please, i need help, I have a lot of rendering to do, and only about 36 hours left.
 
When you say "resources," that implies you're using a win9x operating system.

I'll bet Pov Ray is using 100% of your CPU time. That's where the bottleneck is. No matter how many free "resources" you have on your machine, with no more cpu cycles to spare, pov ray will remain starved.
 
ummm... just saw this now but anyways for future, in situations of heavy rendering/raytracing you should first use the most optimal OS for your rendering software. Win 2k seems to be popular for alot of heavy renderers but POV-ray is available for linux. Linux will be the most unobtrusive OS to use it on and since you're used to seeing command line windows... might as well use linux 😉.

You should talk to some people in a POV-Ray forum. POV-Ray is so user defined that little tweaks and changes from an expert can make significant differences in quality and render times.

You then need to optmize your computer for rendering, that may mean a clean OS and partition to run off with a clean defragmented HD, and other things to stremline your comp for heavy rendering.

Lastly if you have access to more then one computer, you can setup a renderfarm or use a reder service. That requires alot of preparation and some possibly expensive software but it can seperate tasks to your different computers to help cut down your render times significantly. As you probably are aware, renderfarms are the only way new, large renders are done nowadays, otherwise something like a 3D movie by Pixar would literally take a single computer as good as yours 10,000 years to render once. Look around and see who offers render services for your needs like POV-Ray raytracing. It may not be cheap and they usually charge by the time/ghz, but when you got 5 days of rendering for a project due in 3 days... you don't have much of an option if you can't streamline the file down.
 
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