[umdrehung]

Hello there,

We are currently working on an outside perspective of a commercial building. We note that the render times are extremely long. After 11 h Rendering time only SL 1.89.
The computer that is available for rendering is certainly not suitable optimal. But maybe the model is too complex also. What do you think of the following data:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2,4 GHz, 4 GB RAM
Platform Mac OS X 10.6
Maxwell Render 2.1.0.0

Geometry:
- Num Meshes: 1035
- Num Triangles: 90846
- Num Vertexes: 78918
- Num Normals: 64805
- Num Materials: 35
- Num Bitmaps: 11

- using 7 emitter materials
- multilight is on
- physical sky

- no SSS
- no transparent Material except for AGS

- Render version : 2.1.0.0
- desired rendering time : 9999
- desired sampling level : 25.000000
- using 2 threads
- illumination layers:
. . direct layer: true
. . indirect layer: true
. . direct caustic reflection layer: true
. . direct caustic refraction layer: true
. . indirect caustic reflection layer: true
. . indirect caustic refraction layer: true

Benchmark of 0.182. Time: 1h37m04s. SL of 0.50
Benchmark of 0.130. Time: 11h32m07s. SL of 1.89

Thank you for comments and suggestions,
Umdrehung

[numerobis]

what is your image size?
7 emitters with multilight... did you check the ram usage during rendering. maybe it doesn't fit into ram and the system starts paging - this can result in a drastically slowdown.
Is it a MacBook or IMac with notebook harddrive?

[umdrehung]

It's a Macbook. Also tried on an iMac. No big difference.

The image size is 1800 x 1200 px.
What makes me wonder: The mxi file is about 4 GB. Is this normal size when using multilight?

Thanks for further comments,
Umdrehung

[Half Life]

That's the problem right there -- a 4GB file when you only have 4GB of ram leaves the computer using virtual ram paging file which is much slower than real ram... you'll need to reduce the output pixel dimensions or the number of emitter materials/multilight channels (or get more Ram).

As far as normal is concerned it will depend greatly on if you are using color multilight and what other render channels you have cooking as well (shadow, alpha, etc).

Best,
Jason.

[numerobis]

yes, this is normal. you can nearly multiply the ram usage and mxi size by the number of emitter materials.

there is no difference between macbook and imac - they both have notebook hardware built in.

[umdrehung]

Thank you guys. I will try to reduce the numbers of emitters.
Unfortunately memory is already up to the limit with 4GB - no more expansion possible.

Maybe I'll better get a new machine these days.

Umdrehung