Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20 or more minutes to render? is this natural for other teams? I do have some raytrace going on but not that much. I don't want to get rid of the raytrace because its the main part of the entry. Any suggestions how to fake reflection and refractions without raytrace?

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Rendering take a long time once you have everything done. Patience my friend or you can split the rendering out to other computers to make it faster.

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Well I know that! But I just want to see if there are any other techniques for reflections and refractions.

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Sorry can't think of any. Best let it do it to get teh best result. Self illumination wouldn't work either.

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

its the raytrace im sure that takes for ever :( take it off and do some test renders without it and check if its faster. also depending on your video card if its fast or not ;)

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

20 minutes seems a bit excessive. What are the specs of the system you're using? Also, what renderer are you using? The basic scanline or mental ray? mental ray handles reflections/refractions better (both in terms of speed and quality). Also, how complex are your objects? Really complex objects will take time while simpler objects, planes and spheres, etc. are really quick. Hope that helps.

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Ok, I have a pretty decent system and my copy of max was doing the same thing to me. All I had to do was go into the change graphics mode application that comes with 8 ( START>PROGRAMS>AUTODESK>3DSMAX8> CHANGE GRAPHICS MODE), I changed mine to direct3D. I am on an ATI 9550 256mb ram, depending on your card, this might help.

Re: Why does a 320 X 240 frame take 20+ mins?
 

Like someone said before it also greatly depends on the complexity of the objects in your screen. If you have a shape with about 1000-10000verts (depending on importance of shape) you might want to multires that down. Try to shy away from greatly complex shapes. It also depends on what materials your are using with RayTrace, are you using the materials from 3ds's Raytrace 1 and Raytrace 2 folder? If so are you using glass? Their glass takes a long, long, long time to render it looks nice but its not worth it. I created my own glass texture which looks almost just as well but renders in about 1/20th of the time. I once had a 320 x 320 chessboard take about 45 mins to render, with just normal color then raytrace for reflections.