Urgent Help with "large" animation

[masond1287]

Good evening all. I am working on a project at work for a potential upcoming job we are trying to contract. Part of our bid package is going to be an animation of our construction sequence for a small chunk of the Level in the building, just one "bay".

I have been out of 3DS for about a year, but picked everything back up right away. I linked all of my .dwg files directly to 3DS after I seperated the content in the .dwg files onto seperate layers, acting as "selection sets". (only because of the amount of parts in the cad files would have been a pain to select and add individual animations)

Straight to the point.......I animated everything that I needed to thus far to get the point across for the meeting with the client, and the animation looks great when I play it back. However, once I hit render last night to render the animation around 10:15pm....as of this morning the render window was showing that the render still had roughly 30 some odd hours left to render. My work machine is a 8 core processor with 24gb of RAM. When I checked the processes this morning, all 8 cores were completely pegged out at 100%, and using 12gb of my RAM.

I dont have any surfaces applied to the objects in my model and only have one light going in the animation. I have the animation set at 401 keyframes, and am only using one camera.

Is there someone that would be able to help me go through my rendering settings to speed up this process? I dont mind the render taking a couple of hours, but I cannot wait 4 days (the rendering time keeps increasing) to get this video up and ready to go.

If possible, I can go into work early tomorrow morning and setup a goto meeting and we can review my current settings and adjust from there??

Thanks in advance guys.

[kennmac]

The only time I render out of MAX to an AVI or MOV file is when I'm checking the flow of something and want to see it in real time. I don't have a super duper GPU like some folk.  When I do, I render to something small like 320x240.  For my final take, I always use sequential TGA files and edit them in Adobe premiere or After effects.  By doing it this way, if there was a blip in frames 1750-1900 of a 5000 frame animation, you can go back into MAX, fix it and just render those frames that were affected by the blip.  Make sure you save them with the original file name.  That way when you open your editor AP/AE, the change has already taken place.  Besides, you have better controls with the the CODEC in AP/AE. 

Peace out. 

Now if I can only remember where I put my keys....

-kenn

[svb3d]

masond1287

I do a lot of that kind of work that this sound like. I found during the years that you can get away with pretty low settings unless you looking for architectural realistic renderings. that's a different chapter

I always try to keep my render time down to 1 min per frame, not always possible of cause.

looking through your settings i see you have fg set to medium, that uses up a lot of time. try draft and see if the picture quality really suffers that much. also the image precision seams a bit high. i found that rendering larger images like yours 1280 x 720 and they are exterior scenes you can lower the image precision a bit. maybe 1.0, 1.0 or even 1.0, 0.5. If you render exterior scenes and using mental ray use the daylight system

here are some good start up values for outdoor

EV = 13.5

Highlights/Burn = 0.1

Midtones = 0.9

Shadows = 0.5

Color Saturation = 1.1

Whitepoint = 6500

Vignetting = 2.0-4.0

If you have a lot of shaded areas that shows up dark.

lower shadow value gives lighter shadows

you can also up the haze to 3-4 to get rid of the dark areas

I try to stay away from lights as much as possible as they ad to the render time

well that's my 2 cents on lowering render time.