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[DressedForSucess]

To get the most out of my models, I would like to use ray traced soft shadows ... but im using a lot of models. Ive kept the polygons down to a mimium to speed up rendering, hjowever, i still think its going to take ages ... There was even one point where i took a rendering of the entire set without shadows and Animn8or came up with an error message and shut down!!! :O

Is there a good fast rendering software that supportas Anim8or files???

also, can anim8or 360 panoramic views?

any tips on how to render soft shadows faster?? Does a fast computer render iamges faster or is it just anim8or ... Wish the renderer was faster!!! lol

[thecolclough]

some of your questions i can answer, some i can't...

the faster your computer, and the better your graphics card, the faster a scene will render.  the same applies for any program (it'll run faster on a faster machine  ) in theory, but it's more noticeable on intensive applications like animation or video-editing packages.

in theory, i'd guess (although i've never tried it) that anim8or should be able to do a 360-degree panorama, if you set the camera's FOV to 360.  but, like i said, i've never actually tried it.  you'll just have to try it and see, i guess. 

i'm afraid i can't answer the other questions, sorry...

- colclough

[CobraSpectre]

The speed of rendering for hardware depends largely a single cores speed, bus speed, and ram.

From the anim8or file it depends on render size, AA, number of polygons, textures, transparency, number of lights casting shadows, and raytraced shadows (size and samples).

Not an all inclusive list, but it gives you an idea.

Some questions
What size are you rendering? (bigger = longer)
Are you using the Scanline or ART?

For scanline, usually softer shadows with always higher samples will take longer.

ART basically depends on the number of rays generated. With no ratraced materials this is: length x width x number of samples. When you start using reflective and glossy materials it generates about twice as many rays. In my tests, how reflective or glossy didn't really affect the time also, increasing shadow softness didn't increase render time, but to get them to be soft and not noisy you have to increase the AA samples. The dielectric test file generates about 20 times as many rays, so refractive materials are very slow.

How many lights, what softness, what samples?

I think the camera will only go to a FOV of 170. If you want to generate a 360 you can use them cube map generating method with 6 renders.

[hihosilver]

As for your error, if you were rendering a video, my guess is that you were using a bad codec.  For some reason, anim8or has errors with certain codecs.  So my advice would be to try a different codec for compression.
For speeding up rendering times, I can't help too much.  One thing you could do is make low poly versions of things, or render of them and put them on panels, then when they get far away, replace them with the lowpoly or panels.  You can use other renderers, though they dont directly support anim8or, you need to export to something like .3ds or .obj
One I know about that some people use is Kerkythea, another is called art of illusion.
I hope those can help.  Though... if you've made animations, you'll have to remake them.  Lastly for faster soft shadows, you can try turning down the samples for soft shadows.  They wont be as soft or quality, but they should go faster.

[DressedForSucess]

Yeah. Thanks for the comments btw

Ill have to use my friend's laptop i think 

i only have 384 mb of Memory on my pc ...

Im rendering at 640-480 and im using version97, scanline.

Unfortunately, volume shadows dont work :S they never have worked very well ... They go all fuzzy when rendering. I dont know if anyone else has run into this problem

Is ART faster than scanline??

Basically, if Anim8or wont render my scenes with a raytraced SOFT shadow, then i will have to do them with Raytraced shadows WITHOUT shadows ... and hope that it works, because it's really annoying taht volume shadows dont work!!

Exporting ... Will i ahve to export every single model and the scene?? Would that work??

[floyd86]

The volume shadows have never worked very good i believe. You should use soft shadows.
You said you used a lot of models: does all of these models need shadows? To reduce the render you should think about which models really need to cast/recieve shadows. Some models are more in the background, you wont notice when those don't got shadows. i.e. a stone on the background is a nice detail but doesn't need to cast shadows.

[DressedForSucess]

Yeah ... Thats an idea i had

I was thinking, i could export my anim8or sets to 3ds files. i have bryce ... i know people have exported their anim8or models to bryce compatible import files before. i tried this, however, and it didnt work at all ... i have a copy of bryce 5.5

i was going to use it to render my scene ... it would be much nicer quality, however, it doesnt seem to want to work, although the an8 files are now 3ds files (ive even tried other formats)

i think my best option maybe will be test out those renderers you suggested

ive attached a ray traced rendering of one of the scenes in the developing model scene ...