When it comes to pre-rendering movies is there any way to speed up the process other than getting a faster processor? I always thought that only the main CPU processor was used for this, but would a better gfx card make any difference? I need as cheap a solution as possible. I''m using Inspire so I can''t do networked rendering, and I''m using a PC. atm it is a PII 350, with 64Mb RAM and a 3D Rage Pro AGP 2X gfx card.

The gfx card does mostly not help at all. Only time it helps that i know of is sometimes when doing hardware renderings of particles in maya.

In the actual scene there are almost always optimzations possible. I dont know about the package you use but these are general things that can help.

Use as few shadowcasting lights as possible. Mapped based lights are almost always faster then raytraced lights.

Split the textured surface rendering from the shadow renderings and composit in post production. When ever you can split up the scene to render something in a separate render pass it is mostly worth it timewise. For example, backgrounds and forgrounds obviously...fog and volumetric lighting sometimes. this ofcours requires that you have a compositing software. Also helps if you for example want to change the lighting a little, make it brighter or dimmer or whatever...you can simply batch process the lightpass rendering insted of rendering the entire animation again.

Transfer produceral textures to bitmap textures.

Use smaller texturesizes.

Can you simplyfy the geometry in any way. Perhaps add lod for objects that are far away.

If you renderer has raytracing capabilities make sure only the objects that should activly use it have the feature enabled. Mostly you can set which objects should for example be able to be included in a reflection on another object.

Then there are most likley some package specific optimizations that can be done to save time. Just think that if the computer does it on its own then it prolongs the rendering and try to find a way to prepare it better for the computer.

There are also a few freeware renderers out there that may be faster then the Inspire renderer if the files can be ported. BMRT for example is not a _fast_ renderer but perhaps it is faster and i think it does support network rendering. (http://www.bmrt.org).

Other then this the only thing i can think of is faster (or more if your packages supports SMP) processors and faster and a lot more ram.

Thanks, that''s all very helpful.

Also, I''ve been looking at getting a processor upgrade, mainly PIII or an AMD. I''ve heard some people say Pentium chips are better and some saying the opposite, so I don''t know who is right. But looking at an article comparing them on GameSpot I noticed that AMD had much more floating-point capability, which is what is used for rendering isn''t it?

Either way, do you think it would be a good idea getting an AMD chip rather than Pentium? Is there anything else to consider, because I''ve also heard some software won''t work on AMD chips without a patch.

From what i remember from the initial discussions on various mailinglists when the Athlon first came out it was said (some ppl where doing render benchmarks) that Athlon is at its best for realtime work while the P3 was at its best when rendering.

As i remember these where test in 3dsmax r3.0 when Athlon support was not yet fully implemented as it is supposed to be in 3.1 running on NT4 SP3 (or 4 dun remember).