Rendering Issues

chadmccomas

Hey all,

I have a concern and I'm curious if anyone has any helpful advice.

I bought Carrara 8 Pro tonight, installed it and also purchased Valle Alpina for it.

I opened the scene mentioned and was going to render it to see how fast Carrara renders now. Except this is what happens:

1. Nothing happens for a good twenty minutes. My cursor is a loading icon.
2. A window comes up and it renders a tiny block about every hour and ultimately freezes and I have to force-close the program.

This seems pretty strange.

Here are my computer specs:

3.5ghz AMD FX 8-Core Processor
16GB RAM
Windows 8 Pro
AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB DDR5 PCIe 3.0 Graphics Card

Those seem pretty reasonable don't they? 3DS and Daz Studio seems to render fine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

3drendero

Valle Alpina from Howie Farkes is the most demanding scenes you can render.

Try the built in scenes in File-New-Presets, they should render quickly for test purposes.
Then you can check File-Prefecrences-General-Use Multiprocessors, which should be checked.
Now you should notice a speed increase.

Did you also install the 64bit version of Carrara?

chadmccomas

Yeah, rendering something else is a gillion times faster. I wonder how I can speed that scene up? To be honest, that particular scene is the only reason I bought Carrara 8 Pro. That kind of sucks.

Thanks though.

ManStan

First time driving NASCAR and you want to race the 500, lol.

Howies scene push carrara to it's limits. Your machine should be able to handle it easily. Howie's scene show just what someone that knows how to use carrara can do.

Now there are things you can do to reduce render time; although I don't know why that rig would be struggling so badly with it. Thing is in order for you to reduce render time you will need to know how to use carrara.

Check shaders for displacement maps. These can really add a lot to render time; especially the time before the render starts{during that 20 minute wait it should be telling you what it is up to}.

Also check for SSS. Subsurface scattering will also greatly; and I mean greatly, increase render time. As in leaves look great with SSS, but a bit of work with the transparency settings in the shader can give you a similar effect with out the hit to the render time.

Surface replicators. Grass, trees, bushes, rocks can all be replicated in numbers using the surface replicator. Lots of replications, or replicators can drag down scene rendering.

Now with an 8 core you should be seeing 8 different colored blocks rendering at the same time, not one at a time.

.

evilproducer

Does 8.5 still have the Allow Multi Thread checkbox in the render settings? If so, it will need to be checked to use multiple cores/processors. Also, you haven't mentioned if you are using the Skylight or Indirect Lighting (both GI settings). Those will also crank up the render time due to the increased calculations.