Hi i have created a 111 frame animation. So far each frame has taken 20mins to render. It is a hq file but surely it shouldn’t take that long! I have no money to spend because i am a student. Please help! Is there any other way i can speed it up without changing the quality?
I have only posted a few questions but only about 20% have been answered. Please Help!!
Don’t expect specific answers if your question is not specific. Difficult to give helpful answers without seeing the blend file, so we may see what exactly is causing the render time to be so long.
Richard
20 minutes/frame is not unusual for certain subjects – some of my frames run twice that and more on a dual-core 3.2GHz machine. Much depends on what you’ve put in your scene, how it’s lit and how large your renderings are. As Richard M. said, we need a bit more info.
Did you really not do any test renders before setting up your animation, to see what the render times would be? It’s usually a good idea so optimizations can be done before rendering the frames.
I’m new to blender so I don’t know how to do that!! at the moment i am trying to upload the file to 110mb because its too big for this website:rolleyes:
Oh, c’mon… don’t tell me you haven’t found the RENDER button? It’s right next to the ANIM button (which I assume you have found).
Or perhaps you mean you don’t know how to optimize your scenes – this is a question often asked in the forum so a search would probably dig out quite a few answers already given.
BTW, unless you have hoards of very large textures packed in your .blend, the file size itself can be an indication that it may need some optimization – .blends aren’t usually oversize unless they contain a lot of geometry (or packed texture files), and large polycount is one of the factors affecting rendering times.
IMPORTANT CAVEAT: My comments are applicable to files done with versions 2.49 or lower – 2.5 being alphaware, it’s maybe not the best place for a beginner to get cozy with Blender.
i have found the render and anim buttons but i’ve had no need to play around with them! 
Yeah, OK. Your meshes are unnecessarily dense, a bad case of polygon glut. Nearly everything in your scene has way too many polygons for the shapes they have – learn some more efficient modeling techniques and principles, and use only the mesh density you really need for the subject.
Even your Subsurf levels are overdone on the objects that aren’t too dense. Also adds to rendering time (rendertime polygon glut).
Good thing you use only one Lamp – raytracing all those polys with more than one would have jacked your render time really high.
ok thanks, when you say more efficient modelling techniques, how do you mean?
Efficiency – using only what’s needed and no more.
Like: a sphere doesn’t have to have 1000 polygons to look smooth and round, you can get by with half or even a quarter of that, especially with Subsurf in use (at reasonable levels).
Using Subsurf level 4 is breaking up rather simple shapes into an astounding number of polys at rendertime, taxing the rendering engine – I think you could get by with Level 2 and see no appreciable difference in the results.
Your model seems built to illustrate the misconception that more is better – not so.
ok thanks!!
Hi,
It’s actually worse than that - the subsurf is actually set to render at level 2 but interactively display at level 4, slowing down the interface without adding anything to the render!
cameron, you should probably ask yourself whether it is worth raytracing the entire scene just for the faint reflections on the icing. The subsurface scattering is also slowing things down a little, but it has much more of a visual effect with the icing. If I were you, I’d get rid of the raytracing, convert the omnidirectional lamp to a spot lamp and reduce the poly count on everything possible.
thanks i will keep that in mind for the future however it is halfway through animating now so i may as well wait for it to finish. Thanks for everyone who has helped!! 