Avoid re-rendering animation object that don't change??

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m a newbie and my animation rendering times are getting way long (4 hours on a 2.8MHz P4, ATI 8500 AIW, fast drives). One obvious shortcut seems to be using a background or to use .avi or image files textures for some forground objects (just setting emit to 1 and making them shadeless). But this is tricky with irregularly shaped objects, fixed particles, etc. Is there a way to set a foreground object (which doesn’t change after the first frame) to be rendered the same in every frame of an animation? I’m making simulations of complicated astronomical objects and sometimes only one or two are changing in an animation.

Any other ideas for speeding render times are much appreciated.

Thanks!

2

you could render them to TGA with an alpha channel and use the sequence editor with an alpha over/alpha under.

Martin

3

Thanks very much. I think that will help quite a bit.